in reply to Slashdot Style

Yeah, I agree. I was going to post something about this a while back, but the server died or a router puked and I never got around to it.

My thought was to add a User Setting for the max number of characters shown for each node listed on the section indices/home pages. I prefer keeping this sort of control in the hands of the reader; a lot of SOPW posts don't even have descriptive titles, and I'd hate to think what those same posts would have for a "concise" (á la Ozymandias' idea) question.

But then I suppose there could be a problem with closing HTML tags....

Well, at any rate, put me down for "Yes, I would like a way to shorten index listings."

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RE: RE: Slashdot Style
by BBQ (Curate) on Jun 03, 2000 at 23:39 UTC
    Now that you mentioned having a fixed length stipulated by the user's settings... It occured to me that something would have to be done with all of the previous posts (aprox. 16,000?) that are already on the database, in case the descriptive title suggestion were implemented. The lousy thing (in a good way) about our liberty to suggest stuff in PerlMonks is that we know this site is live. I can imagine the nightmares vroom must have every time we come up with an idea like this.

    Changing code? No problem.
    Changing the database schema.. Whoa!

    Even if some work needs to be done in order to allow length, rather than a descriptive field, I'd rather go with length myself.

    Good call!

    #!/home/bbq/bin/perl
    # Trust no1!