Maximum thread title length on Bluelight is oppressively short; it's very hard someti

[23536]

(assuming these things can be lengthened):

If at any point you guys have debated allowing longer thread titles, let me just say that this would be a great thing. It's very hard sometimes to compress a complex idea into about 50 characters. But look how much information a reader gets by looking at similar pages in Reddit (for instance):

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/

I immediately know whether or not I want to click on each of those topics.

Just something for you guys to consider. Ignore this thread if our software makes this suggestion moot

 

[tambourine-man]

Possible, but the brevity of 85 characters is a virtue, IMO.

Forces people to choose their words carefully. Like haiku. :D

 

[Tommyboy]

I think that the limit on the thread titles is more than enough, so I wouldn't want it increased even if it were possible.

If you want to find out more about the thread content without clicking on the thread, you can put the cursor over the thread title and it will display a few lines of text from within the thread, without having to actually click on it. As long as you are viewing the forum and not just the name of a thread that appears as the most recent in a forum, it will give you those few lines of thread content, saving you the trouble of clicking on the thread to get anything more than the thread title.

 

[23536]

Forces people to choose their words carefully. Like haiku. :D

That is incredibly hard for most people to do. I can do it competently, but I'm a writer.

But consider some of the current entries from the link I posted:

Towns pay $3.5 million to settle lawsuit: '5yrs ago, a heavily armed special weapons and tactics team charged into a home - guns drawn and flash grenades exploding - and killed a man who was quietly watching porn on TV'

actual headline: Towns to pay $3.5M in deadly cop raid

What if we told you that, by our calculations, the largest U.S. banks aren’t really profitable at all? What if the billions of dollars they allegedly earn for their shareholders were almost entirely a gift from U.S. taxpayers? – Bloomberg Editors

actual headline: Why Should Taxpayers Give Big Banks $83 Billion a Year?

How Hospitals Are Killing People, The Country and The Treasury with Over 400% to 1000% Billing Markups. If Price Gouging is illegal in Most States, Why Can Hospitals Get Away With This?

actual headline: Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us

New study badly undermines GOP position on sequester. "A new study finds that the biggest driver of inequality is income from capital gains and dividends: exactly what Republicans refuse to increase taxes on to avert the deeply damaging sequester"

actual headline: New study badly undermines GOP position on sequester


The expanded titles give you a clear, undistorted idea of what the article is. The actual headlines are opaque and potentially misleading.

When written well, those expanded titles can motivate you to read a piece you would otherwise have skipped.

Consider for a moment that your affinity for brevity has been shaped not so much by tanka and haiku, but by actual typographical limitations (column width, cover size, etc). Now that we are reading primarily on screens, many of these typographical conventions will fall out of fashion.

 

[23536]

I also think it's helpful to look at the Daily Mail, as it seems they've realized that detailed headlines draw readers in, not alienate them. It's one of the reasons they're the most popular online news site in the world.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ushome/index.html

Three killed and four wounded as gunfight breaks out on Vegas strip between Range Rover and Maserati after 'dispute in casino'

Revealed: Disgraced TV anchor accused of 'choking his wife' beat her so badly last month during another drunken attack that she 'almost passed out'

'I dress for my man': Kim Kardashian debuts a new chic maternity-style monochrome shift as she reveals she likes to please Kanye

(though somehow their long ass headlines still manage to distort the subject matter their articles cover. But that's because they're stupid)

 

[alasdairm]

It's one of the reasons they're the most popular online news site in the world.

brief internet search brings up a few results which suggest they're, at best, not even in the top 10 of online news sites. they are #1 or #2 for newspapers with a web version.

aside, how do you know that their headline approach is one of the reasons for their popularity (or are you just assuming)?

i'm with tambo and tommyboy. i think that this kind of thing is like a gas - the headlines just expand to take up the available space. if we increase it to 125 characters, somebody will just want 175 characters, claiming that 50 more characters will make it even better. and so on. we have to draw the line somewhere and we chose (perhaps arbitrarily, perhaps because it was the default) 85. i think if you can't write a meaningful thread title in 85 characters, you probably can't do it at all. but that's just me

does anybody else want to support 23536's case to increase it?

though somehow their long ass headlines still manage to distort the subject matter their articles cover...

maybe their sensationalist, exaggerated headlines are (part of) why they're so popular? i don't know.

alasdair

 

[Foreigner]

When headlines become useless it's because people don't know how to use key descriptors properly. If you expanded the length of the headline, those same people would still mess it up. I always hover over the vague ones so that the first few lines of the OP are revealed and that usually satisfies my curiosity.

What's the big deal with clicking on a thread only to realize you're not interested? It's not like we're on dialup anymore.

 

[alasdairm]

^ as tommyboy indicated, you don't even have to click and go back. if you mouseover the headline on the forum page, you'll see the first line or two of the post.

alasdair

 

[23536]

Sorry, I should have given a source for those DM claims:

How the Daily Mail stormed the US

The Daily Mail has overtaken the New York Times to become the world's most visited newspaper website, according to online tracking service Comscore.

4. Long, long headlines

News websites long ago got wise to the trick of packing their headlines with common search terms so that they would appear towards the top of the Google rankings.

But MailOnline has taken Search Engine Optimisation to a whole different level. Its headlines are so long they are like mini stories in themselves, says Jakob Neilsen.

One side-effect of this approach is that readers will probably not feel "disappointed" when they click on a story, which may help to build loyalty to the site, he argues.

But Ken Doctor, an expert in the economics of internet news, argues that there is little brand loyalty in a world where people fire stories around the web at their friends on Twitter and Facebook.

"I bet most people don't even know they are reading the Daily Mail or what the Daily Mail is," he says.

Using long headlines packed with celebrity names may attract the passing internet browser but it does not necessarily build name recognition or attract advertising cash.

"They are very proficient at search engine optimisation - they get up high in search rankings - and that will generate great amounts of traffic but it's not producing high amounts of revenue," says Mr Doctor, who last year carried out a study of advertising per unique user at the world's biggest newspaper sites.

A very interesting article, even though it deals with an odious newspaper.

 

[smokemctoke420]

does anybody else want to support 23536's case to increase it?

yeah. ill agree with 23536. it would make a lot less topics get skipped, or you would at least know if you wanted to click it first. its describes what your gonna see in a clearer view IMO and i think there would be a smaller chance of being mislead by the title.

It doesnt matter to me whats done because i only make a thread on occasions, but i figured i would chime in for the fuck of it.

 

[alasdairm]

Sorry, I should have given a source for those DM claims

thanks. it is interesting.

alasdair