I don’t personally understand, still even it has been explained, point of nil content, but it is just my opinion. If an admin wants such feature and users are using it, why settings aren’t approving zero?
I mean is there lying behind something similar than with multiple drafts that are several times asked, but aren’t coming because of structure of Diacourse? So it would be more complex job than just changing some value in the code?
If it is practically impossible to allow because it would need huge amount of work then the situation would be more acceptable. And after that such forums could start using those tricks, that messes toolbox or users must remeber tricks to make something work. In both cases it breaks the idea give ability use only headers easily and without touching content itself. All of those tricks are just quick fixes, though.
But if the reason is more politically or strategically then I would ask if a fear of image of Discourse as serial forum platform in the eyes of big companies is really threated because of some forums that has its conversation happening using tittles and headers? Why are then allowed discuss using hieroglyfs and gifs
Ah! That’s a point. Sometimes on my forums, someone asks me where a certain sentence came from - and I quote the original post. Then I find that Discourse tells me that I must add at least one word, and I can’t send a pure quote. I don’t quite understand why.
How can anyone know that you agree with something you have quoted just because you have quoted it? That may be the common interpretation, but things like that can quickly start to become misunderstood or not understood at all.
The feature request can make sense if someone wants to forward a message without writing any comment, but that is just parroting not making an agreement.
I think this is out of scope. The purpose of this feature request is to give forum admins the freedom and autonomy to decide for themselves to enable 0 length posts in their forum
As a follow up, I’ve tried using the HTML comment method listed here and it seems that it doesn’t always work in all contexts either.
How so? When has it not worked for you? On the forum I help run, we frequently use faked HTML blocks to fill posts, generally when we’re just a few characters short, but we have made entire posts that are seemingly blank.
For example, what I personally do
Some short post here
<e>
<Some filler content here>
Because it is totally trivial to break that limit, and because no in Finnish is ei, and because it is every now and then totally valid answer (we hate useless small talk that is ment to be just for meaningless filling) I allowed two characters limit.
I see that way there is absolut no point to make rules that can be broken right away.
That’s awesome! I’m guessing it would make developers and hosting providers a little nervous though. I seem to remember a Discourse site where they played a game that was essentially trying to break Discourse by having users post as quickly as possible.
Another case for allowing empty topic bodies would be the (not yet supported) idea of “red link” or “wanted page links” in documentation topics. For example, [[this should be documented]] would link to https://forum.example.com/t/this-should-be-documented/{topic_id} with an empty topic body.
Both will probably not work for my (figurative) grandmother, sending an email to the address I gave her to reach the Discourse category replacing a mailing list.
Such workarounds are out of my experience often rather difficult for users with limited IT literacy and then suddenly things get rather complicated (cf. Incoming emails trimmed despite trimming disabled - #9 by sjjh) and people quit using Discourse and fall back to Facebook Messanger or the like because its “so much easier”. Which is a shame IMHO.
And as I hope/believe that this is not the case, I’m also wondering what potential harm is feared to allow for this (admin) configuration to include “0”.
Honestly, I have no idea, as I don’t use it personally. But facebook messenger was just an example for a worse alternative to Discourse. If this example does not work, let me suggest two other ones
fall back to Telegram, WhatsApp, or Discord (allowing a short sentence, that would be a short subject/title + empty body/message)
fall back to a plain email with 64 addresses in the TO and CC field
or use one of your own choice. The message was: The suggested workaround will not work around. I do have users here who thus switched back from Discourse to a worse alternative. Sorry, if the (wrong) example distracted from this message.
I think I might have figured it out, guess I am not actually that familiar with HTML comments, but it appears that the newlines are required. Doing it all on a single line, does not appear to work
but if I break it up over three lines, as shown in the examples here, it does seem to work. Did not realize the line breaks matter here
I really can’t see the point of an entirely empty post - it is extremely wasteful of resources to do this including just screen resources. Why not just establish your involvement with a reaction if you want to be seen to be an “active reader”?
However, I agree with @David_Ghost & @Lhc_fl I really like the idea of being able to post simply a quote, that makes much more sense! That’s useful on the admittedly rare occasion when pointing something out to someone.
