Requesting to remove the Subject length limitation

[Cryptohygenic]

What's the size in byte of subject box where title of thread is written in Bitcointalk forum.
So the thread subject box has a capacity of 64 characters=64 bytes.
So the length of the thread subject need to be concise. We can also look out for applicable special characters to minimize the space consumption while giving title to our thread. Atleast that would help in a long run while those in power as Theymos have a review of this summon.
It is actually hectic finding how to put some tense of thread subject to match the body of the thread on a brief character.

[Fivestar4everMVP]

I'm entirely not sure whether it's possible in SMF, but I would like to request theymos and PowerGlove (those with the power) to increase the character limit/size for the subject box. I am aware, for post body it is limited to 65535 bytes / 64k character, however I don't know what's the limit for the post's subject/title.

For English, it isn't a big deal, but for other languages like Bangla, it becomes challenging to fit the complete title in the subject box. My language and some other language takes more character space than English!

I recently translated a topic with the title: [Guide] How to create your customized Bitcoin-Address (vanitygen) – step by step .

As you can see, it's a long title. But when I translate it into Bangla and try to use it as the title, half of it gets cut off and shows random texts. This forces me to shorten the title by removing certain parts.

The original title was supposed to be "[গাইড] কিভাবে কাস্টমাইজড বিটকয়েন এড্রেস তৈরি করবেন (ভ্যানিটিজেন) -  স্টেপ বাই স্টেপ".
But I was forced to make it shorter to "কাস্টমাইজড বিটকয়েন এড্রেস (ভ্যানিটিজেন)".

A very good suggestion when seen or considered from the context and examples you provided.
I personally have thought about this some time in the past when I used to be very active in creating new thread, but I really never took the issue too seriously to want to bring it up here for discussion and possible solution.

I can remember vividly that there have been several occasions where while I am trying to create a perfect title for my thread, I end up with no choice but to look for a way to make it shorter because the limit has been reached and I can't further or else, I will just end up with a shit title, this is with English actually, so now, I try to imagine how stressful it must be when typing in other languages that takes up more spaces like you said.. Title of a thread is everything, as with a very good title, one sometimes may not even have to read the message body to already understand what is being discussed about.

I may not vote for the subject length limitation to be removed completely, but then, a little bit of increase should be fine.
And if it will be possible to allow more subject length in the local boards alone, that also will be very nice.

[DYING_S0UL]

A very good suggestion when seen or considered from the context and examples you provided.
I personally have thought about this some time in the past when I used to be very active in creating new thread, but I really never took the issue too seriously to want to bring it up here for discussion and possible solution.

I can remember vividly that there have been several occasions where while I am trying to create a perfect title for my thread, I end up with no choice but to look for a way to make it shorter because the limit has been reached and I can't further or else, I will just end up with a shit title, this is with English actually, so now, I try to imagine how stressful it must be when typing in other languages that takes up more spaces like you said.. Title of a thread is everything, as with a very good title, one sometimes may not even have to read the message body to already understand what is being discussed about.

I may not vote for the subject length limitation to be removed completely, but then, a little bit of increase should be fine.
And if it will be possible to allow more subject length in the local boards alone, that also will be very nice.

Thank you for taking this matter with more seriousness. Yes, if you take a look at this problem from a local person's perspective, you'll understand the struggle we face when choosing a title! We have to make the title easily understandable, and at the same time we have to adjust it to the limit. Since it's not a global issue but mostly local language related, nobody took this seriously! That is the only reason I can think of.

Every time I made any post or posted any translations, my title was cut off. And every time I had to edit it out, make it short! Like you said, a title is everything, it gives the user concept of the topic without even reading it. But for me, I am not satisfied with the title I was forced to choose!

If you look below, you'll see that the current title that I was forced to use and the meaning of the current title. I doesn't contain any words like "How to, Guide, Tutorial"; it just says "Customized Bitcoin Address (Vanitygen)". And from a user's first look, he'll just think this as a topic related to a custom BTC address, maybe some article, stuff like that. He won't understand that it's a guide to create the vanity address, not before he reads the whole topic.

