0
$\begingroup$

I recently wanted to ask about a series of questions relating to pretty much the same topic. It was a pretty narrow topic, but I had too many questions to put in one major post. Therefore, I was thinking that I instead write something like this for each title:

"Topic question 1"

"Topic question 2"

"Topic question 3"

etc.

Would this work in this forum?

$\endgroup$
6
$\begingroup$

First: the StackExchange network is not a forum, it is a Question & Answer site. A forum allows discussion between many people and answers tend to get buried deep in threads (if it's ever answered). Here, we allow only questions and answers (the comments are really meant for cleaning up misunderstandings or pointing out incorrect statements or similar such things).

Second: There is a great Meta.StackExchange post titled Writing a Good Title that's worth the read. A title that's simply a label is not descriptive, likely to be ignored, though usually someone would come along and edit it to something meaningful.

Third: Since each question has a timestamp attached, we'd be able to see the temporal order which would make labeling them fruitless.

Two alternative suggestions:

  1. Start with something along the lines with
    This is question 1 of a series (see [Q2 here](link1) and [Q3 here](link2))

  2. Ask your only first question and get some answers. It might be that those answers guide you to (maybe even give you outright) the answer to the subsequent questions (which asking & answering those anyway are totally okay)

$\endgroup$
3
  • $\begingroup$ I agree with most of this, but the linked post says not to start your question by asking "How do I...?" and I don't agree with that. In my experience, on this site, titles asked as questions, including "How do I...?" tend to be much better on average than titles that are not. Also I think the "bad" question titles in that post are mostly actually pretty good. $\endgroup$ – David Z Dec 19 '14 at 2:32
  • $\begingroup$ @DavidZ: There are a few answers on the Meta post, I particularly like muntoo's answer which doesn't seem to oppose the How do I... type titles (even including a How to.. in his "Good" examples). $\endgroup$ – Kyle Kanos Dec 19 '14 at 2:40
  • $\begingroup$ Ah, right, my previous comment was only in response to the top answer. $\endgroup$ – David Z Dec 19 '14 at 3:00
3
$\begingroup$

"Topic question 1"

"Topic question 2"

"Topic question 3"

Honestly, these are terrible titles. (A good rule of thumb is that any title which includes the word "question" is probably a terrible title.) They do not say what is actually being asked. That's how you should title your questions: ask the thing that is actually being asked.

There's really no need to indicate that the questions are related. For each question, just write a title that asks your question and then put the complete question in the body, as you normally would. If you think it is useful to reference a previous question, you can mention it and link to it in the body of the new question.

$\endgroup$
1
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ But make sure that what you ask in your title is the same as what you ask in the text! It bothers me to no end when the questions are different from title to text... $\endgroup$ – tpg2114♦ Dec 20 '14 at 0:26

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .