Increase character limit for the title

[GiuliaMattion]

There is a limit to the characters available for the titles in the new StoryMaps platform. This limit was not present in the StoryMaps implemented as Map Journal. Since StoryMaps are very used for scientific purposes and we usually deal with organisms with long and complex names, it will be very useful to delete this title limit or increase the number of available characters. Please see below an example of a StoryMap with this problem, for which I cannot use the full title (which should be "NEW - Pest survey card on Elsinoë australis, E. citricola and E. fawcettii").

We will deal with a lot of other organisms with long names and removing this limitation would really help us providing a correct title for our consumers. 

[AliceDelbianco]

Great idea! Looking forward for this implementation.

[OwenGeo]

Thanks for sharing this idea! The current limits for the title and subtitle were set according to storytelling best practices (short, concise titles are usually better than longer ones) and so they work well for SEO and social metadata (this makes stories more favorable in search engine indexing and helps provide a good experience for readers when you share stories on Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media sites). That said, we understand that there can be special cases where these best practices may not apply or aren't needed.

If we do increase the limit, we'd want to re-review any potential downsides to including longer titles. We'll also need an idea of what we could change the limit to so that it would be helpful in all, or at least most, of the cases you're thinking about.

@GiuliaMattion @AliceDelbianco -- Could you please share some additional examples of titles you'd like to use and let us know what the new upper limit would be to account for the longer titles you would like to use? The title you shared was about 75 characters, is that enough or could they be much longer? Can you also please let us know if and how you share your stories with the public, such as via press releases, social media sites (which ones), etc.?

[PeterKnoop]

Perhaps the current limit could be maintained as a soft-limit, while the hard-limit could be increased to something like 256 or 280 characters? And, if one exceeded the soft limit, a warning could be displayed notifying the user that their title might be problematic for SEO and social metadata?

An author, however, could choose to ignore the warning when they were planning to use their StoryMap for internal documentation, peer-sharing, limited-scope collaborations, etc., or other intended uses for which a long, informative title might be more important than sharing on social media.

[OwenGeo]

@PeterKnoop Yep! A soft limit is an option we've discussed for this and other places where there are limits in place. We just want to make sure that any downsides to exceeding the limit aren't too serious and that we have a plan for putting good messaging in place.

[GiuliaMattion]

Dear @OwenGeo, thanks for your reply!

We use the StoryMaps as scientific outputs and since each one regards a specific organism or a small group, the most important thing to us is provide a title that mirrors the organisms we are going to deal with in the StoryMap. 
We will publish several StoryMaps in the next months and, for the time being, one of the longest titles would be the following: "NEW - Pest survey card on Pissodes cibriani, P. fasciatus, P. nemorensis, P. nitidus, P. punctatus, P. strobi, P. terminalis, P. yunnanensis and P. zitacuarense". This is about 165 characters, but we have many more that ranges from 80 to 140 characters. 

Mainly our StoryMaps are shared via email or during conferences/meetings. We have created a gallery and our audience is aware that we update it once a month with new StoryMaps. 

I think that the suggestion from @PeterKnoop (thank you!) could be a nice solution for the different needs of the StoryMaps users.

I remain available for further questions or clarifications.

[PeterKnoop]

@OwenGeo Great to hear that the concept of soft limits is being considered not just here, but elsewhere. It could be a great approach to keeping things robust and reliable for the most common use cases, while enabling more edge cases, without overly complicating the user experience.

[asiegel_HEC]

It'd be great to have the flexibility to break the character limit when necessary. For example, I'm working on a project where title should be "Washington State Parks Climate Adaptation Implementation Plan", but it gets clipped to "Washington State Parks Climate Adaptation Implementation Pla". So close!

While I can modify to combo with the subtitle, this is not always ideal. Thanks for looking into this!

[Anonymous User]

More control with the logo sizes and Titles to include smaller subtitle text would be nice

If you include a horizontally long logo with the title, it auto reduces really small 

[Christian_Sebaly]

Having more than 140 characters in the subtitle section would make a significant change. Among other things we would like to use story maps to create a digital twin (🙂) of our print products. Those papers include longer subtitles and it is quite important that we can fully include the subtitles provided by the authors. Cutting down statements to 140 characters can be a problem when you write in german since you have a lot of technical terms and scientific expressions that can't be squeezed in the current subtitle section without decreasing the informative value.