I’m jumping over here from the “Robert Duvall” thread to suggest a board practice.
/notjuniormoddingreally Please do NOT make posts of only a celebrity name. These have pretty much always been interpreted as a death thread. and after the endless grief 2016 gave us, I think a lot of us are a bit sensitive.
If you have to post something about a celebrity, give the subject line a little context, like “Robert Duvall - way bald way early!”
I don’t mean to speak for the OP, but I believe that the point is not that the title isn’t descriptive, but that it is overly and incorrectly descriptive. I.e. that just a celebrity name invokes the dread to hat the subject is dead.
Actually, it’s insufficiently descriptive. A thread title should in any case be more than a person’s name; it should give some idea of what the discussion will be about.
Honestly, when I got the report for that thread asking for a name change, I thought it was the other way around, that it was a death thread that people were misinterpreting as just a thread about his work in general, because why would anyone assume that a thread with just a celebrity’s name would be about their death? I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a death thread titled in that way before.
Yeah, a little more context is always good, but I’m not sure the problem is as bad as you make it out to be.
“Descriptive” means that it tells you what the thread is supposed to be about. If it doesn’t do that, then it’s not “descriptive”.
This is not rocket science. Your thread title should tell people what to expect once they open your thread. If it doesn’t do that, then the title is inadequate. And it’s easily fixed by reporting the OP and asking a mod to make the title sufficiently “descriptive”.
The funny thing is, until just now, I’d thought he had died years ago. I just figured the thread was talking about the life’s work of some long dead actor.
I would also point out that this thread was not itself descriptively titled (originally “Posts with only a name”), since it was about threads rather than posts, and the title didn’t give a hint of what the issue was. I have edited the title to indicate the actual subject.