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Minimum words/characters allowed in posts


Makoto

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Posted

I may have suggested this before, and I'm sure others have as well, but I really would like to see this as a native setting in IP.Board.

Currently, there is a mod in the marketplace that claims to do this,


However, $10 really seems rather expensive for something so "simple," and this hasn't bee confirmed to work with 3.3.x

But this, to me, is such a useful functionality that I believe it should be added to IP.Board itself. Not to screw over the developer of this app, but just because I think there are many who could find this functionality useful.

It would consist of a simple global setting for the minimum words or characters allowed in a users post with the option for user groups to override this restriction, the same way you would with flood control. Basically, similar to what the paid app above claims to do.

There is another problem, for me at least. While I don't allow single word posts anywhere on my site in general, I do have a Forum Games section (where posts do not increase your actual post count), and in this forum are some games that center around using one word posts. So it would be useful to be able to have certain forums override/ignore this restriction as well. This is something the app above doesn't do.

It's a common problem for me to have users try and spam single word posts to gain full access to my site, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. I have restrictions in place to prevent these rule breaker from doing any real harm, but this entire issue could easily be avoided with the feature I am requesting.

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Posted

My view is that enforcing a minimum limit on words or characters to enforce meaningful posts is unworkable.

For example, if you had 10 words as a limit, then surely:

"moo moo moo bah bah moo moo moo moo bah" is just as pointless as "moo"

My point (other than to practise farm animal noises which is always enjoyable) is that if someone wants to troll then they'll find a way.

Posted

useless function.



It's not useless, but Matt does have a point.

I still see it as being potentially useful though, even though a troll can easily bypass it by spamming large posts, it's not really my prime objective to prevent trolls. It's to coarse people into making higher quality posts, in a sense.

It would likely be more useful for me than it would be for others.

I also just realized I posted the wrong link in my original post, somehow. I meant to link to this item in the marketplace:
Posted

It is definitely not useless. I moderate a forum where we now get posts such as ".". I told the forum administrator to enable this function, and he said he could not find it. So I Googled it and stumbled on this topic. I have honestly never seen a forum without this, but I assume they were all vBulletin or something else.

Posted

It is definitely not useless. I moderate a forum where we now get posts such as ".". I told the forum administrator to enable this function, and he said he could not find it. So I Googled it and stumbled on this topic. I have honestly never seen a forum without this, but I assume they were all vBulletin or something else.



I definitely agree that it's not useless. While Matt does make a good point that if the user was intentionally trying to spam, they would likely just try and write "......... .......... ......... ........" or random giberish, I don't consider it a means of reducing or stopping trolls/idiots.

I think it poses a usefulness for non-malicious users who haven't fully read your boards guidelines, as an example. The user might try and post "lol", and instead of a moderator then having to go and delete the users post and send them a warning telling them that's not allowed, the forum itself can reject the message with a brief notice about the site's policy on 1-3 word posts.

The user will then know the policy and truly have no excuse for trying to violate it by posting "lol lol lol lol" and can be safely given a harsher penalty if they so try, as they can't use the excuse "I didn't know XX word posts weren't allowed." But I like to think that most users will acknowledge the site's policy on the matter and simply correct their ways.
Posted

My view is that enforcing a minimum limit on words or characters to enforce meaningful posts is unworkable.



For example, if you had 10 words as a limit, then surely:



"moo moo moo bah bah moo moo moo moo bah" is just as pointless as "moo"



My point (other than to practise farm animal noises which is always enjoyable) is that if someone wants to troll then they'll find a way.

While I agree 100%, having a feature like this will definitely reduce the amount of nonsense posts.
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Posted

I got a notification regarding this thread that I forgot I made so I'm going to use that as an excuse to bump it.

So, bump.

I'd still love to see this added as a core function.

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