It seems that it is not possible to do the following;
create a new topic with an empty body message
create a post with an empty message
For the former, if you try to create a topic with an empty, or even single-character, body message, you get the error such as “Body seems unclear, is it a complete sentence?”
For the latter, if you try to create a post with an empty body, you get an error such as shown here; “Post can’t be empty”
This is despite updating all known settings to reduce “entropy” values to the lowest possible values, and reducing the minimum post length as much as possible.
The settings already exist to control the post and topic body lengths. So it seems like they need to be modified to allow 0-length posts and topic body. I would think this would be a small change to the codebase, and it would be a lot more convenient to just have the existing settings modified to allow this rather than to require the server admin to write their own plugin to change minimum length values from 1 to 0.
not sure what you mean, are you asking what the justification is for this feature request? or do you mean that you currently cannot make a post that says only “why” ?
I would like the users on my Discourse forum to be able to post messages and topics with zero-length bodies. My users would like to have this feature too. The reason why you can’t do so, is not clear to me. Is there some technical issue making it not possible to create a post without any text in the body?
I am not asking for this to be a default setting, I am simply asking for the option of allowing this on my server.
A lot of my users enjoy posting empty replies. Sometimes for the sake of posting but not having anything to say, sometimes to bring topics to the top of the topic list, other times to indicate that they read the topic but dont have any comments. Similarly, when making a new topic, often times the body is not necessary if the topic title is descriptive enough. So being forced to write more text in the body of the original post can at times be redundant. Blank posting is a “fun” feature that people enjoy doing on forums and similarly helps with engagement.
Yes, there are other methods to react or subscribe to a post or topic.
But people still enjoy blank posting. My users are accustomed to it so I would like to be able to enable it for them.
Personally, I don’t understand what is the sense of posting empty but I can accept that there may be communities where this is common and I remember this is not the first request for something like this.
There is a way to bypass the posting limit. It can be with for example [wrap] tags because it will be count as characters.
I know it’s probably not the best option to always type it. So I’ve made a theme component for it. I hope it will enough for you and your community too.
The theme component will add a button to the composer toolbar (by default it’s in the popup menu). Clicking on the button a placeholder text will be adds to the textarea what you can publish. This text will be hidden after you post.
The component contains some settings where you can set up
Also contains Theme Translation section where you can customize the button name and the text what will be added the textarea…
Let’s see in action
The button is in the popup menu by default as you see in the video but it can be placed in toolbar too. To achieve this just simply disable this setting.
And than with this setting you can choose which section of the toolbar you would like to place the button.
This is a very strange feature request – to be honest I can’t imagine a world in which we would support empty posting as a feature – it goes against our entire philosophy of civilized discourse. Don’s suggestion is probably your best option here.
Actuallly you can get around this limitation… by writing an HTML comment with enough words in the body of the post like:
<!--
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed bibendum pharetra finibus. Fusce sed ligula et leo elementum viverra quis.
-->
So if you really want this feature, you can write a theme component to fill the editor with an HTML comment by default.
However, this is a really strange request, and few people would do this. In Chinese forums, we usually type “RT”(It is an abbreviation of “As the title”) in the text to indicate that the text and title are consistent. I think most cultures should have similar expressions
Moreover, it doesn’t look good, and it makes people feel like there is a bug.
I was just about to post that an html comment would work - this has come up in previous discussion somewhere (pfaffman and I were hiding posts, and Canapin ruined our fun lol).
thanks for all the suggestions. I will try them and I suspect some or all of them will work for us.
for what its worth, blankposting is certainly quite civilized. Users have a lot of fun with it, sometimes they even have impromptu contests to see how fast a topic can be filled with posts, or how many blank posts can be posted in a row before someone breaks the chain. And it certainly creates a lot of engagement and fosters a fun community atmosphere. You might be surprised at how much entertainment users can derive from such simple features.
That doesn’t read as being important, am not certain what the official definition of civilized is with discourse but the main idea is to emphasize focus on well thought out expression and communication through written language for which 20 characters is not a significant minimum threshold.
Let me give you two examples from my context where an empty post makes sense for us, are well accepted and do not harm a civilized discourse: Over here Discourse is used basically as a mailing list replacement.
Someone wants to write a quick note, e.g. “meeting 8pm in the red house EOM”. So they write an empty email, just containing the note in the subject.
Someone forwards a message to the mailing list/Discourse, technically without additional own content (e.g. forwarding a message to a group from someone outside the group to spread information or a small circle discussed a message out of discourse via email in beforehand and then the content is copy-pasted to an email to discourse, containing “forwarded message”-html-tags and thus is currently perceived as “empty body” by Discourse)
I pledge for allowing “0” as lower boundary (and honestly fail to see the benefit of currently allowed “1” over “0”), the default could still be a more sage/sane value of, e.g. “10” to ensure that it is a consciousness decision by the admin. IMHO an admin of such platform as Discourse should be trusted to make good decisions for their needs, guided by sensible defaults. Thus I do not see any harm in allowing empty posts as an option.
Let me clearly express my gratitude for the focus on the philosophy of civilized discourse by Discourse! The thoughts put into it and the features derived from it were one reason why I opted for discourse.
