Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-4738647-20130406114842/@comment-770155-20130406130311

You could ofcourse truncate things. But the easy methods will most likely cut off halfway a word. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember creating a sentence parser myself over a year ago, and from my experience, there are no magic words that can detect a non-breaking space character (nbsp). This is because the magic words use the nbsp as empty string substitute. If you don't mind losing half a word, you can of course go ahead with truncating. But keep in mind any templates such as infoboxes can get copied as well.

Another thing you should consider doing is substituting by using. Since your mainpage will generate a lot of traffic, substituting avoids relatively longer loading times as it saves you the template calls.