I have just installed a hack that won't let people post messages under a set number of characters. That makes my people stop posting one liners. Love it.

Did you install such things?

I've thought about this. But if found that many of my members post good one liners and sometimes a few words can have a lot of knowledge in it.

I agree. Sometimes a couple of words is all that's needed.

I agree. After all if a one line reply is a spam message you can allways delete the post.

Yup (Case in point)

also with some of those forum mods the poster can get away with a couple of characters and just a many spaces to fill the charactes or by .........'s

I think that there is no need for it since as others said that there are some threads where one word explains it all.

I think all it does is aggravate the posters, and does little to clean up the forums.

Well, I am seeing a plus in the posting. Had 2-3 youngsters who liked to post something like "me too" and still posted a lot. Deleting all those messages and telling them yet again they should make better posts was a pain. Since the implementation they found out they do have more words in their vocabulary. I have a notice over the quick reply too, reminding them to post on topic and respect the rules (have the rules link there too). Don't know about others, but my members now put more thought in their messages. Not to mention that the automated warning is less personal and doesn't offend them at all. And it's not the end of the world: 75 characters is 75% of a line of a post (10-15 words) don't think it's quite that hard.

I have the minimum set in vBulletin to ten (10) characters and haven't had any complaints.

Hmm ... 75 characters is a lot for an Internet forum. While your posts might be of a higher quality, have you noticed a decline in new posts per day? It's possible many people might type a quick reply, see it not go through, so just say "the heck with this" and never bother to elaborate on it.