Minimum post length here on talk.tiddlywiki.org

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#1

In another thread, @TiddlyTweeter wrote:

PS: I wrote “Dunno” twice to obvert the SILLY 20 character rule here.

We’ve already discussed this fairly recently. I think several of us tried to explain that some of the rules here are made for the benefit of the community at large. As a poster, somebody may enjoy peppering threads with short replies, but for everyone else, those short replies lead to lots of notifications and noise, and don’t add much to the discussion.

These threads are a community resource. Other communities have discovered that rules are needed to keep them useful for everybody, and I don’t see any reason to think that our community is radically different.

What do others think?

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#2

I completely agree and would like for us to keep this restriction in place and the very most consider bringing it down to 15 characters. I personally already find that over-editing of posts to make small non-critical changes, and overusing the ability to @ mention someone without necessarily needing to attract their attention, leads to a spam of irrelevant notifications. As such I have already disabled notifications for the forum, which of course means that when I am mentioned for something that may actually require my attention, I might not see it until much later. However, that has been my way of trying to resolve the problem on my end.

Personally, I would like for us to have guidelines around when it makes sense to use the @ mention feature as well.

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#3

Attendant, as I am, of your thoughts.

Often I do want to say: Well done! and variants thereof. SOME TIMES.

I don’t think it a serious issue here with everyone doing it 24/7?

When was it ever a problem here?

Basically, I think, you are off mark — and quenching enthusiasm in your posts in this thread.

TT

#4

I have occasionally offered complete answers to an existing question in less than 20 characters. I don’t feel that I was being anti-social, I was being concise.

For awhile, I felt I was seeing too much traffic from one individual (no one in this thread :slightly_smiling_face: ) and was able to use the preferences to ignore/mute 'em. Perhaps that would be helpful for Jeremy’s or Saq’s situation.

I think people are using @author so author’s of particular works know that their work is being discussed, rather than that an action is required. This is probably meant as an act of politeness or attribution. If you’ve only done a few things, like I have, you find this usage interesting. If you’ve done some major things, like Saq, you might find it overwhelming. It’s hard to know how to separate these two use-cases except perhaps to create two different identifies (a la pMario), where one id is mostly ignored and the other is the in-case-of-fire id.

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#5

Right!

You saved us from bandwidth. You have a definite knack with concision. Adumbrated in your contributions.

Will @jeremyruston & @saqimtiaz try to police you?

TT

#6

@TiddlyTweeter you have not addressed the point that I raised. Making a post here incurs a cost for the whole community in that it results in a notification and the need for attention. Inconsequential posts that do not contribute to the discussion make for a net negative.

My reply was triggered by you calling the rule “silly”. The reasoning has now been explained multiple times by multiple people.

My own policy is not to mute anyone here because then my experience of the group wouldn’t match that of others, which would take me further away from the general community.

To be very direct @TiddlyTweeter, you know that my time is limited, and that I have spent a good deal of time and trouble on this issue. I hope you can see that I am trying to have a serious discussion, and hold you accountable for the consequences of the choices that you are making.

Nobody is trying to “police” you. We are trying to explain why forums on the internet like this work like they do. Forums like this are shared resources, they simply fail to work if everyone behaves how they like without regard for the impact on others.

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#7

All please keep in mind in this discussion that

  • short answers or thanks can often be given with a reaction such as a thumbs up
  • simply encoraging this would reduce short replies
  • regardless both generate notifications
  • I the list of notifications you can destinguish between reactions, text replies, @ mentions and direct messages.
  • it was a leap forward when we got reactions by leaving google groups.

As a rule I use reactions when I can and replies when more is needed, and a reply allows others to support it with a reaction.

I do find if I have to respond with a reply because a reaction is insufficient but I have a concise answer I do need to add a bit if fluff to pad it out. But this is quite easy. I would favor the limit being removed for people who do what I do but I have noticed some will reply with somewhat unhelpful short replies, not replying to a particular comment and no more info than a reaction.

So although I would like the limit removed perhaps it needs to remain until the community learns the differences.

#8

The specific number “20” is obviously an estimation to filter out posts that typically don’t contribute much, but any such estimation is bound to be off in some occasions. Of course any fixed number is bound to be inappropriate on some limited occasions but, on the whole, “20” seems decent IMO. But @TiddlyTweeter - where do you think the cut off should be? I’m sure you agree that most potential “interjections” don’t really contribute much to the discussions.

As for @ calling, I only recently noted that I had begun using it out of habit when mentioning anyone, as if it was some kind of prefix like Mr. or Mrs. I’d guess that others also make this mistake. This may be worth commenting on in some official introduction… wherever that may be…

#9

From a relative newcomer’s perspective what I’ve found is that most of the discussions are diluted which makes the process of finding the information you need inefficient.

In my opinion these are the main areas in which this could be improved:

  • Keeping the discussion strictly on topic.
  • Not commenting with irrelevant information.
  • Saying as much as possible with as few words as possible.
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#10

For anyone interested here is a pretty informative thread about the topic.

A simple summary is that Jeff Atwood (who is the founder of Discourse the forum software we use here) is that:

it puts a barrier in front of annoying behavior.
Is it an insurmountable barrier? No. But why allow annoying behavior when you can discourage it?
That said it’s a forum level setting. Don’t like it, start a forum, change the setting to zero. voila.

With a little follow up:

It’s a fairly common thing to do, very rarely will someone who has something meaningful to say be bothered by a reasonable minimum character limit. Even in the rare case that they are it’s not a big deal to add a bit more, if it’s not worth doing then chances are your post isn’t really important.

I might add as a personal opinion that the original post that spawned this thread. was “Dunno” which I think could have easily been expanded on with a fraction of effort—possibly—to: “I do not know off hand. Here are some of the things I tried to research but was in the end unsuccessful.”

Communication is sexy. And it isn’t too much to consider when contributing to a community. In my humble opinion that is.

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#11

@jeremyruston right. I very much agree. In principle.

Your point being? My post was negative?

I don’t think so.

There IS an issue here, in this forum, on “getting heard” — I often see great contributions here I ONLY read and LEARN from … that are otherwise “0” anything if I did not post a “shortie” for them.

Anyway, I’m not so big on winning anything here. I will always defer to the BDFL, you.

So, no more sub-20 tricks from me.

But does that deal with why I was doing it?

TT

#12

I think it should be kept exactly as it is. I got bitten 2 or 3 times, where a very short reply would have worked.

On the other hand, the limit “forced” me to reword the comment, which in turn forced me to “think” about it in more detail… In the end the response was of better quality, than it was in the first place.

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