The 15 character title requirement is well-intentioned, but it hasn’t exactly been working on the Discourse site I’m part of. People are just adding “(15 chars)”/etc to post titles instead of finding a more descriptive way to word the title. Here are some examples of titles:
“Feedback (15 chars)”
“Avatar 2.0 - AND MORE CHARACTERS TO MEET TITLE REQ”
“New TLDs (Title must be at least 15 characters)”
“Math question that must be at least 15 characters long”
“Hexagon Sphere (15 characters)”
“Hello world (oh we need 15+ characters in titles)”
I imagine the character requirement’s intention is to either “force” people to use descriptive titles or to simply remind them that they might want to be a little more descriptive. If it’s the former, it’s not accomplishing that goal, and only accomplishes the goal of the latter. Either way, the current way people are reminded that they might want to be more descriptive has room to improve.
Instead of having a hard requirement for 15 characters, it’d be cleaner to just have a popup that says “You could be a little more descriptive in the title. Are you sure you want to post the topic with this title?” It still reminds people that they could be more descriptive, and it removes the ugly “(15 char to meet title req)” spam from the titles of topics posted by people who aren’t going to try and be descriptive either way.
