Reduced engagement due to Article type

NodeBB federates out Note or Article depending on the length of the content. While this by-and-large works, the article logic does not encourage as much discussion as expected because a summary is 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.

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: <!-- break -->) 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" aria-label="Profile: evan@cosocial.ca">@evan@cosocial.ca) for his thoughts.