Yeah, I ran up against that a while ago. Sent a message to Sam asking if it could be changed but I guess either it can’t or it hasn’t been. All it does is force you to add garbage to the title, devaluing the forum.
Similarly the rule that new users can’t post more than 4 times (or something like that) to a given topic, recently a new user was engaged in a good exchange trying to debug their build and when they ran up against that, they started editing their old messages to replace their content with new material. A completely counterproductive rule.
For what it’s worth I don’t think the title limitation is unreasonable. The original poster could for instance have expanded the title to “Ondioline, an early electronic keyboard instrument”. This would also have been more helpful to the other users.
Sure, they could have. But instead they found it easier or preferable to add garbage to the title. So did I. And I think that’s likely to be the case in most instances.
I yearn for the days of old “user unfriendly” forum software from the web v1 era. Programmers didn’t waste their time, nor users, by programming arbitary restrictions which seem like a good idea, but really aren’t. A bit like modern windows will ask you “are you really sure you want to run that program you just double clicked on?”
Yeah, you can change these things to say don’t bother me, but wouldn’t it be nicer if they just didn’t bother you in the first place.
Being a software developer myself, I do have to remember to keep it simple (stupid - KISS) and not go running off to develop something clever, complex and impossible for anyone else but me to use.
Reminds me of a couple of LMNC livestreams where Sam is trying to use the cirklon. Yes it can do wonderful things, but if no-one can use it, what’s the point?
(That’s from the daydreamer thread, which is currently titled “DAYDREAMER DAY! (new LMNC music release)”. Sam obviously needs to use clearer song titles from now on Or they could let me reply “YES, YES, IT’S GOOD ENOUGH” to that question… or treat “OK” as an actual “OK” and not “CANCEL”.)
Do you know, that sums up so much of what I dislike about electronic music production and how bloody daunting I find DAW. “The tyanny of choice.” It’s why I love the Moog Mini-D, it’s so intuituive what it does and if you’re not sure just have a go.
This is also why I like my microkorg. Anything I’m not sure about, I can plug it into the computer with a MIDI cable and see at a glance what that preset is doing and how.
These measures are in place to thwart a bunch of nonsensical and all UPPERCASE comments. I have a feeling its annoying but honestly discourages one word responses and the like. As you saw in a previous comment i made in this thread, its not impossible to get around this.
I don’t think we should bother Sam with Discourse issues, I’d rather he spend his time creating the stuff we all enjoy.
Instead, if there are real problems that you’d like fixed (some we don’t really want fixed, we just enjoy bitching about them), you can try contacting @scossar, he is one of our members that work for Discourse and he said:
My first question would be: where’s the documentation?
For example I saw people formatting text with strikethrough but that is not in the editor menu.
I eventually figured it out, you bracket the text with two tildas ~~, but it is not documented anywhere that I could find.
Triple ticks (```) for code blocks is something i think is the most important to know when posting arduino code.
import random
insults = ['fool', 'turkey', 'melon-head', 'noodle-brain']
def random_insult():
print('Get your own sandwich, you {}.'.format(random.choice(insults)))
I just ran into “Body seems unclear, is it a complete sentence?” to which you can only respond “OK”, which it isn’t, and once it’s assured it’s OK, it still won’t let you post it. As if an algorithm knows better than I do what an appropriate response is.
I mean, if it said “Are you sure?” and then allowed it if you responded “Yes”, that’d merely be annoying. But as it is, it’s completely infuriating. Right, @scossar?
This is to keep people from making posts that are unhelpful or formatted oddly. Its an auto-mod feature and the alternative is having a human mod police things. Its not perfect, but I only ever get that if i make a kinda silly looking post.
It could be infuriating All the issues raised in this topic can be overridden on a per-site basis. This needs to be done by an admin on the forum. @lookmumnocomputer, if you would like to make any adjustments to the site’s settings to allow shorter titles and posts to be created, send me a PM and I’ll get you pointed in the right direction.
The relevant settings are:
body min entropy (the number of unique characters required for a post)
title min entropy (the number of unique characters required for a topic title)
allow uppercase posts (Allow all caps in topic titles and posts)
min post length
min first post length
max consecutive replies
These settings are all found in the Posting section of the site’s Admin / Settings pages. You can also find settings by name by entering the setting name into to settings page search box.
For the issue of the system asking questions like “Body seems unclear, is it a complete sentence?”, the text that is displayed can be customized from the site’s Admin / Customize / Text section. Enter is_invalid into the search box on that page to find the correct translation keys to override. I can see how people could be annoyed by a computer asking them a question that is actually a statement.
The default Discourse settings are a good starting point for most sites. The expectation is that sites will override these settings to meet their requirements.
It’s funny to me to be answering this question as a regular user on a site. Especially on a site that’s related to something I’m a complete newbie at
Or they could let me reply “YES, YES, IT’S GOOD ENOUGH” to that question… or treat “OK” as an actual “OK” and not “CANCEL”.)
All the issues raised in this topic can be overridden on a per-site basis. This needs to be done by an admin on the forum.