Code:

কাস্টমাইজড বিটকয়েন এড্রেস (ভ্যানিটিজেন) - Customized Bitcoin Address (Vanitygen)

I would have been satisfied if I could use this title below, but unfortunately i couldn't!

Code:

কিভাবে কাস্টমাইজড বিটকয়েন এড্রেস তৈরি করবেন (ভ্যানিটিজেন) - How to create customized Bitcoin address (Vanitygen)

Note that, I don't complain or blame the current character length limit. Honestly speaking, it is enough, but for the English language only! But local language doesn't count here! 

[NotATether]

The intended title would have been represented like this (approximately; I haven't really rolled up my sleeves and looked into this deeply yet):

Code:

[গাইড] কিভাবে কাস্টমাইজড বিটকয়েন এড্রেস তৈরি করবেন (ভ্যানিটিজেন) -  স্টেপ বাই স্টেপ

And chopping that ~480-byte representation down to 255 bytes is what's behind the title changing from this:

Code:

[গাইড] কিভাবে কাস্টমাইজড বিটকয়েন এড্রেস তৈরি করবেন (ভ্যানিটিজেন) -  স্টেপ বাই স্টেপ

To this (with maybe some extra junk at the end, too, like &#2):

Code:

[গাইড] কিভাবে কাস্টমাইজড বিটকয়েন এড্রেস তৈ

And that result is what forced OP to come up with a title short-enough to survive the truncation:

Code:

কাস্টমাইজড বিটকয়েন এড্রেস (ভ্যানিটিজেন)

(So, long story short, I think if theymos left everything else the same, but changed the column's data type from TINYTEXT to TEXT, and then changed the 255 in that SUBSTRING('$msgOptions[subject]', 1, 255) to something a little roomier, then entity-rich topic titles would stop getting truncated so aggressively. But, like I said, I'm no DBA, and I can't anyway even see, let alone reason about, Bitcointalk's actual database schema, so, only theymos can really estimate if this is worth doing or not.)

Bingo.

I didn't even realize that subjects were being stored as HTML entities. That is quite inefficient. I was under the impression that they were represented as bytes. At the very least, with two bytes for each entity.

Though at this point, the only valid database modification allowed by the DB engine right now would be to just increase the text field's character limit in the DB.

[DYING_S0UL]

The intended title would have been represented like this (approximately; I haven't really rolled up my sleeves and looked into this deeply yet):

Bingo.

I didn't even realize that subjects were being stored as HTML entities. That is quite inefficient. I was under the impression that they were represented as bytes. At the very least, with two bytes for each entity.

Though at this point, the only valid database modification allowed by the DB engine right now would be to just increase the text field's character limit in the DB.

Long story short!

So is it possible to increase the limit slightly? Or it's just extra work, pain in the ass?

[NotATether]

Long story short!

So is it possible to increase the limit slightly? Or it's just extra work, pain in the ass?

Yes, if we fiddle with some PHP and theymos or Cyrus agree to increase the column size in the DB.

[dkbit98]

I wouldn't remove this limitation, I am sure spammers and scammers would abuse this with their crap.
There are some rear cases when longer title is needed, but most of the times I prefer to have shorter and more concise title that draws attention of readers.
You can always post longer title or subtitle inside post, and than write the rest of the content.

[DYING_S0UL]

I wouldn't remove this limitation, I am sure spammers and scammers would abuse this with their crap.
There are some rear cases when longer title is needed, but most of the times I prefer to have shorter and more concise title that draws attention of readers.
You can always post longer title or subtitle inside post, and than write the rest of the content.

I wouldn't say completely remove it or anything, maybe like increase it a little bit, you know what I mean. I am aware there are consequences and some users may abuse this.

Normally nobody needs a longer title. But you see the title of this topic? I'm pretty sure, if i were to post this same title in the local section in my language, it wouldn't fit.

