It's never been a tech question on keeping the prompts short, it's been an affordance thing. I want to discourage people from writing, well, full and specific prompts, or to spend a lot of time concentrating on the things they hate. I really dislike the way that works out (from both a mod and a participant perspective) on those comms that do signups by commenting on a journal entry.

I'll think about adding something, but I'm probably never going to encourage people to add the sorts of full-bodied, long form discussion that's appropriate for a Dear Sailor letter.

The word counts, though, those I can do.