Thread title length

[Former Member]

Jul 28, 2014 8:44:09 GMT -8 Wormopolis said:

Typically, a thread title doesnt need to be really long in the first place unless you are putting extra stuff in there for organization. the point of the title is to be a summary of the post, not a detailed description of the contents.

for example. lets say the article was about

a man in florida, who was out fishing and was attacked by an alligator. His left foot was bitten off and it took wildlife officers three days to find the suspected gator.

^that is too long to be a thread title. that is almost long enough to be a post itself. but a decent title would be

man attacked by alligator

that is 25 characters right there. it does its job.


what would be an example of a thread title you were trying to use?

I was trying to post this article : www.independent.ie/irish-news/health/sunshine-vitamin-can-boost-cancer-survival-30458683.html, and it was quite a challenge to chop it down sufficiently. In the end I went with the slightly unsatisfactory : Bowel Cancer Survival More Likely with High Vitamin D levels, but it'll have to do I guess. Most of the time you're right, it's long enough, but there are occasions when it's a struggle to compact the title enough and still make sense.

[Wormopolis]

See I would have went with

Vitamin D - Cancer Combatant?

[Bütch]

Just my 2 cents here, I agree with @wormopolis I like the title limit, keep it short and to the point, otherwise there is always some body who will put all the post in the title where it doesn't belong

[ponzinomics]

I do not understand why everyone should think in the same way instead leaving the decision to the admin's choice. ()

[Bütch]

Just a thought here
A Title is just that a Title. Without a limit there will be somebody comes along and Write a paragraph in the title, then title gets long they won't need to make a post. Anything anybody needs to know needs to be in the post itself. Accuracy and info needs to be in the post. The title is just a name for the post and no more. It's like mailing a letter on the envelope you just put a name and address and no more, all other info goes inside the envelope. I hope that makes sense
I looked at the example you give and you could have used the same title as on the article and it would have fit on your title line with no problem. It is shorter than what you used

[Wormopolis]

Jul 29, 2014 10:31:34 GMT -8 ponzinomics said:

I do not understand why everyone should think in the same way instead leaving the decision to the admin's choice. ()

can you clarify your stance on this?  who is the admin you are referring?  what decision?

[ponzinomics]

Jul 29, 2014 16:19:05 GMT -8 Wormopolis said:

Jul 29, 2014 10:31:34 GMT -8 ponzinomics said:

I do not understand why everyone should think in the same way instead leaving the decision to the admin's choice. ()

can you clarify your stance on this?  who is the admin you are referring?  what decision?

Hi, yes. I think proboards team is not building a forum themselves. They are building a tool. A tool that will be used later by their customers to, by means of configuration, create a board. The admin of the board will typically configure the board how he thinks best fit their board members. If you apply restrictions by design, in the tool, these restrictions will be later translated to the final board members by how the admin can customize the tool. For example, it can be boring for a member have to create a synthetic sentence rather than copy and paste, and therefore, lose potential members. Narrowing down to just one approach would only make sense, IMHO, if there would be a big impact on including both, but technically, the difference, from outside, looks just a VARCHAR(60) vs a VARCHAR(200) or equivalent DDL change. If it can not addressed now, because there is a risk estimation altering DB sizes, just put it in the TO DO list for a future DB update.

In that way:
* those that want limiting to 60 will be covered (maybe by a user interface param)
* those that think their board members would prefer longer length would be covered

Well, is my view. I think you should think as a tool, no as a board when designing proboards functionalities, but this is obviously a decision of the corresponding proboards manager. Sorry for the long wording. you asked  Regards

[Wormopolis]

In my dealings with databases, you need to allocate sizes to each of the fields that you want to store. you dont get to change sizes for each of the fields on each entry, ALL entries in that field will be of the same size. This means that if you say thread titles get 100 characaters, then all thread titles get 100 characters. for everyone. all forums. you have already seen the arguments for the purpose of keeping thread titles short. there shouldnt be a NEED to have half of a paragraph in the thread title. so keeping that field size lower reduces the over storage use by that field. lets say you had a forum with 10,000 threads. at 100 characters a title, that is 1million characters that have to be allocated for storage. if you put it to 50 characters, that cuts it in half. and that is just ONE forum. now think in a larger scope of all the forums.


Martyn Dale VS Admin would have to provide more specifics.  but to me it doesnt make sense to have variable sizes.  people are always going to just choose the largest size they can get (just in case).

[ponzinomics]

Hi Wormopolis, thanks for your feedback. I do not know the specific product that proboards uses as storage but, as far as I remember, I think in mysql there were VARCHAR and VARCHAR2. The first allocates the full number of chars and the second just the required to store each specific data. In a quick look I found this info for Oracle: www.orafaq.com/faq/what_is_the_difference_between_varchar_varchar2_and_char_data_types

CHAR(5) is fixed length, right padded with spaces.
VARCHAR(5) is fixed length, right padded with null
VARCHAR2(5) is variable length.

On the other hand, on extraction, you can always trim() the data out of the DB to the application so you only deal with the specific number of chars in app memory, no matter what size were they assigned in database.

I am sure that, at this point, almost any relational database that they could be using offers enough flexibility to no having the need to oversize the tables. Honestly, I do not see any technical constraint here. The only point I could consider is the migration on doing ALTER TABLES which is better speak to a expert of the specific RDBMS and knows proboards code.

Regards

[Wormopolis]

That would be something the developers would have to comment on.

but even then, I maintain that you shouldnt need a half a paragraph for a thread title.

[Todge]

While I fully agree with what Wormo has been saying above, try this..

Extended Thread Titles

[ponzinomics]

It seems to work fine, Todge. Thanks

[Chris]

[tpgettys]

Jul 31, 2014 11:07:39 GMT -8 Todge said:

While I fully agree with what Wormo has been saying above, try this..

Extended Thread Titles

I see I am very late to this party, but I would also like to see the thread title length greater than 60 characters.  For one thing, the dialog box displayed for the title is long, which creates an unconscious expectation of the maximum length.  If the box were no longer than 60 characters it would "make sense" that that is all you get.

The main reason for us, however, is that we have adopted a fixed format for thread titles in some boards; for example:

Creative Effects Challenge No. 165 - 01234567890123456789012

So the OP has only 23 characters to actually describe the challenge!  When we began we didn't understand about the limit or we would have taken that into account.

Anyway, the Extended Tread Titles plugin sounds appealing, but would like to see some description of it before installing it.  Does that exist?

[Todge]

Jan 17, 2022 15:10:52 GMT -8 tpgettys said:

.....the Extended Tread Titles plugin sounds appealing, but would like to see some description of it before installing it.  Does that exist?

Hmmm... Try this..

Do you have trouble thinking of an adequate title for your threads in the space allowed?.. Is 60 characters just not enough to have that concise description you crave?

The Extended Thread Titles plugin will allow you to use titles of up to 4000, that's right, FOUR THOUSAND characters.

Why use a two or three word title when a whole paragraph will do? Install the Extended Thread Titles plugin and have all the space you could ever want. Enhance the look of your forum with looooong thread titles.. Describe your thread in exceptional detail using up to 4000 characters. Install the Extended Thread Titles plugin to give you the freedom to do just that.

Get the Extended Thread Titles plugin today.. It's FREE.