csearle wrote:Oh for heaven's sakes peeps! The title of a post should be entirely down to the poster. If the poster wants it to be informative then all well and good. If the poster wants it to be cryptic for comic effect then all is ok. If the poster wants it to be so cryptic that you have to read the post to understand the title then that is surely his, her, or its choice.
If you as a reader don't understand the title and are curious then read the post.
If you as a reader don't understand the title and are annoyed that you haven't received a precis then don't read it.
And if you as a reader consider that the title isn't "respectful, understanding and helpful to other posters",
report it for breaking that site rule (rather than posting ineffective complaints that will simply act as a distraction from discussion of the thread's actual subject, whatever it is...). Just as you should if the title breaks other site rules, such as being defamatory or hate speech.
From which people may correctly deduce that I do not agree with csearle's IMHO over-categorical "
entirely down to the poster" statement - the site rules must prevail over the poster's choice if they come into conflict.
On the other hand, while obscure post titles can easily be regarded as "unhelpful" to other users, a post clearly has to exceed some sort of threshold of unhelpfulness to be regarded as in breach of that rule - otherwise (for example) a post replying about some aspect of tax rules that gave generally good information but omitted to mention an obscure special case could be deemed "unhelpful" because of that omission. But I can certainly imagine post titles that I would hope would be far too "unhelpful" to be allowed to remain - for instance, a post with the title "Biscuit recipe suitable for nut allergy sufferers" which used a non-obviously nut-containing ingredient...
Whether merely being obscure or cryptic can become bad enough to exceed that threshold, I don't know. Being cryptic for comic effect is one thing, the unhelpfulness being redeemed by the comic effect; being cryptic just to inconvenience people (making them read the post to find out that they're not interested in it when a more considerately-chosen title would have saved them the effort) does strike me as a case of being unhelpful without any real redeeming features.
Finally, one not entirely serious suggestion I might make is that there is a form of poetic justice that could be employed against uninformatively-titled posts: take the title at its word! If e.g. someone posts under the title "It just won't go away, will it?", as mentioned in the OP, reply about how Covid just won't go away, about how Brexit-induced problems in Northern Ireland just won't go away, about how the climate crisis just won't go away, about how the nasty smell in the council loos just won't go away, etc, etc, etc. I reckon posters subjected to that treatment would soon learn to make their post titles more informative about what the posts are about... ;
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Gengulphus