Length limit for question titles that have nothing to do with Unicorns (we don't really need that many characters just for the title, do we? Isn't that what the question body is for? Some lower length limit would help here. Seriously.)

Question

See e.g. revision 1 here - 195 characters. I think the limit should be lowered.

Points in case:

• see revision 1
• see revision 1

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Some data from the last dump - out of 590,635 question titles the counts for certain minimum title lengths are shown (maximum length is 250):

  min length |  # questions (of 590635)
-------------+--------------
        200  |    13
        190  |    29
        180  |    53
        170  |   106
        160  |   196
        150  |   387
        140  |   686
        130  |  1332

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Excerpt featuring those with length >= 200:

250: I'm trying to build the first program in Aaron Hillegass's  book: Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (3rd Edition) The problem I'm having is that I can't my Interface object to "spawn" for lack of a bette term unless I build and run the program. He   
225: Error externally testing WCF UDP Custom Transport Channel sample from the Windows SDK using WcfTestClient - What role does ITransportPolicyImport play in TransportBindingElement derivations such as TcpTransportBindingElement?  
219: What factors could cause the following SqlException: A transport-level error has occurred when receiving results from the server. (provider: Shared Memory Provider, error: 1 - I/O Error detected in read/write operation)  
217: asp.net error "tt is an error to use a section registered as allowDefinition='MachineToApplication' beyond application level.  This error can be caused by a virtual directory not being configured as an application..."  
215: Cannot convert string 'RenderTransform.(TranslateTransform.X)' in attribute 'TargetProperty' to object of type 'System.Windows.PropertyPath'. Property path is not valid. Cannot resolve type name 'TranslateTransform'  
213: How to Solve Intermittent error with Reporting Services: "This report requires a default or user-defined value for the report parameter '*'. To run or subscribe to this report, you must provide a parameter value."  
209: The message received from the server could not be parsed. Common causes for this error are when the response is modified by calls to Response.Write(), response filters, HttpModules, or server trace is enabled.  
208: What is a way to do a Generic Repository with Entity Framework 4.0 where I have function imports?  (I don't want just a generic "execute" function where I pass in strings for the function name and parameters)  
208: C# error1:The name 'DateTimeStyles' does not exist in the current context ..... error2:The type or namespace name 'CultureInfo' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)  
207: SQL CLR - Load assembly fails with error - Could not load file or assembly 'X, Version=1.0.3715.19636, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. Failed to grant permission to execute.  
206: In procedure to vb ,access the temp table values  from then procedure is worked in sql  & vb but the result set does not access and displayed the error that operation is not alloed when the object is closed  
205: What would be a good starting point for development of a 3D application for representation of structural elements and analysis (in structural engineering) with the least amount of reinvention of the wheel?  
202: Taking this strategy while developing .net win-based application : "get a new connection object, use it, close and dispose it each time you need", How to handle connection string within the application?  
200: .Net MVC - Restful URL's - The specified path, file name, or both are too long. The fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters, and the directory name must be less than 248 characters.  

Even those that are error-messages could easily be shortened by stripping out useless parts, the rest are just prose instead of titles.
(Interesting side-note: There aren't any Objective-C/Cocoa identifiers in the excerpted titles ;)

I personally can't see any additional value in the questions with lengths >=180. All those question are either

• the aforementioned prose
• containing unneccessary parts like paths on the users machine
• just informative notes in error messages.

I didn't really look yet below 180, but a rough scan leads me to believe that quality drops greatly when question lengths exceed about 140.

Answer 1

I'd need to analyze existing question title length to get a sense of what the maximum length should be. Suggestion of "one line". This of course varies per font and characters used, but for this post it is:

Length limit for question titles that have nothing to do with Unicorns (we don’t really

which is 89 characters.

Are there any good examples of very long titles that aren't abusive and/or wrong?

edit: I agree with the data presented here. When people enter > 150 characters in title, the odds of it being egregiously wrong are … high. The new question title length limit has been reduced from 250 characters to 150 characters.

Answer 2

Extremely long titles can be edited down to size. I don't think it's that big of an issue.

Extremely short titles can be considerably more difficult to flesh out however. "Java problem" doesn't really give us much to go on...

Answer 3

In a way, if you reduce it a lot, you will have a case of people complaining they can't write their long exception/class name in it. And you will end with more "generic" titles.

If a title is really so long that it's disturbing everyone, I think any 2000+ rep user will edit it to make it shorter. No need to limit what the community can moderate by itself, in a way.

Answer 4

The existing mechanism of allowing long titles but encouraging people to use shorter titles is probably the best solution. A technological solution, in the form of a shorter hard limit, will just produce more stupidity than it prevents.