Please consider (I assume it’s possible) turning off Discourse’s post auto-moderations.
Notably the restriction on post length, and the “complete sentence” one.
I understand that this “feature” is designed to make posts more comprehensible, but it has exactly the opposite effect: Instead of just having a post that says “No,” now people have to post “No - and a bunch of nonsense for Discourse,” which doesn’t add any more information to the post, and just makes reading the thread less fluid.
Sadly, I don’t think we’re able to do that.
I would agree, if it were possible.
PLEASE NOTE: I deleted the closing bracket ] on the code above so it would show up in my post.
Nice!
I’ll just note that people don’t have to do that. Maybe it was cute in the beginning (for certain definitions of cute). But it stopped being cute 4 years ago.
If people don’t know the workarounds mentioned above, just add some more punctuation or something.
For myself, I know there are shorter workarounds. I don’t post longer comments to be “cute”, I do it as a form of protest to show my contempt for the very existence of the restriction.
If I hae to learn a special technical workaround to defeat an obnoxious Discourse feature, or just add extra words, I’ll just add extra words.
Not trying to be cute; just don’t see why I have to learn a tech workaround because of a bad feature in Discourse, or add punctuation that affects what I’ve said in my post.
Because you’re making your post about some misguided protest, not whatever you actually wanted to post about.
Protest all you want, but using some reply to comment on Discourse distracts from the conversation everyone else is having.
No. . .
This is not hard.
IMO the 5 char limit is an ignorant hill to choose to die on.
Try: “ISWYDT”
No.
The above illustrates that there are easy workarounds for all these issues, in this case the use of invisible padding, which also works for the annoying problem of a full quote in reply to an immediately preceding post being auto-deleted. The latter behaviour is actually a configurable option, but since nothing’s been done about that I don’t imagine anything will be done about things that are not configurable.
Discourse does have some strange quirks. In a recent exchange with another poster, I got a Discourse message that said something like “You have replied to this poster 6 times. Please consider sending a private message instead.” WTF? We’re engaged in something called a “conversation”, in which readers and other posters might be interested! Isn’t that kinda more or less the whole point of a message board?
There are a lot of interesting settings in site_settings.yml. I recall a short exchange once with @TubaDiva concerning some tweaks, so at least someone had access to the admin interface at some point.
It is possible :
I use an invalid tag to add extra characters … eg <qwe>, (which doesn’t need
a closing </qwe>)
It appears that it is possible to disable the “complete sentence” one too but
that’s more complicated…
(…but don’t hold your breath, i’m still waiting for this to be implemented !)
Yes, you and I and the other techies know this stuff. But the people fussing about this wanted a low-tech non-expert way to do it. Which was the point of my visible dots.
This ain’t hard. Although I do agree with the various posters up thread that the folks typing “and extra characters just to satisfy stooopit Discourse” are (mildly) threadshitting with that empty rant. Just type a couple of periods or commas and move on with your life. We all get why the extras are there.
Skimming past posts with under five characters also makes the thread less fluid. Put in some effort, people!
Of course, adding a 
button would go a long way towards removing the need for low-content “+1” type posts. 
on that idea. 