What's the max length of a title for sync?

adamsmith

The context for this is that I'm thinking about Mastodon import. For Twitter, we do import the whole text, but Mastodon instances most commonly allow messages up to 500 chars and some have even higher limits, so that might get a bit long.

Also interested if anyone has more general thought about how to handle this (i.e. what's the "title" of a Mastodon post. Even for Twitter, full message became a bit lengthy since the switch to 280 chars.

dstillman

500 or even higher is fine. (No guarantee of a particular length, but synced fields can currently be much bigger than that, because we try to avoid the too-long error unless absolutely necessary.)

bwiernik

The APA manual says to cite up to 20 words of a social media post. That seems like a reasonable upper limit for import (still too long IMO)

adamsmith

Oh, I like that, I'll see if I can do that -- do ellipses at the end for shortened posts?

bwiernik

APA manually doesn’t have one, but I think it would be better to include one

dstillman

For the Twitter translator, we add the full tweet to Abstract if the title is modified (e.g., because we stripped newlines) or if it's a quote tweet. Could do something similar here.

Rintze

The Twitter and Mastodon translators currently behave rather inconsistently when creating Forum Posts:

* The Twitter translator doesn't truncate the contents for the "Title" field based on length, and never populates the "Abstract" field. It only creates a note if the tweet contained newlines or if it was a quote tweet. The current limit for free Twitter posts is 280 characters.
* The Mastodon translator truncates the contents for the "Title" field if the title is 140 characters or higher, and only populates the "Abstract" field if the "Title" field has truncated post contents. The current limit for Mastodon posts is 500 characters.

Would it be acceptable to truncate titles for both platforms (and for Bluesky, which has a 300 character limit, once that platform has a translator), and always populate the "Abstract" field with the full post regardless of whether the "Title" field contains the full post or not, and stop creating notes in the Twitter translator?