Does the forum auto-capitalise the first letter of topic headings?

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I recently created my IFComp review thread, which I uncreatively titled “iaraya’s IFComp 2025 reviews”. Upon posting I noticed that the title has been automatically changed to Iaraya’s with a capital I, which just looks weird to me. I tried editing it back to lower case but it did not work.

Is it possible to override this and start a topic title with a lowercase letter? I know this is a very minor quibble (and I can always reword it to “IFComp review by iaraya” or something), but I got curious, is this a quirk of Discourse? Are there other formatting rules that get automatically applied?

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I know that if you use more than three dots in an ellipsis, it only shows three. I think it converts them to a single Unicode character. Here be six dots…

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I tried to edit your topic title with a character that looks exactly like the Latin “i” but is internally different (I think it’s a Cyrillic letter?)

So far it seems like it’s sticking!

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Oh thank you, especially for the creative solution!

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That’s fun. I know there’s debates on whether an ellipsis can end a sentence on its own, or if one should still add a period afterwards… For a total of 4 dots at the end of a sentence. I suppose Discourse has decided their stance.

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Just noting that substituting non-latin characters for latin characters tends to make it hard for screenreader users (which we have a few of in the forum). I don’t use screenreaders in general but a quick check with TalkBack (the Samsung mobile screenreader) reads this Cyrillic replacement as “araya” not “iaraya” while the normal spelling reads properly.

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How bizarre! Unlike with other “cleanup” things Discord does (like removing excessive quotes), the capitalization doesn’t even leave a revision in the edit history, so you can’t revert the changes. And I confirmed that even moderators can’t override it.

There’s probably some setting in the control panel where we can adjust this. I’ll see if I can find it.

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Okay, I’ve tentatively turned off the setting to “Prevent common title typos and errors, including all caps, lowercase first character, multiple ! and ?, extra . at end, etc.” We’ll see if this has any major ramifications, but we have plenty of high-trust users who can fix all-caps titles if they happen.

It’ll still remove whitespace before a final punctuation mark, and convert -- to — and ... to … and so on, but if those cause problems they can be adjusted too.

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For the record, Talkback is part of Android, not something Samsung adds on top of Android.

But yeah, on my end, Orca(Linux’s graphical screen reader) reads it as Cyrillic letter followed by what I assume to be its hexadecimal unicode index, at least when using espeak-ng as the speech synth… and I assumed it was just a Russian(or another language that uses the Cyrillic alphabet) language topic and skipped by it without letting Orca read the full thread title… after all, it’s not like there haven’t been other presumably non-English threads on this forum(I’m pretty sure I’ve encountered at least one romance language), and I’m kind of numb to non-latin(and even some of the stranger accents and font variants built into even latin characters) character sets not being handled well by my accessibility stack at this point.

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Oh, that’s super good to know, thanks for the information! (And sorry!)

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There are Discusión en español (Spanish) and Discussion en français (French) categories but other languages aren’t represented here, at least in my experience. In any case, I believe you can mute them.

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Is this setting asserting that using multiple exclamation or question marks is an “error”?

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It is indeed. Which, to be fair, I think most style guides would agree on, same as lowercase first letters.

How much we need to stick to style guides when writing internet posts instead of articles for the New York Times is a separate question.

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Usually, you see !!! or ! but not !! (or lots like !!!!!!) so Discourse probably replaced !! with !.

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I believe the setting is to prevent topic titles like ZOMG!!!!!!!! i have a question................

Discourse uses the topic title as part of the URL to link to it, so I think it’s intended to reduce clutter.

I did notice while composing this message without the code-block formatting it replaces multiple exclamation points and periods to maximum of three. Without code blocks the above autocorrects to

ZOMG!!! i have a question…

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