Discourse wasn’t written specifically for us. The default settings in the software are designed for more typical message boards, which probably do contain a significantly higher percentage of ignorant juveniles than what is found here.
Most of these are configurable, so yes, you owe the developers an apology.
Who do you think this “someone” should be? We haven’t had a dedicated technical admin since the days of Jerry way back when (and later John, but even at best we only had partial use of his time). Most of the defaults here were set up with TubaDiva working with the Discourse staff. TubaDiva tried to get our owners to give me admin privileges so that I could fix minor issues and possibly tweak minor site settings as needed, but our owners refused since I am just an unpaid volunteer and am not even an employee. You can complain all you want, but I strongly suspect that we aren’t going to be hiring even a part time technical admin. So we’re stuck with what we have.
I can work with Ed if something needs to be fixed, but he seems to be pretty busy and I don’t want to bug him with an endless stream of minor annoyances. vBulletin had a minimum post length of 3 characters (IIRC). Discourse has 5. That’s not a big enough difference to be worth worrying about, IMHO. We have better things to spend our limited time on.
I’m certainly not intent on stirring any hornets nest about how this place is, or should be, managed. I’m aware that Ed and others are doing many other things and their time is limited. I’m just pointing out the self-evident fact that a message board like this, of non-trivial size and complexity, cannot just be left on its own with minimal administrative oversight without eventually encountering issues. That’s just the nature of software. TubaDiva’s decision to move to managed hosting with regular updates was a wise one in terms of minimizing the need for technical management, but as we’ve already seen several times now, our unique requirements coupled with a dynamically updating infrastructure will sometimes break things. Which leads to bad experiences that, ultimately, tend to drive people away.
But it’s easy enough to change that we might try to do it the next time there’s some more compelling reason to mess with the configuration. I could probably research it and find out exactly where that setting lives.
Not trivial stuff like that, of course! I’m thinking more of things like an update that was supposed to fix YouTube videos restarting and instead (in our case) breaking YouTube posting altogether, updates that have broken some themes, and stuff like that.
A simple solution is to create a general pre-answer reply, ending with a colon, then assign that to a hotkey on your keyboard. Then, when you want to reply with a 1 character answer, just hit the hotkey, followed by your one character answer, then click submit.
Here is an example (and one I may use myself):
I have given your question a great deal of thought and consideration. After significant research and contemplation, I have arrived at what I believe to be the very best answer to your intriguing question. The answer is:5
