A Suggestion to Avoid Spam Posts

Speaking from personal experience from another forum I refuse to mention unless needed(Nothing explicit), I suggest that we have a character minimum limit on the forums, preferably a 20 character minimum limit. There's no need to have a limit for the Forum Games, just the rest of the forums.

 

If any kind of character minimum were to be imposed, it'd have to be far more than 20. Any old fool could bust out a 20-character sentience in a matter of seconds. In fact, here's one that I've seen a lot of newbies use:

"This is a good hack!"

Literally 5 words, and it tallies up to 20 characters in total. Character limits, in general, aren't very hard to surpass, unless you've got it set super high. I doubt implementing a minimum will do the forums any good.

 

Character limits are a bad idea, they do more harm than good.

 

The average sentence length ranges from 10 to 15 words.
According to a study done by the American Press Institute, when sentences have 8 or less words, their readers understood 100% of the information. With 9 to 14 words, 90% of the information was still able to be understood.
Taking into consideration the average range of a sentence, the simplicity of forum posts, and the fact that in the English language that the average word clocks in at about 5.1 letters, we can expect the average coherent English sentence to contain about 60 to 92 characters (including spaces).

I think if there was to be a limit imposed, it should be around 10 or so characters. Something so minuscule and ridiculous that no normal post would come close to it. On the other side of the coin, however, I've never seen a user go on a spam attack on these forums before, so the limit would be pretty pointless.

 

You're right about the far more than 20 part. And really, I'm giving this suggestion just to avoid spam posts. I'll leave it up to the staff if they want it or not, and if so suggest or set their own limits.

 

5char

There are times where it's appropriate to have one-liners. Blocking this won't help anyone, and a generally brainless person won't be stopped from doing equally dumb stuff. This idea just sounds way better on paper than in execution.

 

While this sounds like a good theory on paper, as Selbi said, there are scenarios where a post of less than 20 characters are actually used, so I doubt this will be happening any time soon. While we appreciate your feedback and concern regarding 'spam posts', I would also like to point out that the majority of these posts are made by trialists who don't make it as a member, and instead are sent to Limbo, or extreme cases, Exile. If these trialists insist on wasting their posts, then they will suffer the consequences.

I would also like to point out that the recent issue is not with spam posts, but rather new trialists who insist on ignoring the rules. Thanks for your comment, though.

 

Your welcome. Guess we have no further need for this thread then.