uninformative thread titles

[tanuki]

Hello!

A thread's title is supposed to give (in my understanding, at least) a short information of what's going on in the thread. So, if a thread's title is 花々 you can expect a talk about plurals or maybe about flowers or maybe even about kanji repetition and voicing (hanabana). But what when the thread's title is "help"?

Now, that's not very informative, is it? I tend to go to threads which I think I might be interested in (as most of foreros do, I guess), and "help" gives me no clue about the content of the thread.

But, well, that's not the worst thing. There have been several threads with this "help" title lately so it gets confusing and I end up going several times into a thread I'm not interested in (but it reappears in the recent threads because it gets new posts), which is annoying.

So, my request (to the admins and/or Clay-san) is: Could you please change the title of such uninformative threads to something informative? For example, if a thread called "help" asks about the kanji 雲, could you please change the title to "雲" or something?

Bye!

[paul_b]

tanuki wrote:
For example, if a thread called "help" asks about the kanji 雲, could you please change the title to "雲" or something?

Well we could but I think that would just encourage laziness in posters. If there isn't already a note in a FAQ / readme / sticky somewhere maybe there will be one soon.

[tanuki]

I can imagine that people who are lazy don't read the FAQ/readmes (readus? )/stickies/etc., so would that really help?

[magma]

Let's edit the PHP so that thread titles that are permutations of "help" are either rejected or automatically changed to the first sentence of the post.

[tanuki]

That would encourage laziness in the admins. Hehe, just kidding, I think that's a very good idea, I had no idea something like that could be done.

[Infidel]

I think the admins do enough already without the added work.

[Harisenbon]

I would gladly become admin for the sole purpose of changing people's topic posts to be more specific!

However, I would probably be fired in 10 minutes.

HELP! -> "I'm a whiny brat who can't use google."
Translate this! -> "I think that just because some of you have over 1000 posts, that you have nothing better to do than translate random anime for me."
What's romanji? -> "Tony, we need you in here."

[Oyaji]

Kanji question -> "I want a tattoo on my arm that I can't read and that people will point at and laugh."

[tanuki]

I think the admins do enough already without the added work.

I don't doubt that, that's why I said the automatic-title-change idea seemed good.

How are admins selected anyway? Can I vote for Harisen-san?

What's romanji? -> "Tony, we need you in here."

Everybody knows what romanji is. Probably the question would be:

What's romaji?
Today I read the word "romaji" in a book . Was that just a misspelling of romanji?

[magma]

I think the admins do enough already without the added work.

Aw c'mon, it's just a few lines of PHP, right? No problem for an experienced PHPer like Zen-san.

Actually my suggestion was only half-serious. Being a programmer myself, the first solution that comes to mind for any problem is always to write some code....

[Harisenbon]

function callTony($subject){
if(getInstanceof($subject, "romanji")){
$subject = "Tony, get in here and bring your bat.";
}
}

[Infidel]

I can imagine all the admins encircled around a poor newbie and wailing upon the poor sod with bats.

[chikara]

Harisenbon wrote:
function callTony($subject){
if(getInstanceof($subject, "romanji")){
$subject = "Tony, get in here and bring your bat.";
}
}

public Tony getTony(Subject subj) {
try {
parseTitle(subj);
}
catch (RomanjiException re) {
return new Tony("There is no n in romaji");
}
return new Tony(subj);
}

[AJBryant]

I'm really enjoying this.


Tony

[magma]

It would seem the correlation between Japanese learners and computer programmers is higher than I first imagined.....