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During the submission process where the form say a title is too long you could also be displaying how any transformations will affect it.
by benologist 7y ago
During the submission process where the form say a title is too long you could also be displaying how any transformations will affect it.
- saagarjha 7y agoYup, basically this. Another idea would be to add a "please review this title that Hacker News won't let me submit with" button that would get these kinds of things in front of you sooner.
- dang 7y agoThat shows up as soon as the submission is created, and there's an 'edit' link if you need to change it. Just don't change it in ways that break the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- grzm 7y agoI think they're getting at transformations that happen after submission, such as dropping initial question words and the like, not just the length restriction (which does appear).
- benologist 7y agoIf it displays during the title entry process it is educating the users about the transformations that occur too. It's a positive-reinforcement loop that supplements the guidelines. It's the reason you don't have to document in the guidelines that the maximum title length is 80 characters.
- dang 7y agoThe title processing logic is surprisingly complex, just as the whole issue of titles on HN is surprisingly complex. That means the code runs on the server, which would make it awkward to run during the data entry process, which of course is browser-side.
- benologist 7y agoThe best solution would of course be instantaneously with some javascript but if it's not CPU-taxing it would still be plenty fast to send the title to the server as the input value changes. It's not uncommon for forms to do this with username eligibility checks etc.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoHacker News, unlike most websites, likely has a very significant number of users who keep Javascript disabled.