In the community I am moderating (support community for a Javascript framework) we have the problem that users are really bad at creating titles:
- Although we have categories for different library versions and they use them, the also tend to include the version numbers in the title like “How do I do x with software v3?” which adds a lot of unnecessary noise - especially as the library version is irrelevant in 99% of the cases.
- Many don’t actually describe their problem, but write something like “Problem, how to fix?” or “Build doesn’t work” an leave all the interesting stuff to the post body (or just leave it out completely - but that is a different problem)
If we just accept these topics as they are, new users (95% of users are first time users) see these topics and create titles that are similar: They all include irrelevant version numbers or just state that they have a problem. That is why we, the moderators, try to “police” the topic titles and edit them.
Right now my workflow for this is opening the list of new topics, opening all the ones with “bad” titles in new tabs and go through them one by one. This takes a lot of clicks and tabs and also marks these topics as “read” by me, which I didn’t actually do.
I imagine a topic view where I can directly edit topic titles with few clicks and maybe even read a preview of the post body without opening the actual thread. Does something like this exist?