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I've often gone through and edited out the system name from question titles. One of the reasons I do this is so that the question titles are snappier and more likely to get attention.

Lets take a page from Gaming.SE's book and make our question titles awesome. Some great examples from Gaming:

  • How can I tell if a corpse is safe to eat?
  • How can I kill adorable animals?
  • Does hitting a sheep in the face yield more wool?
  • Can I permanently kill important people?
  • Is there any reason for me to sleep?
  • How to pray safely (to God)?
  • My wife is stuck in a wall, can I save her?
  • My children are useless. What should I do?
  • How can I find lesbians?
  • Can I kill everybody?
  • How do I cannibalize people?

These are just some of the top questions. Now I've noticed that not all of their questions remove the game, but honestly aren't these question titles more awesome from lack of context? All of them have at least 20 upvotes.

Lets be more awesome. Similar meta post on gaming

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    \$\begingroup\$ * * Showers @wax-eagle with cool points. * * Not only are you helping eliminate redundancy (do we really need "...in AD&D" at the end of a question already tagged adnd?), but you are absolutely right that people watch Gaming largely because of the titles. Usually blatant attention-grabbing comes with some perverse incentive, but our experience on Arqade tells us there isn't one here. \$\endgroup\$
    – HedgeMage
    Nov 17, 2011 at 17:04
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    \$\begingroup\$ My personal favorite was "I'm afraid of dying, how can I live forever?" or something similar, but I can't find it now and that makes me sad. Edit: I just found "Can I take off my clothes and hide in the dark?" gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/36058/… \$\endgroup\$
    – Cthos
    Nov 17, 2011 at 21:40
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Lohoris There are plenty of other posts about comment deletion, this is about post titles. \$\endgroup\$
    – wax eagle
    Jul 11, 2014 at 13:25

3 Answers 3

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OK, here's the deal.

I like snazzy titles. I try to use snazzy titles, as some recent weeping and gnashing of teeth indicates (murderous cretin question).

However.

  1. If a poster objects to an edit, roll it back. It's their question. Period. We had some early edit wars on this site and the upshot is that you can edit, but if they reject the edit, it's their call. You can vote to close the question if you think it doesn't meet site standards without the edit, but that's it. All this other discussion is secondary to that in every way.

  2. The site is primarily about getting good answers to the poster's question. When we've had rampantly popular linked questions, they draw some new eyes to the site - but sadly they do NOT draw better answers to the question (the Star Destroyer question comes to mind), in fact those questions tend to then need mod attention because of the drivebys. As a result I don't necessarily support going and rampantly editing titles for "kewlness." Bringing new eyes is good, but not at the expense of answering the question.

Tags help somewhat, but especially in the sidebars, twitter, and whatnot they don't appear. Personally, if a question is really vague I'll just ignore it. Anyone can only know/play 1/100 of all the RPGs and so not every question is or can be for everyone.

My suggestions:

  1. Post your own questions with 'awesome' titles. Problem solved.

  2. Encourage others to have awesome titles, in meta or with comment suggestions.

  3. Edit awesomeness in occasionally, and when you think it would be welcome. You know who your buds are on the site and who isn't. Use it more for system agnostic questions that don't suffer from lacking the game system in the title.

  4. Be careful of going over the line, both in changing the question itself and in volume.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Snazzy titles is clearly an elusive thing, as many of the attempts to do it since this Q have IMO fallen pretty flat. \$\endgroup\$
    – mxyzplk
    Jan 3, 2012 at 4:00
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Let's take a recent example, i.e. What goals are valid in Social Conflict in The Dresden Files.

First, it's tagged with Social Combat and Dresden Files, so we take Dresden Files out... though both terms were in the title.

Second, if someone posts another question about social conflict in WoD. These questions aren't immediately disambiguated (not to mention talking about social conflict in other games). You might point to the fact of the dresden-files tag appears on the main page. But what about other navigation/help? When you're typing in a new question, and that appears? What about the fact that in the right column, the related stories will show that question because of the social-combat tag, even though it's only tangentially related.

I noticed this in my use of the site, which was why I started including it, because it was annoying when related topics appeared, they weren't really related (but you couldn't tell by the title), and they wasted my time.

It's not a big deal by any stretch of the imagination, and I can see the arguments for the other side. I do think there needs to be a consensus on which way to go, though- seeing some questions with it and some without is, if not confusing, at the very least, messy.

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    \$\begingroup\$ I think in order to be "awesome" you pretty much have to rework the whole title. Something like, "How can I make people do what I want?" or "How can I beat people socially?". I'd downplay the whole issue of in-site navigation. Some 80% of stackexchange traffic comes directly from Google. Those are the people we (for lack of a better term) want to pander to. Convince them to click on the link, and then they'll see how awesome we are. :) \$\endgroup\$
    – Pat Ludwig
    Nov 17, 2011 at 18:53
  • \$\begingroup\$ Also if you have a similar question in a different system linking the related question in a comment or the question itself will solve some of this \$\endgroup\$
    – wax eagle
    Nov 17, 2011 at 19:21
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    \$\begingroup\$ This is the reason I add what language I use when asking Q on SO, because a solution in FORTRAN differs from C, Java etc. I think the clincher is when rules questions are being asked, and 'fluff questions' are being asked. Perhaps if we filtered by that criterion, and only eliminated the game title from 'fluff' games. So "How do I antagonize the characters in nWoD without annoying the players" becomes "How do I antagonize the characters in my game without annoying the players" as it's 'fluff', but "In DnD 4e how does Feat X work" needs to be left, as the game name is such a visual clue. \$\endgroup\$
    – AncientSwordRage
    Dec 11, 2011 at 8:51
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For me as a new user, the tags are not compensating for not having the system in the title. I can't get over my expectation that everything is about D&D and I keep clicking on "awesome" questions like "I want to build a castle... with magic!" and slowly realizing from the unfamiliar vocabulary that this is not something I can have any input on (Ars Magica). One fix for this would be the ability to limit my front page view to D&D only, or make tags a little bolder.

I posted this after the second time I clicked on the magic castle question. The first time I thought "should have read the tag," the second time I thought "something's wrong with the display."

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    \$\begingroup\$ put dnd* into your interested tags, it does not delete the others but it does highlight the dnd ones \$\endgroup\$
    – David Allan Finch
    Dec 28, 2011 at 13:59
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    \$\begingroup\$ David's solution is probably best (since it'll allow you to see all the system agnostic questions), but for a truly D&D-centric view, you can use this: rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dnd%2A \$\endgroup\$
    – AceCalhoon
    Dec 28, 2011 at 14:06

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