[Aanuoluwatofunmi]

I'm entirely not sure whether it's possible in SMF, but I would like to request theymos and PowerGlove (those with the power) to increase the character limit/size for the subject box. I am aware, for post body it is limited to 65535 bytes / 64k character, however I don't know what's the limit for the post's subject/title.

I am not against this, but what am seeing that should be considered here is about the main point of discussion, which is the subject length extension, which i don't see with much necessity because a title or subject as the case may be should only talk about the content we are about to read or go through, a title shouldn't carry the whole summary of the content, but instead a glance of what the content is all about, which is also expected to serves as the introductory part of what we are having in consideration if extended, do we think it will still make much of sense like that.

[dkbit98]

I wouldn't say completely remove it or anything, maybe like increase it a little bit, you know what I mean. I am aware there are consequences and some users may abuse this.

You see how important correctly written title is?
In your title for this topic you clearly used words remove length limitation.
Making title length longer won't make it better, so better to consider title more as a short teaser.

[Stablexcoin]

I'm entirely not sure whether it's possible in SMF, but I would like to request theymos and PowerGlove (those with the power) to increase the character limit/size for the subject box. I am aware, for post body it is limited to 65535 bytes / 64k character, however I don't know what's the limit for the post's subject/title.

For English, it isn't a big deal, but for other languages like Bangla, it becomes challenging to fit the complete title in the subject box. My language and some other language takes more character space than English!

It's challenging for both English and local language topics. It's not possible to remove the limitation on length for just the local board subject field. It will have to be a general thing.

In the meantime, this is how I go about mine when it becomes too lengthy.  I write the sentence and add .... to the end. Showing there is a continuation. When you start writing in the big text field then you can completely write the subject there in bold letters before writing what you have in mind.

[EarnOnVictor]

I'm entirely not sure whether it's possible in SMF, but I would like to request theymos and PowerGlove (those with the power) to increase the character limit/size for the subject box. I am aware, for post body it is limited to 65535 bytes / 64k character, however I don't know what's the limit for the post's subject/title.

Your concern is valid and I've faced the same issue many times. At the same time, there is what we call a "summary," you can utilize it here. You can write the whole topic's content in a place and summarise it in such a way that contains all the needed details. I do this when the space created doesn't allow me to write the topic as I want and it still makes sense, intriguing and precise. Mind you, they call it a "topic," it shouldn't be an essay or as if you are writing a detailed sentence.

[NotATether]

I wouldn't remove this limitation, I am sure spammers and scammers would abuse this with their crap.
There are some rear cases when longer title is needed, but most of the times I prefer to have shorter and more concise title that draws attention of readers.
You can always post longer title or subtitle inside post, and than write the rest of the content.

Since this really only pertains to local boards, we should increase the limits to 1.5x so that they can have a similar character count to English language topics while not givng spammers too long of a title to work with.

Local languages have about half as much space to work with as English, since this is encoded as UTF-16. In some cases, even less, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16 .

[DYING_S0UL]

I wouldn't remove this limitation, I am sure spammers and scammers would abuse this with their crap.
There are some rear cases when longer title is needed, but most of the times I prefer to have shorter and more concise title that draws attention of readers.
You can always post longer title or subtitle inside post, and than write the rest of the content.

Since this really only pertains to local boards, we should increase the limits to 1.5x so that they can have a similar character count to English language topics while not givng spammers too long of a title to work with.

Local languages have about half as much space to work with as English, since this is encoded as UTF-16. In some cases, even less, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16 .

IMO, rather than implementing this 1.5x increase in local boards, I think it's better if it was added to certain languages. Although I'm not sure whether it's possible or not!

The only reason I am saying this because some of the local languages doesn't have their own boards yet. Like us! So if the increase was added to local boards it wouldn't matter to us. But if the rule could be added to certain UTF encoded characters/languages, then it won't matter whether we have any boards or not. The system would just detect what kind of UTF encoded character a user wrote and apply that 1.5x increase, my two cents opinion....

It's just a theory! I'm not any god level tech expert!