Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Codidact Meta!

Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.

Comments on Why does the title come after the body when writing a question?

Parent

Why does the title come after the body when writing a question?

+11
−2

This might sound silly, but ever since I wrote my first post here, I have noticed that the title comes after the body and I find it quite strange.

Since I have some activity using Stack Exchange (both public and private) I am very used to having the title before the body, so I thought I am way too biased in this direction.

After thinking a little more I realized that I do not remember ever to have encountered any posting system (e.g. medium, forums, blogs) that reverses title with body.

Also I assume that most folks' thought process starts with an idea, a vague question and then it develops into something more, a body that includes a context.

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

1 comment thread

General comments (2 comments)
Post
+13
−1

I made that design decision. If it doesn't work we can of course change it, but the reasoning is pretty much what @pnuts said in another answer. On other sites I've seen a lot of bad titles, ones that didn't match the question that came out at the end of the question body, and I think that's because the mere act of writing a question can change what you thought you were asking as you rubber-duck your problem. I consider myself to be pretty proficient at asking questions and this still happens to me a lot. Being conscientious, I go back and rewrite my title when this happens, but I don't assume that everybody will.

Placement after the body is only upon first posting the question. When editing or, of course, viewing, the title is at the top.

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.

1 comment thread

General comments (5 comments)
General comments

Skipping 1 deleted comment.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote over 4 years ago

@pnuts that was more inertia and less intention. I don't think we explicitly talked about that.

pnuts‭ wrote over 4 years ago

@MonicaCellio More or less as I suspected :) - and definitely 'no big deal' either way but immediately under the Title makes more sense to me, and can reduce scrolling. Unfortunately there have been times (elsewhere) when Title and body have been totally incomprehensible without sight of the tags.

ShowMeBillyJo‭ wrote over 4 years ago

I agree with its current placement after the body. Often, when I don't write my titles/subjects/summaries after I've written my main copy, I end up rewriting them anyway.

Julio Cezar Silva‭ wrote over 4 years ago

Back when I was writing my first question on a random online forum, this was the first design decision that came to my mind. Most of the times, it's far easier to summarize something you already wrote.

Lundin‭ wrote over 4 years ago

If you don't know what you are about to ask at the point where you decide to ask it... then I don't think any GUI tricks will save you. We know from SE experience that if the title is bad, the rest of the post is very likely bad too, including content and tags. I think more direct "ask a question wizards" is a better way to deal with such problems.