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Get rid of minimum character requirements
Various places in Codidact where a user enters text seem to have a minimum character requirement. If you enter fewer characters than that, the system keeps the "submit post" button greyed out, pops up a message that a minimum number of characters are needed, or the like.
Let's get rid of these limits. Some reasons are:
- It's just plain annoying. I've said all that needs to be said, and the system is forcing me to add more.
- It's nannyware treating people like children. This is not how to treat contributors.
- It's ineffective anyway. When I get a nanny-message, I'll develop an attitude of living up to the letter of the law, not the spirit. I'll pad the text with dashes, blanks, "blah, blah", or whatever. That actually makes the post worse as a result of the supposed minimum quality control.
(I just found out that padding with " " works to fool the system to let you post a short flag reason, but then it shows " " literally instead of rendering it as a space. Again, that made the flag reason worse for the moderator to read, not better.)
- Length is not quality.
If someone asks a clear yes/no question, then a simple "Yes" or "No" can be a legitimate response, especially in comments.
I just tried to write "Opinion-based" as a flag reason for closing a question. That's all I felt needed to be said, as I believe this will be obvious to the mod that looks into the flag. Again, this is my call to make, and the mod's how to respond to it. I resent the system treating me like a child based on some arbitrary metric.
- There are already better quality controls. Real humans will eventually judge everything you write here, with the associated consequences. Let those mechanism do their job.
A simple "Yes" could be correct and useful to the OP. More background might be better, but I wouldn't downvote "yes" when it's right and directly responds to the question as asked. I might possibly upvote for the unambiguous succinctness, depending on context.
In other case, "Yes" could be a patronizing dismissal. There is no way the system can tell the difference. The voters can, so let them.
It strikes again
I just tried to raise a custom flag with the comment "Not an answer". I felt this would be quite clear when looking at the flagged answer. However, it wouldn't let me raise the flag. I had to waste time reading the popup, and then add two garbage characters. Now the comment is "Not an answer..". This is stupid.
2 answers
Prevent zero only
- I'm comfortable with preventing users from posting zero character comments and posts.
- I agree there are times when insisting on 15 characters is unhelpful.
- For comments, I see no reason to make the minimum higher than 1.
- For posts, I'd expect them to be longer but 15 is arbitrary so why not have 1 and let users flag problematic posts?
There may be some other settings where 1 is not appropriate, but I can't think of a reason not to use 1 for comments and posts.
Status completed: title length, body length, custom flags.
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Minimum title and body length are configurable per category. I'll lower the body length here on Meta; if other communities want to lower these limits, please let us know via a support request on your meta.
We have an open issue to lower this limit on custom flags with a PR pending merged.
Comments are still hard-wired with a 15-character minimum. We don't have an issue tracking that yet, though there's a general parent issue about lengths.
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