I start my first sentence in the Subject field and let it (Destiny)

by Claude Errera , Thursday, July 30, 2015, 17:42 (3192 days ago) @ scarab

overflow into the Message body.

But if the forum software did it automatically then the goodness would just happen. I wouldn't need to touch the subject field.

How I imagine it would work is...

user clicks Post reply

reply page loads with original subject in subject field

user does his stuff and clicks OK - Submit

back on the server the PHP code checks the contents of the subject field.

if it has changed from what was sent to the reply page then it uses that as the subject

if not then it tries to get the first non-comment sentence

if found then it is trimmed to size and used as the subject

I image that the first non-comment sentence is the first non-empty line that doesn't start with the angle character

This sounds complicated, with tons of room for comical (and maybe not so comical) mistakes, and huge potential for annoyance from people looking to be clever. :)

It also changes the behavior of the forum for EVERYONE, not just the people who think this style would be cool - with no way to override it.

Overall, I think it's a cool idea, but implementation brings with it too many issues to make it feasible. :(