A while back I started a thread in CS with the subject line “xkcd thread”. Note that it’s in all lowercase, intentionally so, since the comic strip’s name is in all lowercase. I just noticed that the thread now starts with a capital X. That’s a recent change, so someone in charge here messed it up. Who do I castigate about the head and shoulders for this outrage?
What_Exit was adding tags to a number of CS threads. Maybe an edit was done in the belief it was a typo.
Or Skynet took English this past semester.
As a test, I started this thread with an all lowercase subject line and now it’s changed to an intial capital. But the xkcd thread didn’t change right away, just in the last day or so. So perhaps someone changed some parameter to Discourse and now it’s capitalizing everything.
I can try to change it back, and see if it stays that way.
I would guess that when I added the tag, Discourse did an autocorrect.
That’s it, Discourse is auto-correcting. You created the thread in vBulletin.
I just explicitly edited it to be lower case, and it still appears as uppercase. I did it twice. Maybe there’s some other way to force it to be lower case. Or maybe I could in insert a leading space? But yeah, it’s an autocorrect error.
It’s a feature. 
We could put it in single quotes, but not even a leading space works.
I hacked the system and decided to intentionally annoy you, but you were so fixated on your capital “X” that you didn’t even notice that I undotted every “i” and uncrossed every “t” in your posts.
You could try a zero-width space in front of the thread title.
It doesn’t show up, but it counts as an extra character. Hopefully it will work in titles too.
Type
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Quote this post to see the zero-width spaces in it.
Based on your suggestion, I added a leading Alt 0173 and that allows for the lowercase x.
Any idea what someone changed that caused this autocorrect? As I said, it was only in the last couple days that this capitalization thing started happening.
I assume it happened when What_Exit was tagging the threads. If you don’t know, What_Exit has tagged most of the active threads in Cafe Society so you can quickly find all the food threads, or all the movie threads, or all the “this celebrity died” threads.
All the details on what caused this issue.
I really doubt that adding tags caused the change. After all, I made this thread here with an all lowercase subject. It got capitalized and there’s no tags on it.
I think you lost me.
- The xkcd thread was first posted on the old vBulletin software.
- It migrated over fine to Discourse.
- When I added the tag to it [comic-strips] it required I edit the title.
- After that is when you discovered the x went to X.
- 2 moderators tried to change the X back to x but Discourse defaults a leading letter in a title to uppercase.
- GreenWyvern suggested a zero-width space and I used the Alt 0173 character for that purpose and got you back the lowercase “x”.
Discourse will not allow you to put up a new thread with a lowercase first letter, so remember the trick of doing the Alt 0173 or the one GreenWyvern suggested.
Apparently, then, Discourse auto-“corrects” a title whenever that title is created or edited. But the import from vBulletin did not involve anything that Discourse considers to be either of those things, so it wasn’t auto-“corrected” then.
What I meant was this thread, the one titled “Change to thread subject line”. I did not type a capital-C when I created it, but it still ended up capitalized. Chronos’ explanation makes sense. And this is highly annoying, just like in Wikipedia, where it won’t let you have a lowercase username.
Since thread titles are “titles”
It Seems To Me They Should Be Written in Title Case Like This:
https://boards.straightdope.com/search?expanded=true&q=%40LSLGuy%20%20in%3Afirst%20after%3A2020-07-01