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There is a question currently titled Can any one help me plzzzzz? I think it deserves the 6 downvotes it's received so far.

I find this title very inappropriate for our site. It seems more offensive than the simple TIA here or there. However, I can't think of a polite, detailed explanation of why it jars with what we are trying to do here. Can anyone help out with what a good explanatory comment might look like? Or maybe it is fine and I am just overreacting?

My gripes:

  • It is not remotely detailed. Just imagine trying to search for the issue within that question.
  • It uses a plea within the title.

  • In my opinion, unnecessarily repeated characters are fairly rude.

    • In addition to the repeated z the post uses many ellipses
    • It's almost as bad as "I need help ASAP!!!!" and "URGENT" pleas

Any guidance would be appreciated, even if it's that I should be more patient with such matters.

  • 5
    Have you been tempted to ask "Would you like some cheese with your whine"? Sounds like a case of, if you're gonna beg, at least do it with some class and dignity? Just wait til you have kids pal! LOL! ;) – crmprogdev Feb 8 '16 at 20:01
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    @crmprogdev Hahaha. Yep you've captured my sentiment exactly. – Adrian Larson♦ Feb 8 '16 at 20:02
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I kind of prefer (to deal with ASAP, Plzzzzz, Urgent, and the like):

SFSE etiquette discourages use of exhortations. A look back at SFSE history shows that well-worded, well-formed questions get extremely rapid response from the community, no encouragement required.

When I have done this, I've received several replies from the OP indicating 'thanks, point noted'.

But then, and I'll admit, I can be snarkier than some of the other fine members of this community as sometimes I feel OPs are too lazy to frame their questions and hence take advantage of the community.

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    I like the word exhortation for that very reason. I, too, am probably snarkier than average. – Adrian Larson♦ Feb 18 '16 at 17:23
  • @AdrianLarson - LOL and I appreciate the fellow traveler :-) – cropredy Feb 18 '16 at 18:11
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In the specific case, the question had bigger issues than the title (it got closed as unclear); editing the title alone would not help. Downvoting and voting to close is about all that can be done.

But normally I edit those titles the moment I see them (not on this site, elsewhere where I have 2000 rep). Often, just picking a part of a sentence from the first paragraph makes a decent title; in any case it's an improvement over "help me please".

If you don't feel editing, try a comment of the following form

Words such as help, please do not add information to question title. Please [edit] the title so that it better describes the specifics of your question. Do not hesitate to make it longer if needed.

The [edit] part magically becomes a link to question editing page.

The reason I mention making it longer is that almost invariably, the title with "please" does not say much about the question, and just removing "please" would not fix that.

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    I agree: fix the problem or downvote and explain why you've done so. – Samuel De Rycke Feb 8 '16 at 14:10
  • I agree with you on this, often the big problem is not only poorly worded questions it is wondering why the questioner hasn't actually tried searching first as often the answer is already there on the site. – Dave Humm Feb 19 '16 at 11:20

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