Is there a reason for preventing user profile content being less than 30 characters?

When editing my user profile the interface prevents me from entering fewer than 30 characters. I can understand imposing a minimum length on question titles and post content, but I don't see a reason that a profile page needs to be a certain length. Is there a reason I'm missing or was this just a default?

As one of our communities is for Code Golf, I can imagine some users might like to have quite short content in their profiles (code golf is all about expressing things as briefly as possible). As a test, I've set my profile to say "I'm succinct", which is significantly shorter than the 30 character minimum. I got around the interface-imposed minimum by adding extra HTML code, like this:

<p title="Or at least I aim to be...">I'm succinct.</p>

(...yes, the title text does show on hover in the profile, if anyone's wondering if that works)

If there isn't a reason for preventing short profiles, removing the limit would save people having to work around it.

If there is a good reason, let me know and I'll remove my workaround.

Related bug

If it turns out that there isn't a need to set a minimum length for a user profile, then maybe setting the minimum to zero would avoid having to add any special case code to fix this related bug: Once filled out, the user profile cannot be reverted to empty.

posted 6 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

6mo ago

trichoplax‭

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