Not really. For example, there are sometimes GQ questions attempting to identify some unknown thing. “What is this object?” is a perfectly valid title even if someone else used that title in 2018 and in 2015. There is no reasonable reason to prevent it being used again in 2021. Nothing is gained by forcing them to say “Wh4t is this object?” or “What is this object that I can’t identify that has photos in the post?” or some other superfluous permutation.
Maybe not the best example. Even there “What is this Object?” would be better as “What is this adjective object?”
Think rusty, or red or large cylindrical
How does that make a thread about an unidentifiable object more clear? Perhaps “What is this tool?” or “What is this rock?” would help, but providing a minimal description about an unknown object wouldn’t. Who do you expect to look at the thread titled “What is this red object?”, an expert in all things red?
OK, go with your examples. They’re better.
Perhaps few have noticed, but this is already exactly how URL’s work here in Discourse. The server finds the right thread solely by the thread-id part of the URL, essentially ignoring the {thread-name} part.
For example, the URL of this thread is:
- https:// boards.straightdope. com/t/suggestion-of-junior-moderating-vs-request-to-members/941672
But change that to:
- https:// boards.straightdope. com/t/abcdefg/941672 or anything else in the thread-name part, and you still get to the same thread.
This is necessary because a thread title can be changed, and when that happens, the thread’s URL changes too. But existing links to the thread by its old URL still work.
(ETA: I broke the links in the URLs as shown above to force Discourse to show the URLs as URLs and not display their thread titles instead.)
See, this is the right way to do it.
And I would like the Mods to actually say (again) that this sort of thing is Okay.
The moderation has gotten kinda random recently.
Redology is a real thing, but it refers to study of the classic Chinese novel Red Chamber, and not to the study of red.
~Max
Sure, it’s valid at the gq.com domain. Point acknowledged. But 25 different “what is this object” topics here is not a good idea.
This is just all-around wrong. Duplicate titles are not bad for me at all. And your other two points contradict each other. SEO is all about people finding techniques to put their garbage results above useful results by gaming Google’s (and others’) algorithms. Me being able to find “well… anything” is easier done in a world without SEO.
If what you really meant was that duplicate titles would complicate searching, you would need to deal with how trivially worked around the current solution is. But honestly, you’d be better off studying how people search for the threads they’re looking for, and what leads to failure. This is just a solution in search of a problem.
(Ignoring what I hope was meant to be a joke.)
Even if those 25 posts are spread over 20+ years? Where you have to work to make sure a title has never been used anywhere on this site at any time in its history? I fundamentally disagree.
That’s fine… it’s also possible to post an empty post here using all manner of unicode and HTML trickery. The general idea is to make it difficult (but not impossible) to do undesirable things, while at the same time making it very very very easy to do desirable things. 
But you didn’t do that. If I ran into the duplicate title warning, I’d just throw a 1 at the end of it and be done with it. That’s the easiest thing to do.
On a more meta-point, you might try listening to your customers - you know, the people actually using your product - when they contradict your intuition.
I am definitely listening, but at an aggregate level across dozens to hundreds of sites. Each site has its own… shall we say… flavor.
And there’s a few things that just aren’t in our DNA, like pagination, etc.
Just because he doesn’t agree, that doesn’t mean he isn’t listening.
Sure, and in the post above yours, he claims he is. I’m skeptical, though. Replying with, effectively, “shut up, it’s good for you” doesn’t sound like listening to me.
Not sure if this was a joke on your part, but Darren_Garrison was referring to the General Questions category which is run like a factual Q/A forum. Originally I believe GQ was a source of questions for Cecil to answer in his newspaper column, to complement letters written to the Chicago Reader. Unlike StackExchange we don’t put so much emphasis on making the question suitable for searches or being the prime source of knowledge, in my opinion we’re more about answering the specific question or problem and especially teaching people the facts. If Cecil wants to write an article let him worry about SEO.
We do have a rule about descriptive thread titles, though. It is rule #1 in GQ:
- Use descriptive thread titles. Try to give your thread a title that summarizes what you are asking about. This makes it much easier for others to determine whether they have anything to contribute to the thread or want to read its contents.
The rationale is as TriPolar explained in #43. A more specific title attracts answers from people with that specific expertise. Titles like “How did my smartphone do this?” or “Question about HTML/CSS coding” are par for the course (you can search for more examples).
Some examples of topics where moderators have stepped in to make the topic title more descriptive (they will put their change in brackets):
~Max
No it doesn’t.
++
Please don’t make any moderation decisions assuming that other’s might be able to read the mouseover. Mouseover is broken in Discourse, at least if your computer has a touchscreen. No one on a modern windows laptop can read the mouseover. For that matter, nor can anyone on an phone or a tablet, because there isn’t a good way to implement mouseover without a non-clicking pointing device.
If I’d seen a report of the title, I probably would have edited it, fwiw. Probably to “A Corny Question [where’s the bread?]”
Last I heard, mouseover is also theme specific.
And I’d have used even more specific language like [Retail availability of prepared corn bread]. That said, though, your edit would have probably been enough to allow me to steer clear: It’s a thread about cornbread & I got nothing.
Yeah, i thought “where’s the bread?” would be more in keeping with the jocular nature of the original.
All those examples are excellent. The whole process of enforcing topic title uniqueness (per domain) makes it more likely that when you click on a link, you will kinda get what you expect. That’s a net benefit to the world.
I’m a TL4 on a different site and I find editing topic titles to make them better and more descriptive is maybe 70% of the job. So many people do stuff like this…
(yes, we’re working on an official theme component that detects unformatted code or logs and nags before posting, as well)
The world does not need 100 topics titled “keep getting error”.