A plea for relevant topic titles

[beatle]

Since most people are unable to perform full text searches now (soon to be everyone) I'd like to get a message out for people to use relevant topic titles. When someone titles their thread "Is this a good video card?" or "What do I do here?" it's impossible to pull useful information out of the thead later unless you remember the title exactly and its contents. Good examples of topic titles might be:

[*]9700 pro versus 5900 ultra - which is best for 2d?
[*]2500+ overclocking results on NF7-S
[*]Best cooler/heatsink for Intel P4?
[*]Suggestions for baybus/rheobus wanted
[*]Logitech Z680/Z-680 - are they really the best?

Some of these may seem to have redundant info, such as "Intel P4" and "cooler/heatsink" - of course there are no AMD P4's, but this thread would be found by someone searching for "Intel heatsink" "P4 heatsink" "P4 cooler" or "Intel cooler." I've also seen some models named differently - such as the Logitech Z680/Z-680. To some, the topics might look weird, but without being able to do full text searches, the title is more important than ever.

I don't see this listed in the FAQ or rules, but perhaps an addendum would be in order in addition to a sticky in the forums for a short period to remind people of the importance of using relevant topic titles. Perhaps mods could work with the users who post vague topics to correct their titles? I think this would improve the usefulness of the forum tremendously, especially for someone searching for more obscure titles.

 

[ProviaFan]

Relevant titles are a very good thing, and I think they should be universally used when messages are posted, but there will always be some who won't title their messages appropriately, I'm afraid.

Anyway, the non-subscriber search "feature" (if it could even be called that) will not search for two words separately; everything you enter is considered one phrase. If anything, now that the subscriber servers are gone, the admins need to relax this one major restriction (heck, I don't need full text search, but I would certainly like to be able to actually search the freaking titles!).

 

[olds]

"relevant topic titles" is a great idea but alas, it is a pipe dream.

 

[dmcowen674]

Look in the DC forum area for examples.

I forget which one of the Senior members (either Smokeball or Engineer) proposed and started it but it has stuck.

The first part of the Title starts with the subheading such as SETI: or F&H: and then the rest of the Title.

For the most part many are trying to stick to this ideology in P&N as well.