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There is a minimum amount of characters one can comment in each comment.
That is obviously to discourage short unnecessary conversational remarks.

But if a user name is long enough, we can comment anything to that user.
Should there be a fixed number of characters the system will assume how long user names are in the comments,
so things can be more consistent and fair?

Like if a user has only 3 characters for a name,
users who want to address that user will have to write longer than necessary comments,
while users with 14 characters or more can get blank comments.

This did not answer my question: Why do I keep getting told I posted less than 15 characters when I posted more than 15? because I don't get my comments auto-stripped.

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  • @SonictheMaskedWerehog Gee, we aren't able to flag questions a duplicate to another unanswered one, at least when I tried, i couldn't.
    – Red
    Jul 10, 2020 at 2:32
  • It's allowed on meta sites. It's a known issue that unanswered questions don't show in the search options in the dialog, but you can search for and paste links to them separately.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Jul 10, 2020 at 2:35

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Should there be a fixed number of characters the system will assume how long user names are in the comments, so things can be more consistent and fair?

I don't see how either consistency or fair can be an argument here. The burden of writing a useful comment that can be understood by the receiver as well as visitors of post is on the commentor.

I doubt many really useful comments take less then 15 chars.

If the abuse vector for "empty" comments is a concern then username length isn't a factor either. You can happily stuff unicode characters in a comment to confuse readers and if you add an @-reply so does the receiver of the inbox-notification. Use this too often and you annoy enough users with this, you'll be contacted by a moderator.

Analyzing the comment length and their frequency gives us this graph:

enter image description here

I want to read from this graph that the majority of the comments are more then 50 characters in length. A DisplayName is 40 characters at most. Based on this data and the magnitude of the perceived problem I don't think the system or the way we handle short comments with @-replies need to be adjusted. There isn't enough evidence to support that.

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  • The zero-width space loophole was closed years ago.
    – Asteroids With Wings
    Jun 30, 2020 at 17:49
  • @AsteroidsWithWings hmm, I must have missed that memo.
    – rene
    Jun 30, 2020 at 17:53
  • Shog was pretty tactical about it.
    – Asteroids With Wings
    Jun 30, 2020 at 17:58
  • You are rigt about that @AsteroidsWithWings, just tested that. Discovered a minor usability bug though
    – Luuklag
    Jun 30, 2020 at 18:27
  • And reported said bug here
    – Luuklag
    Jun 30, 2020 at 18:53

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