Why? Why force me to write more than I want to?

hel that’ll be 5 bucks random forum goer only I can speak the name of best waifu for free

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Not much.

Probably because, as stated, the forums are a tool for discussion and “yes” or “no” are not really a “discussion answer”.

If you can’t figure out a way to elaborate more on your thoughts past “yes” or “no” then you shouldn’t reply at all.

Encouraging people to write a bunch of garbage they didn’t intend to write is the opposite of discouraging spam.

4 Likes

Spam is used as an umbrella term. It’s being used as “anything generally seen as thoughtless or unable to continue good discussion”. Short answers like yes and no meet the latter of the two.

“Bla bla bla must have 20 characters” meets it even better.

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If the 20 character min is a concern, it probably isn’t worth typing.

Well you know what they say about assumptions…

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Huh?

If all you have to say is “yes” or “no” probably best just not to say anything at all. In elementary school, they teach you to follow up a yes or no question with a sentence description that explains your reasoning. You could try that? :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

I would just like to point out that this is the second time someone has said “yes or no” as if that is the problem or even the topic here. The topic is about the twenty character minimum. I’m not sure if the filter counts blank space, but you could potentially write ‘no’ ten times.

In fact, people probably do reply with such inane responses as “no no no no no no no no no no” because of the arbitrary word count that assumes nothing of value can be said in less than twenty characters.

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There is a pretty crazy reason for that my friend… Maybe try reading the original post? Yeah?

Tweets are, like, 120 characters? I do not use Twitter, but they are notoriously short and this site asks you to type up 1/6 of a tweet. If you cannot manage that, the problem is not the 20 character limit.

Honestly, you are going to have to provide me with an example of something valuable in less than twenty characters.

I mean, twenty characters is literally 17 characters. Like??? It is arbitrary, no doubt, but more on the liberal side. I would understand if the restriction were higher. What would you lower it to? 15, 10, 5? At that point, there is no point. The rule is there to get you thinking, “hey, I am on an online discussion, maybe I should not spam the forums.” It is a good thing and if you have a problem, type your “valuable” message and follow it up with (20 characters) which is what literally everyone does to circumvent the rule. Is it really that inconvenient. If so, find a new hobby, bro. :sunglasses:

You can type a bunch of stuff in between <> to keep it hidden from your post, but it’ll still count towards character count.

Lead writer, Lead developer.

How are those posts valuable? Because they answered a question? If that was your definition, sure, I agree with you. That being said, it speaks volumes that the lead writer cannot even be bothered to write a sentence, if you ask me. :face_with_monocle:

If a simple “yes” is the appropriate response, there is a small, hollow heart icon you can click that essentially means “yes, I agree with you!”

And a simple “no” is almost never the appropriate response. If you’re going to disagree, use your words and type something out. This is a discussion forum.

Not a petition forum.

I love an argument as much as the next guy, but I feel like you are arguing for the sake of argument as if you are sitting in front of a sign that says “20 character minimum is good for the forums, change my mind!”.

People ask for help on the forums all the time. The answers to those questions are not necessarily lengthy and I maintain that the character minimum encourages useless posts much more than it discourages them.

I doubt even a single person stopped when the warning came up and said to themselves, “I see now that I have not put enough care into my verbiage and I have failed to meet the impeccably high standards of the general forums and I will now retreat to ponder my misdeeds”. What is much more likely is that they blurted out whatever they intended to post in the first place, and then filled in the blanks with some variation of “blablabla 20 chars”.

In closing I would like to steal a quote from William Shakespeare, “Brevity… is the soul of wit”.