This is apparently currently set to 15. Not infrequently this proves to be an obstacle to me and from time to time I notice it with other forum users too (although it may not always be obvious when it has bitten someone else).
For example, you can see in the topic here: Code is Power! how Purism makes a blog post with title “Code is Power!” but I can’t mirror that into the forum without hacking the topic title.
It would appear that Discourse has logic to reject trivial attempts to reach the minimum length. I don’t know the exact logic but perhaps repeated characters at the end are compressed back to a single instance of that character - because initially I tried to change the topic title to “Code is Power!!” but that was still rejected. I suspect that double spaces are also compressed back to a single space (anywhere in the title). So then we end up with unsightly hacks such as shown.
(Since I have no intention of changing the message imparted by the Purism blog post, I don’t really want to reword the title.)
Feedback is: I would like a lower min topic title length.
Actually I wouldn’t mind a lower “max topic title length” also but I don’t know what its current value is.
As I said though, because I am just mirroring someone else’s post, I don’t really want to reword the title, as it could change the meaning, in subtle or unsubtle ways.
“Code is Power” .NE. “Code is Powerful”
Both are true statements but the former better reflects the intent of the article i.e. to suggest correctly that the current blackbox Big Tech global IT arrangements entrench a power balance where the user is in a weak position and the user is sold to the highest bidder, and Big Tech is in a dominant position, all without meaningful informed user consent.
Thanks. “title entropy” (and “title prettify”) would appear to shed light on my comment in paragraph 3 in the OP - but I guess I would have to look at the source to understand the exact rules. It is possible that “title entropy” would also have to be reduced slightly in order to give effect to my intention from reducing “min topic title length”.
Another minor Discourse gripe of mine is converting the first character in the topic title to uppercase, which is not always appropriate in a technical forum (and is exhibited in this very topic). That setting is also shown there (“title prettify”). However fixing that properly would require a Discourse change i.e. splitting that setting.
Yes, for example, in the scenario where converting to uppercase is literally a problem, messing around with characters as described in Daring Fireball Projects: SmartyPants could also be a problem … and unlike that context where HTML tags can be used to suppress the messing around, I doubt that there is any way for the user to suppress the behaviour in a topic title but I didn’t actually test that yet.
I am advised that ‘all’ the forum settings changes explicitly or implicitly discussed in this topic have been made.
Note therefore that some of the discussion in this topic will now appear a bit strange. For example, I can now fix and have now fixed the topic title of both this topic and the topic cited in the OP.
