Can we please get rid of this blasted minimum 15 character restriction in the subject line when creating a new topic? It really is annoying!
Most of the time the subject line can be less than 15 characters, with more detail in the body of the message. Even if it was reduced by half, if it can’t be removed totally would be helpful.
Thanks!
I don’t think 15 characters is unreasonable. If you had typed out New Zealand instead of NZ, you’d have been there 
Maybe, but it just seems a waste of time to me.
I understand your point and frustration, but I personally disagree.
I’d like to see topic titles have substance to them so that they’re useful to other people who use this forum, especially since this forum provides support. The character length is one tiny tool we have to try and encourage good titles.
If others feel strongly, I don’t mind change, but I think the minimum limit is there for a reason.
Ok, but the substance can surely be had in the body of the text? If the subject line can be shortened by using normal convention abbreviations that lose no meaning, then why make someone waste time by writing out the full version?
Often, a reasonably descriptive subject line could be done with way less than 15 characters. If the subject line that is under15 characters promotes enough interest, then other users will click on it.
I also think being confined goes against the FOSS way of doing things. I should be free to post with a subject line of less than 15 characters if I wish, no?
Ideally both would be meaningful and succinct. 
That was a specific example of something you could’ve done to meet the character limit, not a rule that says “no abbreviations.”
15 characters is like 3 words in English and less than that in other languages. We’re not asking you to write a novel.
While we do exude the Free Software ethos, this forum does not strictly adhere to it. I think a huge part of Free Software is being a good community member, which includes writing descriptive headlines so that others may benefit from the conversations here.
@paperdigits is spot on for the reasons that the entire forum software defaults to having those minimum lengths. The idea is to really encourage more meaningful subjects as well as posts. (I already removed the minimum post length as requested by the RT team).
I happen to wholeheartedly agree with the reasons the discourse team chose to do this. However, we also happen to be very lucky in that our members are a bit more eloquent and trustworthy than most forums.
Let’s ask the @staff in general if there’s any preference or strong feelings. I’m open to lowering it if desired - everyone is pretty good at keeping things focused already.
Despite my natural terseness I have never hit that limit(*) but I have no problem with a much shorter one.
(*) which I find an utter PITA for Amazon comments.
I haven’t ran into the lower topic limit yet. Absolutely agree that topics should be long enough and worded well enough to represent the contents of the thread without having to read the thread. Can short topics do that? Possibly. One good word can do a better job than a sloppy sentence. If the writer puts effort into the topic, there’s no need for a limit. On the other hand, even a 30 char minimum limit won’t help if the writer is careless. Example: “New topic subject… Pleeeaaasseeee” is a bad topic. It doesn’t tell me what the thread is about. Its character count has nothing to do with it.
I don’t have any strong feelings either way regarding the limit, it works for me as is, but what I would do if this was entirely my forum is to set the character count lower limit to something which should only prevent accidental new empty topics, like 3, and only raise if it practice shows that there’s a need, not the other way around.
I gave the like because I misread the post 
I thought about content of topics where even a 
can be meaningful.
I had a short look at the subjects of rt issues on github. I didn’t find one with a (meaningful) subject less than 15 chars.