This is one of those things that I really didn't put much stock into until I saw this award-winning question posted...


... and yes the question itself contains as many words as the title. It would make Yahoo! Answers proud. I am all about short, sweet and to the point but that is absolutely ridiculous that we actually allow 6 word questions to be posted.

We already have a minimum character feature for comments, so why not a minimum word feature for posting a question or answer? If you agree, what should the limit be?

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    I'm very interested in finding out who up voted the question in question. Do speak up, if you dare... – yannis Jul 13 '12 at 11:20
  • @YannisRizos I don't know but now that you mention it, I want to upvote it sarcastically – maple_shaft Jul 13 '12 at 11:39
  • Damn, and I can't suspend you! (btw don't upvote, it just got to -5, which means it dropped off the homepage, one upvote and it's back) – yannis Jul 13 '12 at 11:40

There already is a 30 character limit on answers. I would suspect that this limit also applies to questions (and if it doesn't, it's probably a bug). Given how he added spaces, it looks like that question body is exactly 30 characters.

Perhaps a word count would be better than a character count - split on whitespace, disregard "words" that contain only non-alphanumeric content (as long as there is at least one letter or number, consider the element a word). A good question would probably need to contain at least a handful of sentences, so perhaps a 30-50 word count would make for a good body?

  • Perhaps not a word count (a bit too complicated for something that needs to be very fast?), but the character limit could ignore whitespace. The space before the question mark looks like OP was trying to get to exactly 30 characters, good catch. – yannis Jul 13 '12 at 11:27
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    @YannisRizos Maybe in PHP is a word count a bit too complicated or slow, but I could do this blazingly fast in Java ;-) – maple_shaft Jul 13 '12 at 11:41
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    @maple_shaft sigh, it's a front end check in JS... – yannis Jul 13 '12 at 11:43

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