I've noticed there's been an increased (or at least noticable), number of calls to add "readmore" tags to posts, recently. My feeling is that this is because people who like to view the frontpage, or the individual sections pages, like to be able to skip through the nodes presented, looking for the interesting ones (to them!), and thus do not necessarily really want to read huge long nodes, or have to search for the beginning of the next one.

Given this, I just had an idea. I think it may have been suggested before, in other forms. To wit, the node creation form at the bottom of each section (and thus also the root node edit page), should have a second text area, in which the question poser can write a synopsis of their question/post, which is the part that will get shown on the section/frontpage pages. This should not be a compulsory field, if left empty, then the actual node is shown as usual.

A second way to approach this would be to only show at most XX lines of each node on the section pages (not settable in user settings, else we cannot cache?), or up until the first double newline/p tag after the first XX lines.

Thinking about it some more, if people already have difficulty thinking up good titles, how can we expect them to summarise their posts as well? Maybe the second approach is better.

I prefer to use Newest Nodes and/or Recently Active Threads, so I cant claim that I understand the minds of the people who prefer the frontpage, yet want readmore tags everywhere, I hope someone will step up and confirm/deny my suspicions.

My motives? Less work for janitors, again, it would be preferable to /msg the author of long posts with suggestions for readmore tags, than consider. Making an autosynopsis or similar would probably remove the need for most of them completely..

C.

In reply to Synopsis field in node creation form? by castaway

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