Our board is a hangout, there’s almost no formal Q&A. On traditional boards we used there would be an informal method of agreeing with someone in which you would simply quote their post and submit that, sort of like quoting and saying “this” or . Most boards would discourage it, but large quote pyramids were a standard result at times.
After switching to Discourse, many of our members took issue with the inability to do this. Now that I think of it, we haven’t been seeing any of those anymore because of this. Maybe I’d change my mind seeing them reintroduced, but looking back on it (with possibly rose-tinted glasses) is a bit sad.
Making an empty post is less of an issue. It can be achieved anyways by inserting a <br>.
I would be very surprised to hear that people totally abandoned a community just because they refuse to add an emoji or letter after a quote
I think a much more likely reason is that the system is new and people hate change, Discourse introduces mountains of change over “traditional” forums.
Haha, you’d be surprised how much of an uproar there was over a few things. I didn’t expect it, but it took a bit of time for people to get used to the lack of pages. People argued in favor of pages for a while, and some still mention it now and then, but obviously there’s no changing that.
I think generally we maybe expected more flexibility than we found in Discourse. It shows up in odd places. It’s still a better alternative for a lot of different reasons. I can’t confirm how many have left for one or another reason; I think the people who actively complain were just expecting lots of good change and no bad change. I’ve been surprised by a couple of things, but when I post about them here it’s generally in trying to fix something harmless that the users would enjoy.
Unfortunately the few devs that we have in our group either don’t have the time or don’t have the expertise to do much development on plugins or Discourse, but I saw this topic and wanted to mention that maybe an old feature (minimum post length zero) had possibly disappeared erroneously. Hardly a critical feature, but if it’s actually still working and I just don’t know what I’m doing then I’d love to hear about it.
Really loving Discourse, it’s fast, very functional and has a lot of things to configure (which is good).
I’ve run into a specific scenario. We have a Question/Answer style of forum, sometimes the questions are very small and don’t require a post body but there is the admin interface limit of minimum 1 character
Can the limit be made configurable individually for the OP and the people replying? (i.e. I would like the possibility of the OP not requiring a body and the people replying have a specific reply length requirement.
Possibility of the limits being set to 0. ( it will only limit the use cases of a stock Discourse installation. )
Also, is it possible to change the template of the topic through a plugin? (Should I look into plugin development?)
Sorry for pushing up this old thread.
We are using discourse to replace mailing lists. People send emails with subjects like e.g. “Meeting today at 8pm in the red house EOM” and an (you can guess) empty body. This is an accepted behaviour. Thus I’d like to set the min post length and the min first post length to 0. If I understand
correctly, this should be possible. Unfortunately apparently the minimum length seems to be 1 for me. What did I do wrong?
That may have been changed since Jeff wrote that post in 2013, looks like minimum post character limit is 1, max is 2,000,000,000.
People sending empty e-mails with the only message being the subject of the e-mail may be accepted behavior for mailing lists but that can still be annoying and unnecessary to communicate that way.
While I do agree, that this can be annoying and unnecessary, this does not mean, that it needs to be annoying and unnecessary. As stated, in this context of using discourse as a mailing list replacement it is an accepted behaviour. To be honest, I do not see the advantage of having a single char (e.g. “.”) over an empty body.
Thus, if it was changed to “min 1”, I’d welcome if the configuration option would allow “0” as lower boundary.
. Most boards would discourage it, but large quote pyramids were a standard result at times.
