# Are we running out of “standard” titles?

I ran across this question. As usual it had a very boring title. Namely,

"How to solve this system of equations??"

Usually I'd edit away the superfluous question mark, but I was quickly informed that a title without the extra question mark already existed. So I picked a different title.

I was genuinely surprised by this, could this mean that the repetitive punctuation common to level 1's is partly to blame on a saturation of available titles? This would be interesting as I always thought these extra "!"'s and "?"'s were just desperate attempts at getting extra attention.

Could there be a more fundamental problem underlying this? Maybe we should encourage more useful titles, not only for attracting views, but also for avoiding running out of useful available titles.

• Don't worry about it. Since the days of yore people have been using "boring titles" that describe very little of the problem inside. – Asaf Karagila Jun 28 '15 at 5:42
• Maybe everyone should avoid what you call "standard titles" (a subset of what I call "bad titles"). The superfluous punctuation mark wasn't the problem, the problem was that the title was not descriptive enough. – Najib Idrissi Jun 28 '15 at 7:08
• @Najib I was surprised that the Op put the extra punctuation in because the other version was already taken. Although yes, that wouldn't have been a problem if a more unique title had been used. – Zach466920 Jun 28 '15 at 13:50

The title was not only vague, but misleading: one is not asked to solve the system of equations, but rather find $x^2+y^2+z^2$ from them. I would go with
Find $x^2+y^2+z^2$ from three quadratic equations for $x,y,z$