Yeah... like giving you an example, myself...

But seriously. I believe until taught otherwise, that you can modify those great topics like

• Help
• a problem
• Need a hint
• ... etc.

in a way which could render them more useful for someone who browses any forum on LQ. Would it mean much work to do this occasionally or whenever you stumble over such a thread?

Sorry, nay.

It is the responsibility of the OP to think about a title. Most "help me"'s are from new members, posting 1 or 2 times. Of you look at those "help me"'s you'll see that these questions are invariably by people who are too lazy to do anything, try anything, look up anything, provide any information or think about formulating the question correctly. Most questions are one-liners and should have put into Google.

I know that LQ is a place where such members are pampered to death, and often such posts attract 10 or 20 answers from member waisting their time in guessing what the missing information is.

Usually the OP does not bother to come back here, update or reply. So I don't even see the need of the member to put some time in answering, let alone to have the mods read through the post and think of an appropriate title.

jlinkels

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I don't really think it is a serious problem.
I know if the title was meaningless the post contained most probably a low quality description of a non-existent issue (which can be easily solved by reading a man page, googling around or similar).

I realize it can be frustrating. Not to say that I'm not guilty of the same thing I'm going to say here. Which is that many of us regular members do take the time to reply and offer corrective advice to the OP. But then many of us continue to either analyze their original question, by way of re-re-re-interpreting what it says, arguing over it, as well as having side discussions, sometimes accompanied by admonishments.

I report the threads and request that the mods edit the titles.

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Personally, I think that mods have enough things to do already. If you think that a thread could have a better title, post a suggestion on the thread inviting the thread's owner to change it if they agree with you.

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Taught? Pigeons learn faster.
Subject:

Bad: "Help Me!!" or "URGENT"
Good: "Why is my mouse pointer wrong?"
Best: "Mouse pointer distorted on XFree86 4.3 with Geforce FX 5200"

I gave up Yak Shaving. GIGO.

Just sayin'

Like sundialsvcs, I think this a lot to ask of the mods, who are also volunteers like the rest of us.

I think it is quite okay for individual members to provide gentle guidance on this topic as they come upon such posts and put it to the posters to improve their subject lines.

Moderators would also have to take a guess with regards to the content of the thread in order to give a meaningful thread title... so not really sure how moderators can solve this.

I agree a lot with both jlinkels and cynwulf.

To add to the point jlinkels was making; If you look at how many technical questions the regular posters here ask, I think you would realize that number is going to be very small. This suggests to me that at least the vast majority of those same members, do their own research, look up things and more to the point: DON'T expect someone else to puppy walk them through it. This tells me that those people are the one's that both want to, and WILL learn stuff. Isn't this site supposed to be about: "to help you, help YOURSELF" ? As jlinkels quite correctly IMHO said, why waste your time on people that clearly don't want to learn anything?

No offence to any members, but I learn a LOT more actually bloody DOING IT!

I've been reading up on a few things of late and have even read the same thing over and over and over again, until it DID make sense. It's not hard to learn if you really want to. But of course that's the problem (and as has been said before), people just lob up here and think this is just like a help-desk. (and treat it like one)

To add to what cynwulf said, I would ask the following; How are mod's going to give a "meaningful" thread title to a meaningless question ?

I can agree to almost everything that you responded above; as I was really starting a discussion by asking a question, not by making a statement.

But this: ,
resumes most of the over-interpretations which appear to have sorted from a heap of prepared answers.

I accept that modifying a thread title is not in the responsibility of any moderator and keep asking the OPs to do it by themselves.

It's because I am no pigeon. Read again.

Yeah, I was thinking that you were wanting a start a discussion about it and I do understand where your coming from. I actually was thinking about starting a thread about it as well, but decided against it - so thanks for starting the discussion.

But a couple of thoughts:

I really think that the title of the thread (bad titles, that is) is just indicative of a wider problem. In that: we seem to be getting a lot of people that; don't do much (if any) research BEFORE asking for help, don't want to learn much (if anything), don't provide much (if really any) useful information about their issues and expect us to be able to read their minds instead. How do we help such people??

If you want examples of the sort of threads (and OP's) I'm talking about here have a look at this; in that example, the OP has not only asked us to do his research for him, he seems to have a habit of asking question without much (if any) of his own research beforehand. And has this question been asked before, in addition to being able to be answered by doing a simple Google search ? You bet ya it has, right here. Has the OP in that case even replied back to clarify his question yet? Nope!

Want more proof of what I'm talking about? Right here. What's ironic? Keywords... DNS.

Also, and oddly enough, if I see a bad thread title, it makes me more inclined to look at the thread. And yes I don't quite understand that either, but, it does!

I'm not really real clear on what you're saying here. Just so you know, my answers are NEVER prepared in advance of any thread or anything else, if you're referring to me - but not sure who you are actually referring to, so I'll give you the benefit of doubt on that one.

Personally, I don't think there is any simple answer to these kinds of problems tho. I would like to see the mod's get tougher with particularly longer term members that keep asking questions that you would expect a newbie to be asking. Who post a line questions like; "how do i install xy or z" and similar - like the examples above. As it's clear that someone like that clearly has not done much if any research of their own. And I think when that sort of thing is clear on the OP's part, that they have not even tried to help themself and just expect us to do it all for them, their thread should be knocked off of the ZRT and closed. (as in the case of last example I gave above - that should happen more often with such members)

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