Can I auto-generate a post title

Can I auto-generate a post title. How can I change the post title to be the first 255 words in the post. Can this be done?

You want users using the web interface to leave the title blank and use the first 255 characters from their post? Why would you not want them to create a meaningful title?

Or are you using the API to create a post? If so, why not also create a title with your API call? (Or have your script get the first 255 characters)

Or, the Discourse AI plugin can auto-generate a meaningful title for you.

I want this for the web interface. Users are very reluctant to write titles. Most users fill the title section with meaningless words because it is mandatory. For example, xxxhkllllll. Also, Title is one of the most important criteria for SEO. Since the title is h1, the words used here are very important for ranking.

If they can’t be bothered write a title, it seems highly improbable that whatever else they write can be good for SEO, especially the first 255 characters that they wrote :slight_smile:

I think it would be possible to make a theme component that would hide the title with CSS and then fill it in with the first 255 characters when they clicked submit.

The AI plugin could conceivably write a decent title if they had decent text, but it’s hard to configure, expensive to run, and would still require the user to participate in the process.

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Thanks for your help, I will look into your suggestion.

I know this is not good for SEO. One of the first recommendations given by SEO tools in particular is the title length. I said it because the discourse takes 255 characters by default.

The Discourse AI plugin can generate titles for you, it’s part of our AI Helper module.

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No it is not. Not even close.

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I know the plugin, I tested it before. It takes a long time for new users to learn this. Additionally, in order to use this, the user must enter a certain number of post characters. In general, users first want to enter the mandatory title in at least a few words and then write the post.

There may be hundreds of criteria. Important if a user is searching for a phrase. Let there be 10 websites, all of them should have sufficient information, and all of them should have equal domain authority. The site that uses this group of words in the site title (h1) will be ahead. Let me enter the same content as my competitors. If this word group is not in the title and my competitor has it, my competitor will always be ahead. I’ve experienced this situation thousands of times.

Hiya! :wave:

Most people do not experience this issue. Could you provide example messages where the title is random characters?

Is it possible that using Discourse Chat is what your users are looking for? A way to leave a message without generating a title? :thinking:

I believe you mean in this sense your “competitors” are the site operators, and all of you have users generating content about the same subject (“equal domain authority”).

How are your competitors solving this issue? Could it be that your users need additional training on how to use the platform? Are your competitors using Discourse, or perhaps a platform made for the content of your particular community?


There is no out-of-the-box feature in Discourse that does what you are asking, but if you give us more details about your community and content, we may be able to advise. :slight_smile:

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Thanks for your answer. My biggest rival solves it the way I want. That is, it takes the first certain number of characters written in the post as the title. I tried Chat in the past, unfortunately users did not use it. Users use it to get information on certain topics, rather than to exchange information with each other like Chat.