Longer Entry Subject Line

[eosrose]

Title:
Longer Entry Subject Line

Area:
entries

Summary:
I request a higher character limit for the subject line of posts.

Description:
One of my biggest pet peeves in writing up posts is the 100-character limit of subject lines. I tend to add a lot of details to my entry subject lines when posting my creative works, since that makes my journal more easily scannable and the memories feature more useful. Unfortunately the 100-character limit doesn't always suffice, thus forcing me to abbreviate and leave out information.

Please, can we increase the character limit to 200 or thereabouts?

There would be some possible drawbacks that deserve acknowledgement:
- Some journal layouts might look odd with the longer subject lines. Of course, people don't have to write longer subjects, if they don't want to.
- A subject line of more than 100-characters might interfere with crossposting. A possible solution might be to build a cut-off point into the crossposting feature and just add something like "[...]" at the end of subject when a cut-off occurs to indicate that the original post had a longer subject.

If we can have longer entries and longer comments, I don't see why we can't have a longer subject line. :)

Poll #7086 Longer Entry Subject Line

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 74

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
29 (39.2%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
9 (12.2%)

(I have no opinion)
36 (48.6%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

The biggest thing against this

[foxfirefey]

So, when we increased the comment and entry lengths, it was way back in the beginning before we had any entries or comments on the service.

Now, though, making a change to the length of the subject would be a pretty massive undertaking to change the database.

Re: The biggest thing against this

[erika]

Why it's 100 Characters, IIRC, is because Russian and other non-English languages can take up multiple bits for one character, so the 100 characters was to hopefully get everything under 256 bits.

Re: The biggest thing against this

[eosrose]

I don't know how your own database works (am I right to think you're part of the team who actually works on this stuff?), but isn't it possible to run a global to change everything pretty quickly?

Re: The biggest thing against this

[foxfirefey]

I do some DW coding and whatnot although I'm not a DB guru--but I do know that telling MySQL to alter a column definition for millions of rows is no small undertaking.

Re: The biggest thing against this

[eosrose]

Well, obviously if it's a matter of one-by-one, record-by-record changes, forget it! But if there's a way to do it without consuming a lot of time or breaking DW, I'm all for it.

[matgb]

A few of the blogs I sub feeds for sometimes go over the char limit, and it's normally because the writer really needed a sub editor.

Having looked at your journal I can see what you mean about how you do it, and you do it well, so can see why it'd be good for you, but I think you're an edge case.

Generally, usability shows that shorter headlines are better, and given Fey's comment about the workload, my "don't care but don't want" is a bit hardened.

[denise]

Just FYI, I looked into this a bit more, and the only way to do this would be to either do a massive table alteration, or to assume that all entries are posted in non-Unicode characters. So, I'm afraid it just isn't practical!