Reduced engagement due to Article type
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NodeBB federates out
NoteorArticledepending on the length of the content. While this by-and-large works, the article logic does not encourage as much discussion as expected because asummaryis generated so as to provide something for microblog-style software to show (otherwise, it would only show the title (name) and a URL to the forum.)That summary is limited to a maximum or 500 characters, ending at the last full detected sentence. [...]
When composing a long topic, 500 characters may not be enough to fully introduce the topic and engage users. This lowers click-through rates.
N.B. Note the above, where I manually added a
[...]because that is where NodeBB would cut content short. When only those 500 characters are read, it's not the best introduction to this topic.I expressed my frustration about this online to @thisismissem and suggested that I might just revert back to sending the entire post content in
summary. This would violate FEP b2b8's recommendation that summary be a maximum of 500 characters:> It should be a maximum of about 500 characters; a few sentences; or a short paragraph.
After consultation with Matt Baer of Writefreely (@matt@writing.exchange), he suggested the following changes:
- Append a
[...]at the end of the truncated content to signal that there is additional content that is not seen - Allow the use of a magic string (like an HTML comment: ``) that would allow power users to manually select where the summary should end. This would still allow for summaries over 500 characters.
That seems like a good compromise for me, where concerns from power users like myself would be addressed, while not overly complicating the interface for users who do not need to know about this.
Pinging @evan ([@evan@cosocial.ca](https://activitypub.space/user/evan%40cosocial.ca)) for his thoughts.
- Append a
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NodeBB federates out
NoteorArticledepending on the length of the content. While this by-and-large works, the article logic does not encourage as much discussion as expected because asummaryis generated so as to provide something for microblog-style software to show (otherwise, it would only show the title (name) and a URL to the forum.)That summary is limited to a maximum or 500 characters, ending at the last full detected sentence. [...]
When composing a long topic, 500 characters may not be enough to fully introduce the topic and engage users. This lowers click-through rates.
N.B. Note the above, where I manually added a
[...]because that is where NodeBB would cut content short. When only those 500 characters are read, it's not the best introduction to this topic.I expressed my frustration about this online to @thisismissem and suggested that I might just revert back to sending the entire post content in
summary. This would violate FEP b2b8's recommendation that summary be a maximum of 500 characters:> It should be a maximum of about 500 characters; a few sentences; or a short paragraph.
After consultation with Matt Baer of Writefreely (@matt@writing.exchange), he suggested the following changes:
- Append a
[...]at the end of the truncated content to signal that there is additional content that is not seen - Allow the use of a magic string (like an HTML comment: ``) that would allow power users to manually select where the summary should end. This would still allow for summaries over 500 characters.
That seems like a good compromise for me, where concerns from power users like myself would be addressed, while not overly complicating the interface for users who do not need to know about this.
Pinging @evan ([@evan@cosocial.ca](https://activitypub.space/user/evan%40cosocial.ca)) for his thoughts.
@julian So, there are a few ways to handle this.
First, the b2b8 recommendation on the summary is just a guideline, not a strict requirement (thus the 'about'). A common practice in news-style text is that the first paragraph is a lede that summarizes the article's main points.
- Append a
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@julian So, there are a few ways to handle this.
First, the b2b8 recommendation on the summary is just a guideline, not a strict requirement (thus the 'about'). A common practice in news-style text is that the first paragraph is a lede that summarizes the article's main points.
For example, in this article, "Lawrence Summers Will Resign From Harvard After Epstein Revelations" (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/us/larry-summers-resignation-harvard-epstein.html), the first paragraph is:
> Lawrence H. Summers, a Harvard University economist and the school’s former president, will resign from teaching at the end of the academic year, according to a Harvard spokesman.
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For example, in this article, "Lawrence Summers Will Resign From Harvard After Epstein Revelations" (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/us/larry-summers-resignation-harvard-epstein.html), the first paragraph is:
> Lawrence H. Summers, a Harvard University economist and the school’s former president, will resign from teaching at the end of the academic year, according to a Harvard spokesman.
Some bloggers follow a similar practice, especially since blogging software often uses the first paragraph as the summary in RSS and Atom feeds.
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Some bloggers follow a similar practice, especially since blogging software often uses the first paragraph as the summary in RSS and Atom feeds.
For generating a summary for long-form text, I'd suggest these techniques in rough order:
- Let the user to define a summary manually - either with a marker in the text, or with a separate input element
- Use the whole text if it meets the rough guidelines (~1 paragraph, a few sentences, about 500 chars) in b2b8.
- Use the first paragraph if it meets the rough guidelines (a few sentences, about 500 chars) in b2b8.
- Truncate the first paragraph and include an ellipsis ([...]).
