Length of thr the subject line

[Johnrgby]

Morning Sam
I was talking to someone in a bar last night who mentioned, he was put off posting anything because of the above, now it has happened to me a few times you try to keep the subject line concise, but the system will not accept it,no problem you add another word or so and it is fine, but it occurred to me maybe there are others, is there any way of getting the system to accept a short{er} subject line?

[Sam]

Thanks John for bringing this up.

I did set the subject line to min 25 characters to prevent one word titles. I used to manually add one or couple of extra words but SiTie wasn't happy about it "That Sam is to me is just not right" so was looking for another solution. Original plan was 40 characters but I reduced it to 25 to keep things simple.

Positives - I don't think we had to deal with any spammers since. Also no need to edit titles anymore.
Negatives - people being to put off posting.

I honestly wasn't expecting 25 characters to be an issue, my apologies to everyone. It wasn't meant to make anyone's day more difficult, quite the opposite.

What's your thoughts? Should we scrap it completely, reduce it down to 15-20 characters? Any other ideas?
How else can we prevent one word titles? Should we (moderators) be adding some extra words or leave it as, even if they make the ranking and the reader's life more difficult?

Also, can we move this to the All about this forum category in hope to get more ideas from our members?

[bedouin]

Maybe see what reducing it to 15 characters minimum does?

[TamaraEnLaPlaya]

I've been caught a couple of times and had to rethink a title, but, in general I think it provides a positive experience when browsing threads - along the lines of WYSIWYG. I'm not 'passionate' about 15, or 20 or 25 though - I'll go with the flow as long as it is subject to periodic review! (Def not less than 15 please!)

[Johnrgby]

Personally I do not have an issue with however many it is, it was just a chance meeting with a guy I have not seen for months, and it came up in conversation suggested it may be an issue with some people if reducing it makes more work for the moderators, perhaps it should remain as it is, the question here is two fold, Are there potentially new members out there that find it off putting and are there existing members who do not post for the same reason?

[Sam]

Alright. Thanks everyone, I'll reduce it to 15 characters. Not sure how long it will take as I have to locate it in the code. Took me quite a while to find it the first time so be patient with me, please.

[Sam]

Down to 15 characters now. And sorry for extremely late execution.









Note to myself in case we'll have to change it in the future: inc/datahandlers ->> post.php

else
{
if(my_strlen($subject) < 15)
{
$this->set_error("missing_subject");
return false;
}
}

[Ducks]

Very positive change, Sam. Caught me a few times, and while I don't mind taking a minute to re-think the title, I can see that new users less invested in the community here might not bother. 

Well done for finding it in the code, though— they don't make these things easy, do they? 

[Sam]

...Well done for finding it in the code, though— they don't make these things easy, do they? 

The most confusing part was the location. Went through several files, named thread, wasn't expecting conditional statements about title length in post setting file instead. The whole script is well documented, no complaints there, just sometimes could get time consuming if a tiny, unusual change is needed.