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

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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.

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General comments (2 comments)
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+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.

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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 about 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 about 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 about 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.