Meanwhile items without titles aren't terribly useful

[strugee]

Problem: Meanwhile often contains things with descriptions like:

alex posted a note.

This isn't very useful, especially when the description is about a reply, e.g.:

alex posted a comment in reply to a note.

It says almost nothing interesting. If it didn't have links, it'd be a useless part of the interface and we'd probably get rid of it.

Instead of simply saying "a note," I propose we add a part of the note text into the description. For example:

alex posted a note ("Hello, world!")

The additional content would be wrapped in a <q> tag so it was semantically correct, and italicized via style=. Also, we'd truncate longer notes to something reasonable, so that e.g.:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

would become:

alex posted a note ("Lorem ipsum dolor...")

Thoughts?

[clacke]

Yes. Absolutely. And exactly like that.

[jankusanagi]

Do you mean adding that to the web interface representation of the minor feeds, or to the actual activity descriptions?

I ask because anyone creating a client can make their client show nicer stuff, extracting from the object itself, but currently the webUI doesn't do such a thing. That's why I often ask people to title their posts, since that makes the minor feeds on the webUI, or other "limited" clients, much nicer for everyone. So affecting only the webUI's display would probably be enough.

Also, there's a privacy matter to keep in mind. If I post something and later get embarrassed by it, I can delete the post, but the old references to it in the minor feeds, if any, will still be there. If I post something with an embarrassing title, and someone posts a comment to it, and then I delete the post, the "ThatSomeone posted a comment in reply to EMBARRASSING TOPIC" will still be there. Currently, you control how "embarrassing" the title is.

What happens when there is no title and the first words of the "embarrassing" post are used here?