in reply to Proper bangin', title formattin'

educated foo:

I don't dismiss them out of hand. But I have a limited amount of time to peruse PM each morning, so I basically go to "Newest Nodes" and look things over. I then look over nodes in order of most interesting to least interesting. Then when I'm out of time, I hit the "I've checked all these" button and wait for my next visit.

So the ones with the most interesting title get my attention first. Ones that have a terrible title "H37P P733Ze!!1!!" often never get visited at all, and a title like "URGENT! Help needed!" I do dismiss immediately, because the petitioner clearly doesn't understand the rules of engagement.

There are many nodes that I dismiss immediately, not because of a poor title, but because the subject is (a) uninteresting to me, or (b) I know nothing about it. For example, I don't do Web development with Perl, it's both uninteresting and I know nothing about it.

I think that the most important thing a petitioner can do when creating a node is to realize that everyone here is a volunteer, and we're doing so for our own amusement. So the better job they do to clearly state their case, and title the node, the better feedback they're going to get.

...roboticus

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Re^2: Proper bangin', title formattin'
by educated_foo (Vicar) on Jul 13, 2007 at 17:45 UTC
    I agree about "URGENT" -- sometimes I wish there were a way to downvote these nodes directly from "recent threads" without having to read them ;). And I too have to skip most of the because it deals with either Windows or Web, two things I avoid like the plague.

    You also make a good point about amusement, which points to the flip-side of this issue: While questioners should write clearly and be polite, they need not grovel, beg, or offer effusive thanks, and they should expect polite responses. Those answering questions are getting something out of it too.