Did you know that you can post really, really, really long topic titles in Invision Power Services Comunnity Suite 4.0 and there is no option in the Admin Control Panel to limit that?

DesignzShop · March 2, 2015

@Charles have time to look at something cool?

esquire · March 2, 2015

I thought I would reply to that since you are referring to me.
I said that the topic at hand was dealing with the feature suggestion about giving the admin the option to limit characters in topic titles. We were not talking about SEO at all so I was confused why you were bringing it up. I realize things like that interact with SEO but the topic was not about that and the setting one way or another had no reference to SEO.

Actually Charles, it was another IPS team member who gave the full explanation before you did about how responsive design cured the need for topic title limits. Perhaps you realized this although this comment seemed to confirm the above as did this comment.

Even if it was my error in misunderstanding you, I will help solve this mystery about what SEO has to do with topic/thread title length as not everyone is expected to appreciate this. Since the dawn of search engines, a limited the number of characters can be seen in search results. Limits are usually between 64-70 characters before you begin to get an ellipsis. As such, unless your users put in relevant keywords and identifiers relating to your topic, results in search engines may appear of limited use. So a topic title like "SEO Basics, concepts beginning webmasters should know" will probably be far more effective than "For people who are new to creating websites and looking to learn more..." Since search engines use a predefined font, all this talk about monospaced and proportionally spaced fonts is irrelevant. It's a hard character stop. And even if SEs weren't an issue, you're better off with good titles that explain the topic quickly.

I can conceive of a half dozen rock solid reasons why you'd want to limit things like title size as can probably most experienced webmasters. They have absolutely nothing to do with responsive design, which has more to do with fitting in all aspects of a web page into a comfortable to see and use. I can't imagine a more unwieldy situation than having super long title that wraps on your mobile screen on several lines too. And emojis in the titles? Are you kidding me? I'd prefer a way to make very sure that they don't appear in titles. If other site owners want them fine - make it an option. It's their choice. If they think these things never happen, fine. That's because on every professional forum these forum titles are usually set for a good reason!

@csm - Sure, you can use CSS to truncate the way the title may appear on the page visually but the entire title is still in the database. You can also use javascript, etc. but this is so messy and inconvenient. If the full title is in the database, that title will be yanked out for a dozen other related things that, if you are a power user like many IPB customers are, they will find it sub-optimal, e.g. in posts that will appear on social media sites automatically.

Charles and folks, I'm not here to bust anyone's britches. I'm all about trying to make IPS 4 the best it can be and point out that the team may have overlooked some very large concepts in the planning stage. This didn't include customers who might have at least an equal understanding about these things as you believe you do. I don't care about the cheerleaders who want to stamp out valid constructive criticism. I concede that you're completely free to NOT take my suggestions. It's YOUR PRODUCT. Of course YOU decide that it's not what you want to include in IPS 4. I respect that. Then I make a decision on whether this or another product suits my needs. Totally cool. But if I'm explaining this, it would appear that you didn't take this into consideration when you were planning IPS 4 by yourselves. There are some people here with extremely high levels of knowledge in this area - many of whom I'd trust would do a great job of representing the concerns of admins - from basic to power users as well as my own. My thought is that it might be a good time to consider it and hopefully they are still willing to make the effort.