Make it possible to start topics with only titles, no content in first post

I too would like to change the min post length. I run a private community all invited, and we sometimes reply with emoji that is more than just the :heart:. also im not sure what setting but if you do the character limit with just gibberish its also blocked…

Hey @wartron :wave: Welcome to Meta!

If it is a private community, why do you need different character limits for different groups? I have the impression you want to reduce the limit for everyone.

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@moin I would like to turn off all the limits, but i also agree it makes sense that it could be group level. In the mean time is there a patricianly setting im overlooking to reduce the character limit to 1

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You literally can turn it off for everyone though?

ok yea, im lost in what tab and what setting that would be i dont see it in /admin/site_settings/category/rate_limits i dont see it in /admin/site_settings/category/spam

It’s under Posting or just filter “minimum”

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Hello @wartron :wave: welcome to Discourse Meta :slight_smile:

I think you are looking for this

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Is it possible to disable the requirement or set it to 0?

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Yes, you can set the value to zero and it will cancel the setting/minimum post length requirement.

I’m afraid those ones can’t be set to 0 to disable:

Nice to know I can set it to 2,000,000,000 though :slight_smile:

ETA: I idly wondered how many copies of War and Peace that would work out at. I googled ‘how many characters in War and Peace’ and it says only 580…

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Could you imagine the end users face if they tried to post a reply to a topic with a simple “Thank you” but were met with an error informing them they needed to add a further 1,999,999,991 characters to their reply? :flushed_face:

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Seems reasonable that the minimum here is 1, because you can’t have a reply with less than 1. Or am I missing something?

I would be careful about lowering this from the default because it’s one of the things that prevents your forum from turning into chat. I guess you can always raise the limit again if you start seeing alot of low value one character replies.

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I mean the length of a topic description, not a reply. In a narrowly focused category, the title can be enough space to express the idea without needing further space in the description. So the minimum requirement seems unnecessary.

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That one is a slightly different one than this topic was asking after - Min first post length - but unfortunately that also has a minimum of 1 as well:

(Though this one gets a popup with the warning in)

I think if you really did want an empty first post you could mimic it using the <empty post> technique (maybe even adding it to a topic template if it was going to be considered ‘the norm’?). With that as the body text it would look empty but still pass the validation (if lowered from the default)

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Thanks, but maybe I didn’t follow that. I just don’t want users to be required to add a description if they think the title is enough. (I also don’t want to prevent them from adding a description if they want.)

I just tried adding to the template and tried to post a topic without a description, but it returned “Please add details and specifics to your topic by editing the topic template.” And it looks like users see the text, unless I did it wrong.

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Ahh, that’s unfortunate. :frowning: I forgot about that check.

There may be another way to automatically insert it (or similar) so it’s postable, but nothing is coming to mind. :thinking:

Can you explain in some more detail what you are trying to do and why? I am not understanding why you would want topics with just titles. Why not just use chat? Are you expecting replies with more text?

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It’s always dangerous to start explaining what someone is trying to achieve, but I reckon it comes from situation like this:

Title: ”How do I post using only title, no text in the body?”

Question is in the title and OP doesn’t feel write nothing more. Yeah, that is nowadays chat/whatsapp style messaging.

In such situation answers should be as laconic too, like ”You can’t”.

I’m wondering when users know when open a topic and when everything is in a title.

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Yes, I’m expecting replies with more text. The title is enough sometimes to start a discussion.

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What if you create a composer button to add a filler HTML tag to the post (assuming the post is empty to start with)? That way, blanking the post is optional for users who don’t want to do it, while allowing the post to be empty for others.