We are currently migrating Bugzilla to GitHub issues.
Any changes made to the bug tracker now will be lost, so please do not post new bugs or make changes to them.
When we're done, all bug URLs will redirect to their equivalent location on the new bug tracker.

Bug 4569

Summary: Discourse is trying to be annoyingly smart about post titles and breaks things
Product: SDL Reporter: Ellie <etc0de>
Component: websiteAssignee: Ryan C. Gordon <icculus>
Status: RESOLVED INVALID QA Contact: Sam Lantinga <slouken>
Severity: normal    
Priority: P2 CC: icculus
Version: 2.0.9   
Hardware: x86_64   
OS: Linux   

Description Ellie 2019-03-28 13:26:08 UTC 
I was just trying to post on the discourse forums with this title:

SDL_HINT_ANDROID_SEPARATE_MOUSE_AND_TOUCH set to 1 has no effect - what am I doing wrong?

I got an annoying "Title seems unclear" popup which really sucks, because:

- it is incredibly condescending to try to teach me to write "helpful" titles without being open about what the dumb algorithm actually objects to (which I assume is the many uppercase letters, which the popup does NOT specify: it just nannies me that I should be "helpful" in the title)

- it is not a hint or strong warning, it PREVENTS me from posting such that I cannot actually put a helpful title

- SDL2 hints are written with caps, that's just how they are in the docs. So having such a rule on the SDL2 forum seems to me like a bad idea

Can this behavior be turned off?
Comment 1 Ellie 2019-03-28 13:36:25 UTC 
Ok I did some more reverse engineering fiddling, and the problem are the underscores. Again that's just how SDL2 hints are named though, so I think this rule on the sdl2 discourse forum is mostly just destructive especially since it's a blocking rule

(made worse by the fact the popup doesn't even say what arbitrary rule your title violates, I had to waste a couple of minutes experimenting to find out)
Comment 2 Ryan C. Gordon 2019-03-28 14:25:38 UTC 
This isn’t an SDL forum policy, it’s standard in Discourse. They tweak this algorithm frequently, as far as I can tell, so feedback to them at discourse.org would probably be appreciated!

(perhaps in the form of “programming forums talk differently than other special interests, and it would be nice if I could turn a dial to adjust for that.”)

--ryan.
Comment 3 Ellie 2019-03-28 14:30:26 UTC 
Was there ever a consideration to just switch to something else?

Discourse does a lot of IMHO questionable things, like:

- gamification badges that clutter notifications with distracting useless noise that can't be turned off as far as I can tell (it's only possible to disable ALL notifications)

- if I remember correctly they once grabbed CTRL+F as a key binding, replacing it with a horrible interface. Gladly the new/current version no longer seems to do that

- you say they tweak the algorithm, that's fine. but that doesn't fix the issue that doing this as a blocking, disastrously non-informative popup (how about "popup seems unclear", dear discourse developers?????) is just a HORRIBLE idea

- unnecessary over-reliance on javascript fanciness nobody really needs

What's wrong with a phpBB of SMF that will do none of these things?
Comment 4 Ellie 2019-03-28 14:32:43 UTC 
(also I forgot to ask, but since this is standard in discourse does this also mean it can't be turned off? Because if it can I suggest the best idea might be to just do so, such an algorithm inherently can never avoid false positives and currently their false positive handling is an awful experience with zero useful info, zero obvious workarounds, ...)