kkinnell - I note your point about version/artifact ID. I'll try to use the right designation in future.

To clarify I'm requesting to control the shorthand length artifact IDs displayed as links on the webpage rather than the stored artifact IDs (40 chars).

i.e the [263b45306c] rather than the

If a minimum of 4 chars is required, so be it. 4 chars is easier on the eye than 10 chars.

One of the implementation issues I can foresee is the likelihood of ambiguity in fossil as the number of characters displayed is reduced. I believe it would be satisfactory when fossil comes across an ambiguity situation it just returns an error stated a message to that effect on the cli and on the website suggest changing the configuration to increase the number of chars display.