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I have seen several posts recently, I think from new users, where the title is too vague to be useful. Also, I have not seen any suggestions in the comments to re-title the question.

Examples:

Real Analysis Problem

Necessary conditions for a polynomial

Functions satisfying a given condition

Is this function continuous?

At this time I would also like to point out the wording in one particular (seeded) question that I find distasteful - but am reluctant to call attention to it directly to avoid a flame war. The offense is in the line

I asked her [my teacher] why, and she told me not to tell her how to do her job.

Could we discuss leaving comments requesting specific actions to be taken by the OP that fit more within the realm of style rather than the mathematical content of their question?

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  • $\begingroup$ Please do this! See here for a good example of this happening successfully, although it's not too clear, because I deleted my comment suggesting the new name after the asker edited his question. $\endgroup$ – Larry Wang Aug 9 '10 at 16:10
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I think this is a completely reasonable use of comments. Asking questions with poor titles weakens the quality of the website, because people that might be interested in answering it might not look at it. Besides, it's (mildly) rude to have vague titles, in the same way that it's rude to ask brief questions without motivation of the form "Can someone tell me about harmonic analysis?" Asking such a question makes the answerer do much more work than the OP. Similarly, bad titles make it harder for the answerer.

Most people probably don't realize that it's a bad idea to have such titles, so a request to change them would probably be better than editing the title.

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    $\begingroup$ And to add onto Akhil's last sentence, since they may not realize what they are doing is bad, do try to be polite and say why your suggested title is more useful (not just to the site, but to themselves). $\endgroup$ – Larry Wang Aug 9 '10 at 16:11

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