In post #8 of this thread Colibri announces that he has changed the thread title “to fix spelling and clarify subject” - a very commendable objective. Unfortunately, this has the effect of making an “orphan” of post #5, which no longer makes sense under the revised title.
But all would be clear if a suggestion I’ve previously made were used: in a post announcing a thread title change, include the previous title. Colibri’s post would thus become:
Thread title changed from “freezing things” to fix spelling and clarify subject.
which I submit is clearly better at very little added cost.
Are there downsides to this suggestion I’m not aware of? If not, why does this not become standard practice?
I try to do it that way. It is a bit more complicated because once you’ve changed the title, you’d have to go digging around for the old one if you, say forgot to copy it beforehand. :smack:
I usually try to modify the title using brackets indicating what changes I have made. In this case, I probably should have changed it by making it “free[z]ing.” But I didn’t think to do that at the time.
I might have tried to make it clearer what the original title was if there had actually been some significant joking or byplay based on the misspelling in the title. As it was, there was one offhand joke that was lost.
But surely you got some entertainment out of trying to figure out what the original title was so that post made sense, no? So it wasn’t a complete loss . . .
I certainly agree that mods should not hesitate to alter titles when doing so makes things clearer. But because the former title usually has some value (if only as entertainment, showing how far short the OP fell) I think it should be standard practice to include this in the title-change post.
The value of doing so seems to far outweigh the cost. Making this an SDMB policy would relieve mods of the need - though not the opportunity - for cleverness, perhaps leading to more such changes (essentially all of which are welcome).
