Thread Titles - Good and Terrible Ones

[HoHun]

Hi everyone,

Due to information in forums traditionally being presented in a very unstructured way, they demand a lot of attention from a user who doesn't want to miss the bits that are of interest to him.

Ignoring all the subtle details, the single most important bit of information for any forum thread is the subject line.

There are good ones, that give a more or less adequate discription of the thread contents, and there are outright terrible ones, that suggest the thread content is something else it actually is.

Here's a real world example for a terrible subject line: https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/heinkel-he-162-projects-and-variants-my-models.43185/

The thread title sounds perfectly like the typical secretprojects forum go-to thread for historical information. What the thread actually contains are pictures of what-if models.

Sure, "My models" has edded at the end of the thread title, but the way my brain works, that doesn't help me at all. I read left-to-right, and by the time I get to the "my models", I'm already triggered.

I could go into great detail on the background, but I suppose no-one else really is all that interested in the way my brain works, so I'll leave it at that ;-) Overall, I think forum engines are regrettably low on useful features, thus forcing their users to jump through hoops, and to adopt certain habits to make the jumping the least inconvenient. Thus my attempt to share my habits and my concerns here!

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

 

[Archibald]

Give the man a break: he is not english speaker. Only french. He told me he had difficult finding the right place to put his model pictures. So I helped him, asking the moderators to move the posts.

 

[HoHun]

Hi Archibald,

Give the man a break: he is not english speaker. Only french. He told me he had difficult finding the right place to put his model pictures. So I helped him, asking the moderators to move the posts.

This is just about continuous improvement. Thanks for helping to put the posts in the right place, that's part of continuous improvement too!

My point is, the current subject line is inadvertent clickbait since it mimicks the typical secretprojects forum historical information megathread title, just with a suffix that amount to "just kidding".

If the forum had a button "disregard topic", I'd just push that button and never mention it to anyone.

If the thread would be titled, "What-if Models: Heinkel He 162 projects and variants", I'd be perfectly fine with that. It's an often-used principle that the information for most relevant filtering goes first, that's a good principle for thread titles too.

However, my post is really not about this specific thread, which only serves as a useful and current example. Rather, in the spirit of continuous improvement, I'd like to draw attention to the general principles that apply to the necessary manual filtering users have to do due to the lack of automatic filtering options.

If more people are aware of how important the thread titles are for some users at least, and what makes a good and what a terrible thread title, the forum will probably become easier to navigate and more useful for everyone involved.

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

 

[martinbayer]

Hi everyone,

Due to information in forums traditionally being presented in a very unstructured way, they demand a lot of attention from a user who doesn't want to miss the bits that are of interest to him.

Ignoring all the subtle details, the single most important bit of information for any forum thread is the subject line.

There are good ones, that give a more or less adequate discription of the thread contents, and there are outright terrible ones, that suggest the thread content is something else it actually is.

Here's a real world example for a terrible subject line: https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/heinkel-he-162-projects-and-variants-my-models.43185/

The thread title sounds perfectly like the typical secretprojects forum go-to thread for historical information. What the thread actually contains are pictures of what-if models.

Sure, "My models" has edded at the end of the thread title, but the way my brain works, that doesn't help me at all. I read left-to-right, and by the time I get to the "my models", I'm already triggered.

I could go into great detail on the background, but I suppose no-one else really is all that interested in the way my brain works, so I'll leave it at that ;-) Overall, I think forum engines are regrettably low on useful features, thus forcing their users to jump through hoops, and to adopt certain habits to make the jumping the least inconvenient. Thus my attempt to share my habits and my concerns here!

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

Honestly, simply tacking on "my models" at the end doesn't change anything at all, because to me (as an admittedly non-native English speaker) it simply indicates that these are *all* models of *actual* He-162 projects and variants.