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Comments on Require title for comment thread

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Require title for comment thread

+6
−6

The title of a comment thread currently defaults to the start of the comment text. That has lead to a lot of partial-sentence comments visible below a post without comments expanded. Those look messy and are annoying, since you often can't tell at a glance what the comment is about. These titles can wrap to at least two lines, then get cut off anyway. That is even more messy.

I suggest that we:

  1. Limit comment thread title lengths to display in a single line.
  2. Require a deliberate title whenever the comment body is longer than that allowed for a title.
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2 comment threads

General (5 comments)
Agreement feedback (1 comment)
General
Lundin‭ wrote over 2 years ago

I kind of agree, but coming up with a meaningful title is sometimes harder than writing the comment itself (which I suppose could be as per design to make people think twice before commenting). So how about adding 'General' as I did here, when there is no title? That's how comments older than the new comment system are titled.

celtschk‭ wrote over 2 years ago

I disagree. “General” is about the most uninformative title you can get. Indeed, whenever I see a comment thread names “General”, I'm unhappy about it (I have no idea whether you are the only one doing this). Someone taking extra effort to make the title less informative than the auto-generated one is something I really can't understand.

The older comments are titled that way because there's not much you can do about it. The comments may be related to each other (which is why you cannot simply give each comment its own thread), but may also be unrelated (which is why taking the beginning of the first comment as title would be a bad idea).

Lundin‭ wrote over 2 years ago

celtschk‭ It isn't ideal but a title like "what if we were to" (cut short there) is even worse. So maybe the best solution is simply to enforce a manually typed out title after all.

celtschk‭ wrote over 2 years ago

But the titles aren't cut that short. Also, you can easily ready the comment you wrote to see if the beginning is somewhat informative (in 99% of the cases it is more informative than “General”), and if not, you can think about a more informative title (even if it is a bad one, it's very likely still better than “General”).

In the case of this very thread, your first post started with “I kind of agree, but coming up with a meaningful title is sometimes harder …”. I don't know where exactly it would have been cut, but it definitely would have been far more informative than the “General” you've decided to use.

Lundin‭ wrote over 2 years ago

celtschk‭ Yeah... after giving it some thought, I do agree with you. Though I still think requiring a title would improve it further.