With so many topics having the question in the title, wouldn’t it make sense to limit the number of characters in the topic title to something like 70 characters?
Hi Martin -
I’ve now changed that to 60 characters. We’ll see how that fares.
-wim
3 Likes
Thanks for this, Martin! 
Brace yourselves for even less descriptive, lazy, and thoughtless topic titles!
@wim, wouldn’t it be possible to set this a little higher, or at least for - say - regular users that have proven to be more responsible. 60 characters is just too limiting!!
I suggested 70 characters and even 80 would be ok.
In general, the question belongs into the topic and not into the title.
Yes, I’m aware of that, but you seem to be Übeltäter for launching this campaign. 
I agree, but the title should at least reflect a general idea or short description of the topic in question, which is hard to do with 60 characters. I don’t know about you, but I like to judge books by their covers, at least here.
I was surprised how quickly this suggestion was set by @wim
Based on my quick Google research, book titles do have an average word count of about 10 words with an average of 5 characters.
I don’t think that’s a good analogy, since books also have the blurb that informs on what the specific book is about. Here the title has to satisfy both. I don’t want to read the entire topic just to know whether I’m interested or not.
And this in my opinion further festers shitty titling patterns that already are a nuisance here.
“How do I make this?” only needs 19 characters. That caters for the commonest post.
Hi Marc -
We have a Papercuts category - that will save you 11 characters.
Apart from that, we’ve had tens if not hundreds of complaints about users using titles that are too long. Yours is the second that it can’t be long enough. I’ll try to keep track and see where we land. Until then, keep blaming Martin…
-wim
1 Like
Noted.
Don’t forget to evaluate the historical data, since now nobody can go over 60 characters anyway.