The discussion focuses on the warnings about minimum character limits in the composer, with users finding them too intense. ganncamp reported that the warnings vibrate too much when trying to create a topic with insufficient characters, causing distraction. codinghorror initially didn’t understand the issue but later clarified that the warnings can be styled down using CSS overrides.
downey and ganncamp pointed out that the character count warning repeatedly reappears after being dismissed, and that its vibrating behavior is particularly annoying. downey suggested a plugin that counts down characters remaining, while codinghorror expressed a preference for encouraging users to type more than the minimum.
Arseniy and Marcin_J shared videos and GIFs demonstrating the issue, with Marcin_J suggesting that the notification should either not bounce on every key press or disappear until the “Reply” button is pressed again. codinghorror tagged the topic as a starter-task, inviting contributions to tone down the warnings’ “jiggliness.”
Title, category & body are required in our internal forum.
In some cases tags are required too & some fields don’t become available until you’ve filled in the fields before them. For instance, I can’t type body text before I’ve chosen a category.
But the blue ‘Create Topic’ button is still available. Out of curiosity I clicked it to see what would happen. Boy, was that a mistake!
OK, I’m not sure what is being reported here? The behavior looks correct to me?
If you’d like to “style down” the warnings on your Discourse instance from red to another friendlier color, make the font smaller, hide the 
glyph, etc, that can be done with CSS overrides in Admin, Customize.
Can’t speak for @ganncamp but the annoyance that jumps out to me is that the character count warning shouldn’t be continually reappearing after dismissed each time you type an additional character.
Yes, it’s that the character count warning on the body field not only reappears for each character, but that it vibrates.
I could deal with it coming back if it didn’t dance around angrily (i.e. in red) pulling my eye away from what I’m trying to do to comply with its demands.
FWIW I am a big fan of this plugin that counts down the number of characters remaining as someone types in the composer box:
OK, thanks for that clarification @ganncamp I’ve updated the title to make it more clear. And @downey I have no appetite for minimum character counters. That implies the minimum is OK, all you need is the minimum. I believe users should strive to do more than type the minimum when they communicate … we believe in the power of the paragraph ¶ here!
Hey! Check out the attached video, it’s pretty self-explanatory. Basically, if you try to create a topic with a short title, it prompts an error - but then it re-prompts it on each keystroke. So it actually blocks the input window. And jiggles annoyingly)
I noticed that the notification that appears when the reply has less than 20 characters (or any other configured amount) bounces every time a new character is added. I think it looks a bit weird. I believe the notification should either:
I’ve added the #starter-task tag to this topic if anyone wants to contribute a PR, I understand the concern – we should tone down the “jiggliness” of the warning, it doesn’t need to happen on every keypress.
This has been fixed in the past 6 months or some.