Sometimes the appropriate content for a post is a simple “yes” or “no.” Or even “Ew.”
Please give us the option of posting appropriate responses.
ETA: WITHOUT having to go through elaborate coding workarounds like the one that permits the inevitable smartass “No” that I’m anticipating this OP will inspire, please.
In all seriousness, I agree that some of this board’s nanny functions are poorly thought-out and have unintended consequences. The notification for a new thread that “your topic is similar to …” is hilarious because it’s never even remotely right. Hard restrictions like no more than four posts in a row are a bit more understandable, but still obnoxious in threads whose sole purpose is to try things out in order to narrow down buggy behaviour, like with the current bug with posting YouTube videos.
The nanny restrictions are essentially based on the assumption that posters are ignorant juveniles who likely have malicious intent. They are frustrating on a board like this where this is mostly not the case, and where such posters are quickly weeded out.
How many words do you think should be the minimum?
There are no minimum “words”. The limitation is on minimum characters. I’d say a proper minimum number of characters is 1. What if someone asks a question and the answer is 5? Just posting “5” is completely appropriate.
Also, sometimes Discourse won’t let you post because it thinks you haven’t posted a complete sentence, which seems wholly ignorant about how internet communication works.
This goes back to the fact that software implements the biases of its developers, as well as the design intents.
Which is a problem, because biases are often too deeply embedded to change. You can persuade a software designer that functional requirements need to be changed, but you will probably never convince them that a one character post is meaningful communication if they have the prejudice that it doesn’t.
If the developer’s reason is nothing more than “I don’t like it”, the discussion is over.
One.
Tried to post ‘1’
No go
IMO the complaint is silly. My actual response is in the next post to demonstrate what an utter non-issue we’re whinging about.
Q: Is the OP’s complaint worth fixing?
No.
A
The above post has no tricky coding, secret invisible goodies, or anything else; what you see it what I typed. An “A” is not a difficult burden to bear.
If you just posted that without the explanatory posts, though, it’d leave people wondering what the heck the “A” was supposed to mean. Did you accidentally hit “submit” too soon? It detracts from communication, rather than adding to it.
That’s why i write:
No
Characters for discourse
Which is stupid, and annoying to type. But at least it doesn’t confuse anyone who is vaguely familiar with the software.
Precisely. We complain about stuff that makes the board worse, because this is Site Feedback.
It makes the board worse, and doesn’t serve any actual, objective purpose.
So it’s absolutely worth complaining about and not at all silly.
And to the extent that the developers may be able to dredge up statistics or feedback that shows that many of their clients actually prefer nanny features like monitoring for minimum post length, maximum allowed consecutive posts, or pre-scanning for complete sentences etc I have a simple response. Arbitrary design features like this whose value is subjective should be configurable, not hardwired. Failing to make them configurable is objectively bad design.
Of course for all I know maybe they are configurable – and I rather suspect that they are – and what we’re seeing are just the default settings, in which case we should all humbly apologize to the developers and direct our ire to SDMB management!
It is configurable. I just tested on my other Discourse site. I was able to post a single letter.
That site has an admin who went through all the options and made choices when the site was started. I think this site mostly uses the defaults, except where the defaults have caused problems. More of a “let’s see if it works” approach. (Except of course this site stripped out the use of “likes” and almost all the “trusted poster” features, to maintain more of the style of the old site.)
Thanks for checking. I tried to check it myself but all I could find was a long list of unsorted “how-to” instructions on mostly obscure subjects. Personally I don’t think it’s worth any great effort to change the default for this as there are easy workarounds.
But the recent issue with posting YouTube videos is a bigger problem and seems symptomatic of an admin style that’s been pretty passive ever since we lost TubaDiva. Surely someone should be working with Discourse developers to address this.
This one is probably easy to change, though.