Oh, did you want me to read that?

Or, WIHMMB #11 A lack of clear titles

As I’ve said a few times in a few places, my resolution for 2009 was to be more helpful and less of a pokey prodder. This was probably not a good goal for somebody whose site’s entire premise is based on hating something and pointing out all the flaws. But you know what I like about me? My overcomenaciousness and with that in mind I decided to continue my “Why I Hate My Message Board” series as long as I only pointed out things that people could change, not things they can’t like “you ugly”.

BTW, if your first reaction to “you ugly” is to get out your guitar and start playing “Everything is Beautiful” in a non-ironic manner, this is probably not the series for you and you should probably defriend me without delay before my negative nature corrupts all that is beautiful and good in you.

Understand your limitations

I just don’t understand why people can’t come up with a good title. My best guess is that they have this odd idea that their titles need to be something grand like “For Whom the Bell Tolls” or “A Farewell to Arms” and get so intimidated trying to come up with something profound or clever they just give up and go with “What? Question? Why does that do this?” This is a message board, not a literary agency. Go with a concise description of the contents of your post. That is creative enough for the likes of you.

Your title is your opportunity to sell us on opening and reading and responding to your thread. Do you want people to read and reply to your threads? If not, why the hell are you posting them on the internet and wasting bandwidth? Take a minute and come up with a descriptive title, it’s worth the effort.

Don’t be a tease

I just chopped my dog in half

—-8 inches of wasted space–

These 1 lb hotdogs are HUGE!!!

It’s not really that funny, is it? You know how they say sarcasm is the lowest form of humor? It’s not, that would be the old fake-out. Or bait n’ switch. Whatever you want to call it. Now some people, they are funny people and maybe, just maybe, if they don’t do it too often, can make this sort of teaser title work. You? Can’t. And the whole scroll doooooown thing has got to end. This is 2009, we have spoiler tags. Learn to use them.

Do you really even need to start a thread?

If everything you have to say in the thread can be posted in the title and it involves you eating something and laughing about it, you don’t need to start a thread about it. What you have there is a sentence and you should wait until you get a collection of them to fashion into a paragraph; then you can work on deciding on a title and posting it.

Avoid Redundancy

If the title of your post is “Baby set on fire and decapitated by sitter!!” you don’t need to subtitle it: Warning death mentioned, might be sensitive.

L@@K!!!!

Is just plain hateful.

My helpful bit

Clear, concise titles are the key to getting people to read your threads. If you have a history of using vague, misleading or just plain stupid titles you run the risk of annoying your fellow posters and might not get the responses you’d hoped for on your threads.

My unhelpful bit

If you are using clear, descriptive thread titles and people still aren’t biting, have you considered that you might just be boring?

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Tagged as: teasers, titles, Why I hate my message board