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!”
/reallynottryingtojuniormodhere
Thank you.
There’s already a rule about using descriptive titles. Just report the offending thread and a mod will take care of it.
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”.
It isn’t not unwise to request new rules without checking the old rules to see if the requested rule…y’know…already exists.
René Auberjonois
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.
Please use descriptive thread titles. 
You don’t play in the Death Pool, do you?
bolding mine
No, that’s just your (incorrect) assumption of the thread.
Robert Duval 19xx-2016 invokes the “Oh no, he’s dead!” even if one was to then post in the thread “That’s how long he’s lived so far”.
Robert Duval just says "this thread is about Robert Duval. Anything else is just like your own hang up man.
“I’m not sure the problem is as bad as you make it out to be.”
It’s not. Even if it was, just mousing over would reveal that it’s not a death notice.
Even so, it’s polite to other posters to use descriptive thread titles.
NOOOOOO! René, we hardly knew ye.