Concise topic titles!

[Simon]

Good topic titles

Topic titles are extremely important. Cut all fluff! Or replace it with meaningful information. Here are some worrisome topic titles, along with suggestions for improvement.

The X topic
X

My X topic
X
username tries X

X doesn't work
X fails to Y

X on my computer
X on Windows 10

The NEW X!
X
X version 2.3.45
X revamped for 2016
X is now hosted by Y

Observe how it's always correct to start the topic title with the most important word.

That's how we arrive at this suggestion:

[BUG] [PLAYER] X does Y, expected Z
X does Y, expected Z [bug] [player]

But I don't feel as strongly about changes in such a standard.

Don't name stuff "new"

The example The NEW X! is particularly bad, because it outdates quicker than you think. Your postings are visible for the years to come. When has it been new? If you feel it's so important that it's new, add a date. The year alone is enough!

Files should never have "new" in their name.  When you have mystuff.xyz and you begin producing backup/mystuff-new-backup-2.xyz -- immediately download git. Use dates or version control.

Backing up is to ensure access to a recent version, protecting against unwanted data loss.
Version control is to ensure access to an old version, protecting against wanted changes.

-- Simon

[ccexplore]

Agree......but I'm hard-pressed to find a single recent example of bad topic titles on this forum.  And the one obvious example I could find, even the author himself acknowledged immediately in first post that the title is non-descriptive.

That's how we arrive at this suggestion:

[BUG] [PLAYER] X does Y, expected Z
X does Y, expected Z [bug] [player]

But I don't feel as strongly about changes in such a standard.

Ideally tags (ie. "[xxx]") should not need to live in titles at all, though in the case of forum threads here, I guess it has no other place to live in.  It is interesting though that for some reason, generally speaking, when tags need to live in titles there does seem to be a tendency to live in the start rather than the end, even though functionally it probably should live in the end (typically it's used for purposes of search/query filtering, and for that purpose it usually makes no difference whether it's in the start versus the end, whereas the actual topic title would prefer to be at the start).

[Proxima]

I suppose not many people do this now that we have the enlarged "Recently Updated Topics", but if you click on the board link to view the NeoLemmix Bugs & Suggestions board, the tags line up neatly along the left of the page and make it easy to glance down the list and pick out which ones are bugs, which suggestions, and so forth.

[Simon]

Yeah, we have good topic titles often. Authors are aware.

The rant was prompted by the IRC bot relaying "NL doesn't work on my computer [Simon]". Clam wondered if it was my machine, or if I had replied to someone else. geoo suggested that I collect my rants in a new topic, "My new topic where I post my new rants that I have typed on my new computer."

Ordering of fields in namida's list: namida has to look at the list more than anyone, and he wanted the list with tags in front, so it's okay. Right, a forum isn't a featured bug tracker. It's best for NL, because the NL users all are LF posters and don't have to register anywhere else.

-- Simon

[namida]

The tags position makes no different to an automated search feature, but having them at the start is much simpler for a human reading them (or at least, for a namida reading them).

[mobius]

can I have a namida this year for Christmas? please?

[Simon]

Confi!
Level!
Rem!



-- Simon

[Simon]

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And split into own thread, because important. (= I'm annoyed.)

-- Simon

[Ramon]

I find this hilarious. But I'm also curious, do you really use e-mail subscriptions to check for new posts in threads?

[Simon]

It's a news feed client. Lemmings Forums has a news feed, which the program queries every hour or so. I get a list of all the unread posts, very nice after sleeping.

I gather a few more feeds than only the Lemmings Forums feed, but I'm vain and have erased them from the screenshot. They're other forums, blogs, and my email account.

But title bloat hits even people without feeds. Do you use a tabbing browser? Do you have a taskbar?



-- Simon

[Ramon]

I do support having concise topic titles, but I don't mind if the topics don't. After all, there's really only a few topics I'm interested in, and I just come browse LF when I have the time to see if anything new has been posted. I never use newsfeeds or subscriptions of any kind.