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by tempestn 1524 days ago
Perhaps there would be some value to extending the allowable length for titles, but having a soft limit equal to (or even slightly less than) the current one? If over the soft limit there could be a message that it's preferable to shorten titles to under that length if it can be done without losing useful information.

In theory that way you still get titles shortened where possible, but don't have to wrestle with this kind of issue. Of course the cost is added complexity, so likely not worth it. Maybe just increase the limit then?

1 comments

I have occasionally thought of writing code to allow this (sort of a 'burst' feature for occasional exceptions) but the 80 char limit is not a real problem in practice. In fact it functions as a classic creative constraint.
> In fact it functions as a classic creative constraint.

If I might play devil's advocate a bit—aren't submitters not supposed to be creative in titles?

"Unless it's misleading or clickbait", yes, but I don't think there's a correlation between click-bait and length. I feel like a lot of titles get edited because of the character limit.

I don't have a number handy but I'd guess fewer than 10%. That's not so bad, and titles are often better with needless words omitted.