New feature: automatic post truncation
Good news, everyone!
As authors on this site, you no longer need to be diligent about breaking your posts out among the misleadingly-named “body” and “extended” tabs of the new-entry screen. From now on, the front page will automatically truncate posts at a certain length, whether or not you thought to designate a section to place above the jump.
As readers, some of you have complained of unwittingly uncooperative authors in the past. You can now rest easy – this irritation is forever banished to history, and the front page will henceforth always be easily scannable.
Either way, you can now relax and enjoy your stay a little better.
PS.: the logic places the threshold at 225 words, but the exact cut-off point depends on your markup.
Waxing philosophical
Finally, thanks!
This is great news - thank you!
Thank you!
Thank you for taking the time to do this.
Thank you very much too
(Note: it’s Aaron y’all should thank, not me – my contribution is limited to announcing it.)
Bugreport: I published a post just now, and I used the abstract/body split myself. The site did not honor my formatting, even though the abstract was no longer than the announcement in Aristotle's post.
Cheers
Peter: the logic places the threshold at 225 words, but the exact cut-off point depends on your markup. (I’ve added a note to the effect to the post.) This announcement weighs in at just 131 words (by the code’s method of counting words), and they’re split over several paragraphs. By the same method of counting, your first two paragraphs alone came to 228 words, therefore the second was subject to truncation.
Would it not be more sensible to honor a split provided by the author, and only fall back to autosplitting if the "extended" section is empty?
If authors who use this facility are always as sensible as you are, sure…
We honour a split provided by the author, but only as long as the non-extended part still falls within the hard limit. My reasoning for that was to avoid any problems in the face of a long piece with an unbalanced split — if a 1000-word post is split 900–100, and we always honoured the author’s split where present, we’d still end up with more text on the front page than would be ideal.
I should also clarify that the precise rules aren’t set in stone yet; we’re aiming to collect a little more field experience with the new system before deciding whether to change the way things work. It’s a little unfortunate that your post was just fractionally too long for our current rules.
I understand that there are "two right answers" in this case, so do what you think it's best. Just one last idea for the problem of "900-100" split - simply add a rule of at least 40%/60% split if body and extended are both populated. Perhaps also raise the hard limit to 500 words.
Cheers!