Hosts: Enhancement request

I second this motion

(Now let's hope the next reply is a host saying "Motion carried") 🙂

J.C

I third it! Especially in the homepage where some discussion listings are relatively narrowed, long topics can take over the listings.

I'm as concerned with design and aesthetics as the next fella, but it's nice to see, especially newer members, getting their questions down (there remains a character limit) without having to be distracted by composing a useful title in addition to a useful post.

In short title fields (I think it used to be about 80 characters), we often see meaningless subject lines ("Safari crashing," "MacBook Pro slow!!!," "Is this right???" and so on), followed by topic posts we wished we hadn't bothered to read. Longer titles sometimes function to save a lot of people a lot of clicks. 😉

Perhaps one option would be to just truncate the displayed title so it uses 2 lines maximum in any view beside the discussion page, regardless of its length.

I have to agree with Tuttle.

In the old layout I would often get "iChat" as the topic when it was already in one to the 4 iChat Forums.

At present I have seen no repeat of this and the Questions as well as the Post do seem to be more informative as to what is going on. (Either that or everyone has taken lessons on how to post questions full stop :-) )

I have also seen some Topic titles that have filled 3 lines or more when I already have Firefox about 14' wide on my 17" Cinema Display. (I thought the whole post was going to be in that Box.)

Truncating the Title in some views may help. Although I can see some unfortunate word breaks appearing. (Whole words please).

9:18 PM Friday; April 22, 2011

 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb( 10.6.7)
, Mac OS X (10.6.7),
"Limit the Logs to the Bits above Binary Images."  No, Seriously

Ahh I recognise the "B" now.

(Found it)

10:28 PM Friday; April 22, 2011

 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb( 10.6.7)
, Mac OS X (10.6.7),
"Limit the Logs to the Bits above Binary Images."  No, Seriously

Hi,

I fourth the motion!

---likeabird---

🙂 Hi Ralph.

The Questions as well as the Post do seem to be more informative as to what is going on. (Either that or everyone has taken lessons on how to post questions full stop :-) )

My theory is that these wonderfully informative post titles are being made by mistake when people use the "Submit your question to the community forms". (Roger Wilmut helped my thoughts crystalise about the mechanism, so any kudos to him. Any mistakes are down to me.)

Suppose I was wondering:

Does anyone know why our post titles are suddenly very long and very informative, and sometimes the contents of the post are perfect replicas of the title? I see it a lot at ASC nowadays.

It might occur to me that I could ask that question of the community itself, by using one of the "submit question to the community" forms. Assume that for one reason or another that I haven't read the tutorials. So I toddle off to the Overview tab at UASC, and have a look at the thing with the big silver apple on it:

I look at that, and think "Righty-ho, I'm going to type my question into that 'Ask your question' thingy and then click the 'Submit your question to the community' button."

Typety-type-type. Click.

Somewhat to my surprise, I then see:

"Dear god in heaven ... what's going on?" I think to myself. "Something seems like it should go in that big boxy thing ... but what? Should I type the question out again? Seems a bit strange, but just in case ... hang on, rather than typing it out again, maybe I could copy and paste it out of that top thingy and put it in the bottom thingy. Better leave the stuff there in the top box too, just in case. Now what? Um ... *scrolls down, scrolls down* ... aha! A 'Post Message' button! Let's click that!"

... and a Question with a long and descriptive title, and where the body of the post is an exact replica of the title, lands in the forums.

I reckon that a similar sort of common mistake must be behind the "multiple" titles ... the sort that go:

How do I x with y? How do I x with y?

... but I don''t have a good feel for what the mechanism might be there.

Speculation ... I know that with some browsers (like IE 8), things can sometimes fail to display pasted or inserted stuff immediately after you've cut and pasted (or inserted) them. So it might be that someone has accidentally cut (rather than copied) something from the title field, and then decided to paste it back in there, and it's failed to appear, and they've pasted it again. (And then possibly again.) But I'm much less confident of that idea than I am about the wonderfully long and descriptive post titles.

Hi b noir,

I can see the logic in that.

Whether it turns out to be Fuzzy Logic remains to be seen.

It seems to be at least a working hypothesis so far.

8:23 PM Sunday; April 24, 2011

 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb( 10.6.7)
, Mac OS X (10.6.7),
"Limit the Logs to the Bits above Binary Images."  No, Seriously