in reply to Disallowing single-word titles in SOPW

Unfortunately, you'll go from titles of "hash" and "Hi" to "hash problem" and "Hi there". Is that progress?

An idea I've had very little time to reflect on is that PM could run a search on the proposed title, and if it gets too many hits, reject it with that reason (title is too generic). Of course, we could still get "hash 12345" then, but I think it at least addresses the problem directly. Admittedly, it's not likely as easy as ensuring that the title meet some pattern.

Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.
  • Comment on Re: Disallowing single-word titles in SOPW

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Re^2: Disallowing single-word titles in SOPW (more)
by tye (Sage) on Sep 02, 2004 at 18:22 UTC

    Yes, it is. Type in "hash" in the "search" box (which isn't very good for searching) and note that you don't find any nodes titled "hash problem" but you also don't find most of the nodes with "hash" in their titles. So renaming those few nodes from "hash" to "hash problem" would make using a simple search of "hash" more useful (except, of course, that one of those nodes is a user, but ignore that for this demonstration and I'll address it below).

    Of course, I've wanted to fix this problem for a long time. But I don't want to break the primary use for "search" (aka ?node=), which is to find a specific node. And lately I've been complaining that the "Search" button should really be renamed as a "Find" button. But now I'm thinking we should have both a "Search" and "Find" button and if you push "Search" it doesn't stop searching just because you had a few (or one) exact title matches. (Which also makes single-word node titles less of a "problem to be fixed".)

    I'd like to disallow (or at least strongly discourage) SoPW nodes with titles that contain less than 2 (or maybe 3) words after "noise" words are removed, qw( please problem help newbie Perl bug urgent and the from error ), to just name a few.

    - tye        

[reply]
      How about: if one exact match is found, it goes to that exact match (Find behavior), but if multiple exact matches are found, it goes ahead with a complete search?
      Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.
[reply]

        That would suck for some current uses of "Find" (at least for pmdev members, perhaps for others as well) and doesn't solve the problem of there being just a user "hash" when you want to search for nodes about "hash"es.

        I think I'd like "Find" to never return a huge list of matches, so there are quite a few reason to distinguish "Search" from "Find".

        - tye        

[reply]
Re^2: Disallowing single-word titles in SOPW
by VSarkiss (Monsignor) on Sep 02, 2004 at 18:23 UTC

    Unfortunately, you'll go from titles of "hash" and "Hi" to "hash problem" and "Hi there". Is that progress?
    Not much, I agree, but a little. ;-)

    This goes back to my point of "If they didn't follow instructions the first time, they're unlikely to do so the second time." So to my mind it's a question of the cost/benefit ratio. Catching one-word titles is relatively easy and cheap, but the benefit is unclear. Your proposal has a higher chance of being beneficial, but also would cost a lot more (in terms of developer and machine time).

[reply]

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