Stuffing a great big long question into the topic title is annoying

Meta
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1

It would be better if members did not post that way.:

  • It makes the thread captions too long in the topic listings.

  • And if someone wishes to copy and paste the “issue”, it makes it difficult. As the post body does not contain the “reason for the discussion”.

  • Worse, is that the Discourse forum quote highlighted text feature, does not work on the topic captions. It only works on highlighted post body text.

@jody : It would be good, IMO, (1 vote) if this was added as a “no-no” to the forum guidelines, “Keep It Tidy” section:
http://forums.sketchup.com/guidelines#keep-tidy

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2

I agree with you but I didn’t find a good title that was informative enough ( so it could be a search result ) and short. As I had to choose between the two, I choosed clarity and usefulness over conciseness.

If you add this to the forum guidelines, please add also some examples to help people see how to respect it without lowering the level of valuable information.

But I would advocate against being too strict on this. Naming things correctly is a notorious hard things to do. Maybe give the right to senior members to rephrase the title of someone else post ? And consider it as a help from the community to keep the forum high quality. Not enforced on the original poster, but done as a gentlemen agreement between him/her and a senior member.

3

the max. topic length is regularly configurable in forum software, in used ‘Discourse’ it should be something at:

“Admin > Settings > Posting > max. Topic Title Length”

4

We do. And I could have, but then the body has no meaning. If you had restated the title, I could’ve shortened it.

Usually, I would do something like:
“ToolsObserver#onToolStateChanged(), always 0 with PaintTool”

Meaning it works best (I think,) if we state the class/module then method first, followed by a short modifier.

It is not the worst I’ve seen here. I’ve seen some ppl put a whole paragraph into the topic title field, and nothing but “Please Help!” in the body.

So, don’t feel bad at all. (I’m just picking nits.)

5

Personally I find it more annoying when the thread title is Please Help. Or something equally inane.
You then need to open it to find out if it is something you can help them with.

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6

Good topic all around, I’ve added the following to the FAQ:

  • Don’t create overly long, and meandering topic titles.

I also changed the Max Topic Length to one tweet (140 characters) - thanks @sketch3d_de for making it stupid simple for me to do. (c;

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