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?
Similar Posts:
- I am growing my brand
- I am grumpy and grumbling this April Fool’s Day
- WIHMMB – Reason #6 Content Free Posting
- WIHMMB – Reason #1 Message Board as Blog
- I am in need of an authority and a niche
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!








{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
Genius.
I love this one. “Do you really even need to start a thread” is fabulous!
I judge people harshly who employ any of the above methods in starting a thread.
Very, very glad to see the return of WIHMMB.
I loved that line. It made me laugh, but it’s very true. I hate the scrolling method, which is a big reason why I usually delete email forwards without even reading them.
You made some great points above. The easiest way to come up with a descriptive title is to ask something related to your post. I often find that I’m having a hard time coming up with a title, so I usually use that trick. I also try to summarize what I’m saying — or trying to say — in six or less words.
Here here!
No Intangible Titles for Titilating Purposes!
George
Tumblemoose´s last blog post..Happy Birthday to me
Hilarious and spot on. It doesn’t get any better than that.
travit´s last blog post..The light at the end of winter’s tunnel.
Please do “do you want me to click that link” next. A post script would be fine.
Yea, verily, I concur.
nice
I see many agree with me! I think perhaps I should stop sending these to people that agree with me – I do not think you need my advice. To be helpful, I need to post these where the offenders are.
Love it! But I still think my pregnancy announcement was genius. Pictures of the growing garden, and then the positive test. I think that’s an acceptable fakeout because I really did have garden pictures first.
Some of these people need to join Twitter. These type of “threads” would make better tweets. Not great ones, mind you, but better.
Angela´s last blog post..Would you take a 20K paycut?
Too funny Tracy. I run into this all the time on the WordPress support forums. If you really need help, please state the problem in the subject line of the thread. “2.7 sucks” is not useful and is probably going to take us longer to even bother to look at the question.
Gotta run – kid just cut her dog in half
Kim Woodbridge´s last blog post..How to Remove “Says” From WordPress 2.7 Threaded Comments
I agree. Titles are always important when writing, and especially so online, and even more so in a forum where you basically need to compete with so many other titles. Same is true for a blog title that needs to compete with hundreds of other titles in a feed reader.
Your are too funny. All your suggestions are spot on!