Unhelpfully short titles

[Andrew Neil]

The "whole question in the title" problem seems to have largely gone away, but now we get the opposite - unhelpfully short titles!

Only today:

So perhaps the 'Posting Tips' need an update ?

https://community.st.com/t5/community-guidelines/how-to-write-your-question-to-maximize-your-chances-to-find-a/ta-p/575228

@Lina DABASINSKAITE 

[Tesla DeLorean]

If you have Edit Rights please just fix or improve these with more details and summary as you see fit. I will typically edit top posts if there are several issues with content or title. I'd rather not, but people will often emulate formats they see others use over posting suggestions elsewhere.

[BarryWhit]

Title: QUESTION

[Tesla DeLorean]

This was the first, I've edited to a form that I find more useful/helpful in browsing the postings, and perhaps finding later if I need too.

https://community.st.com/t5/stm32-mcus-wireless/stm32wb55-keil-error-in-pack-download-install/td-p/692665

Honestly I'd recommend you just edit anything that really grinds your gears, probably less friction there than trying to explain forum etiquette to others.

[Tesla DeLorean]

I'd honestly prefer it were a quick summary or highlights, 12 words or less, so it fits on a line, and I know what parts and topic the post covers.

Tags are a helpful cue, but mostly a waste of time. I'd like to know CubeIDE, and the version if salient, in the Title/Summary

[BarryWhit]

It sounds like you have Guru superpowers I'm unaware of. But reading what you wrote, I think there are two parts: prodding users to write good titles, and how the forum software (should) present metadata about the issue.

For example, the popular (and open-source *cough cough*) "discourse"  software project for forums presents threads

with more contextual information, like this:

If you had more control about what and how gets displayed as context for the thread, maybe tags would become more useful for doing what you want. But, that's never going to happen with a closed-source solution. And even if the commercial solution ST chose is extensible in this way, I doubt ST really has dedicated staff for writing custom extensions for it.  They probably think the company's business is to make chips, not customize forum software. Corporations are terrible at allocating proper resources to stuff like that.

[Tesla DeLorean]

This is the counter-point, unhelpfully long question in the title..

https://community.st.com/t5/stm32-mcus-products/unable-to-download-any-software-from-the-st-website-same-error/td-p/153271

[Tesla DeLorean]

A handful of us have finally got some limited moderation and spam suppression rights.

This will be flagged if we "edited" your post(s)

I've been doing forums for a while, I've found that berating users has some, but generally limited value, and is mostly counter productive and seen as unwelcoming.

So my preferred approach is to just make the forum / dialog in the image of what I want, and hope people follow. I'll call this the "Chameleon Effect", where when people want to "Fit In" they adopt the form and style of those around them, or that they respect. If they see a wall-of-posts in a particular form, with details, they will emulate it when they are comfortable with opening a new thread, or finding one that seems relevant to their issue. They hopefully also see it in the "Related Posts" when they browse. Hopefully the "Algorithm" will also pick up on this when doing it's general relativity computations.

>>I doubt ST really has dedicated staff for writing custom extensions for it. 

Actually I think they do, the vendors like Khoros basically want to dump all responsibility for the look-n-feel stuff onto their customers, so they can do the least amount of work possible. If things are architecturally broken the scripting can't fix it, and they get compelled to get involved. The experience with Salesforce, and Jive, was not a good one.

[Tesla DeLorean]

Tags need to be managed / curated to have significant value. This isn't Twitter..

The metrics here pivot around One Question / One Answer, but community is more about a conversation, and having threads which may be visited and restarted over the months and years. Some things are timeless, other age poorly.

Some will refer to Frequently Asked Questions, etc but others will not. I'm not sure if this is a generational or cultural thing, all I dealt with growing up was written and printed material, it's served me well, but it's not how things work for most people today.

[BarryWhit]

> Tags need to be managed / curated to have significant value.

Who said tags should be arbitrary? I suggested that showing the tags by the thread title in the "lounge", might turn them from relatively useless, to quite useful (and then, it would be worthwhile to manage/curate them)

>all I dealt with growing up was written and printed material,

I have no idea what your age is, but I'm "no longer 18" either. And I've never used twitter in my life. blech.