Be as specific as possible, give your post a clear and descriptive title, and focus on problems and use cases, rather than proposed solutions.
As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to read through forum post titles without constantly seeing generic titles like “why doesn’t my script work” or “why doesn’t this work” or “my game is broken” and having to read the actual post to see what they are about.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve everyone’s experience using the forum because there is no way for anyone here to understand what the meaning of these posts are without actually taking the time to click on them to find out what the poster’s issue is.
I find it funny that the requirements for posting something say “give your post a clear and descriptive title” but when someone posts they can just use “help” as a title and it would be accepted.
Wouldn’t it be easy to filter titles such as these, making the person posting have to change their title if one of these simplistic ones are used? In such cases a warning could pop up stating that the title isn’t descriptive of the actual problem and it needs to be changed.
I know it’s a petty thing, but I look at this forum on an almost daily basis and especially in Scripting Support it seems that every 5th post is “why doesn’t this script work”.
Seriously, if you made a list of the top 20-30 worst titles you could save everyone time so we could use that time to help those we are able to from the post title rather than from having to read through each post.
I think ‘filtered’ is the wrong name for this, since it alludes to posts having to go through the Roblox text filter.
Maybe ‘don’t allow non-descriptive titles’ would be better, since this will likely have to be carried out by forum moderators anyway (since I don’t think Discourse has an option to do this)
The moderators Roblox employs for things like forum moderation are not technically equipped enough to judge whether a title is technically descriptive or not.
And if it’s not manual, let’s say an allowlist, users will just do “help!!!11” instead of “help”.
I think it’d be better if the site just down-prioritized poorly worded posts in discovery, so that you won’t even see these posts over descriptive ones. This is better than building a machine learning system specifically to block people from posting non-descriptive titles/bodies.
@Abcreator I used the term ‘filtered’ because I think this could easily be done by checking for particular phrases without having to use human moderation. @buildthomas I’m only talking about titles that don’t give any reference to what the post is about. It wouldn’t be hard to filter things like that.
I was thinking more a list like @geometricalC2123 said which has the most common ‘poor’ titles in it.
I’m sure that most people wouldn’t try to bypass it because at first they do believe ‘help’ is a good title. A gentle pop up reminder that it’s not would make them realize that a better title would be more 'help’ful and increase positive responses to their post.
I’ve recently starting these types of titles and I just can’t stop finding them. Currently, the #help-and-feedback section (especially but not limited to scripting support) is plagued with super vague titles and it’s honestly hard to find posts that are asking about issues that I might have experience in solving because of the super vague nature of the post titles. Post titles should have clear, concise names that ask exactly what you want to do, not “why doesn’t my script work?”.
StackOverflow does this nicely, when creating a post, the following article is linked which outlines how to ask a good question:
One of the biggest categories in this post is the title category, where it expresses how important it is to write a good title.
Even if this post acts as a PSA, to everyone reading this, I beg you, please write concise titles. I’m going to sound like an English teacher here but whatever. Your post’s title should be a well-structured question asking how to do something, or asking why something happens, not “why does this not work?” and “script help”.
As a proposed solution (which I know shouldn’t be the emphasis and I’m not trying to make it the emphasis of the reply), add that your post’s title should be clear and concise in the category information post, particularly the section that talks about how to write your post.
I believe addressing this issue would help the forum’s quality as that’s what people first see when coming on to the forum, well-structured post titles. If someone sees titles that are vague and seem to be the same across many posts, imagine the impression that the forum will have on them. It won’t be a good one, that’s for sure.
Thanks @7z99.
This is entirely the point I was going for in my post.
The reason I suggested a filter is that many people in these forums don’t even realize that a good title is extremely important. Like I said a simple filter or checklist that asks a poster to please rephrase their title if they try to use something from a simple list of frequently used “poor titles” would be extremely helpful for others in the forums.
Exactly! And that’s not even to mention the number of people it would help in the future. Imagine having an issue that someone else had, the solution is right under your nose but you never know this solution exists because the vague title doesn’t express the issue the post is talking about.