The discussion revolves around the confusing nature of the min entropy settings in Discourse, particularly regarding title and body content. simon highlights the need for clearer, more human-friendly explanations of these settings, which are currently defined in technical terms. Architect notes that while the alert messages provide some guidance, the underlying requirements remain unclear. Jagster shares a frustrating experience with the entropy settings, especially given their use of Finnish, which features many vowels and long consonants, making it difficult to meet the thresholds. simon agrees, emphasizing that such settings may not be suitable for all communities. Jagster suggests that forums should focus on simplicity and user experience rather than relying on complex anti-spam measures. Architect points out that the entropy requirement can be confusing and may lead users to add meaningless characters to bypass it. piffy advocates for manual approval of initial posts instead of relying on automated thresholds. ecki believes the current description is clear enough, though questions remain about how non-Latin scripts are handled.
I’m admitting my ignorance here, but every time I want to relax the rules around unique characters in titles and post content, I get stuck on the descriptions of the body min entropy and title min entropy settings:
The minimum entropy (unique characters, non-english count for more) required for a post body.
It’s tricky, because the setting is describing an algorithm, without supplying enough information to make it clear how the algorithm works. But yeah, it’s essentially saying “from 0 to (?), how much variation is required in titles and post content.”
I know what entropy means, but using those settings was just awful experience. No matter what values I tried it was constantly nagging. Setting itself is needed, perhaps, but because I’m a member of very small and very strange language-family, Finnish, and we use a lot vowels and those can be long, and same thing with consonants, I put zero on those.
Again. My forum is practically spam free and for normal grownup people, so I don’t even need it. I would guess situation isn’t as sunny everywhere. But I can see why it looks so confusing.
Well, of course it depends if a forum is targeted to nordic, italian, south american (sorry for generalization), usa (big generalization here), academics, gaming, right, left… but I would like to say there is few universal rules:
too much decoration and gimmicks are just too much
Spam problems should solve only if there is need for that
Users must get those rights they need right away, so no playing with trustlevels
Kick bad apples right away out from forums, no warnings
However there is no way to answer this question, the system prohibits publishing of the post unless there is more entropy which isn’t explained to the writer.
With the minimum character limit for titles adding a few asterisks fulfills that limit but this additional entropy requirement could be a little more developed.
My strategy is to have manual approval of the first few posts to filter out spam and other low quality content. All of the other limits like character count and entropy and all this other junk gets in the way of people engaging with the site so it’s turned off (or turned to an extremely tolerant threshold at least)
So far we have caught 100% of spam and no user has to suffer through a vague message about how their post needs more characters (which ironically probably promotes spam. Because to get around the message the simplest way is just to add character noise until you pass the threshold)
The description “Minimum number of unique characters” sounds quite clear to me - i dont think you need a change here, especially given thats a really minor tuning. (however that NLS comment might be a bit confusing, does that mean it counts a national character as the number of UTF8 bytes it has?)
