Suggestion: Reduce the character limit on comments

Question

Yes, yes, I know this has probably been suggested many times already in one form or another, but I have different solution; just reduce it. You have no idea how many times I've tried to put in "Thanks!" or "Thank you!", only to get rejected by the character limit and having to do anything from adding a ton of exclamation points, to putting "Thank you very much!" or something, to putting [Filler], and all of those solutions have their problems in one way or another. So I propose scaling down the character limit to at the very least 10 characters, so that we can still avoid spam, but then everyone on here can just put a simple "Thank you!" when someone answers their question, with no workarounds to a character limit.

Comments

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It's no good chief, we can't stretch the word "Thanks" to ten characters without using a juvenile amount of unnecessary exclamation points!

In all seriousness though, I like this idea. Having the limit to prevent spam is a good thing, but having to write [filler] so much is annoying. Or you could make it so that the word "Thanks" bypasses the character limit.

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Yeah, I know "Thanks!" wouldn't fit under this, but you gotta start somewhere, right?

And having Thanks bypass the limit is something I didn't even think of... Good idea!

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People often want to write "no" in comments, so I think a two character limit would be best. Besides, spamming 12-character comments isn't that much harder than spamming 2-character comments.

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I think the point of the character limit is to encourage people not to post just "no". There is a reason you're going to say no, and the character limit encourages people to be more detailed. But I do think 12 characters is a bit long, I agree you should be able to post "thanks" with some punctionation and have it pass. Perhaps the limit doesn't really do much though, if people are more inclined to add filler instead.

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I hate it when  people explain something I didn't know to me and the character limit nullifys "Oh, okay." +1

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Agreed, though I'd advocate to lose it completely. Nobody is trying to spam this site and low effort comments can use filler characters to get past it easily.

Answer 1

The minimum comment length is currently 6 characters. Don’t remember if/when I changed it but there you go.

I think 6 is a good number. It at least allows you to write “thanks”. The minimum was intended to avoid pointless off-topic stuff, but you can write nonsense in any amount of letters ;)