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Full Version: How to ask Smart Questions (thread title expansion)
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This goes hand in hand in relation to this help doc. This is more focused on the thread title itself.

The purpose of this thread is to compile various real-time postings in which the user provides a horrible subject title. In which it can be linked to from the help docs in the section "How to ask Smart Questions" in the event people actually want to learn how to summarize a piece of writing. At worst case scenario, it would be something we can link to without having to explain every single time. The links to the threads should probably not be here as 1) as i dont mean to shame them, but use it as a learning tool and 2) the titles here are always fixed by some point a reader would come by.

Often people will make thread titles that we need to fix such as:
Bad Thread Titles
  • My code does not work!!?
  • I need help!!!!!!!!
  • please help
  • I get an error
  • I am a noob
  • Basic Question
  • ANYTHING THAT IS ALL CAPPED

If the person is for some reason unable to summarize their own post, they could at the very least put things like:

Unexpected output The output is not what you expected it to be, but you get no errors

IndexError: tuple index out of range You can always put the error that you are getting stumped on. However putting the final error in the title does not replace the need to put the entire traceback in the actual post.
initial title:
Very basic question #1


The thread title from this post could be:
NameError: name 'python' is not defined
initial title:
list

As is, list as a title does not tell us much. Its better than help, but not as good as the rest of the error.

A better thread title would be:
TypeError: 'list' object is not callable