Should questions about TV shows include episode titles?

Question

I am mostly asking about TV shows whose seasons are released at once, but the question could bee made broader to include any show.

When I see here a question about a "traditional" TV show on the main page, I will assume that it is likely about a recent episode and refrain to read the question before I am not up to date with the show.

But there are shows like Daredevil or Iron fist that are released in one load and many people like to binge watch them. I don't. When a question appears here, I cannot know if it is about the first episode and I will be mildly spoiled, or if it is about one of the last episodes and big events from the show will be spoiled. A typical example is this question: will I learn that Jessica Jones plays a big part in the show, or is it just a minor Easter Egg about another show?

Of course, a simple solution would be to avoid reading questions before I finally completed watching the show. But many of these shows are linked together by easter eggs and references, and I like to learn about them, or some shows have a complicated plot and reading about the episode I just watched helps me a lot (not a "one time release" example, but I could not understand, hence fully enjoy, WestWorld without the help of this site).

Should a question's title about a particular episode of a show includes its title?

If so, should we actively remind people to do it (in comments for example)?

Answer 1

No

This presents a great number of issues.

• First and foremost, it’s not really so helpful. As you say, its usefulness is primarily limited to the case of TV shows that are released in one big bundle on Netflix, not the majority of TV shows. But we’d need to have a consistent policy, so this would affect all TV shows.
• Nearly as important, which episode title? This seems rather simple when a question is about the events of a single episode, but not at all as clear when a question (as is often the case) deals with individuals, relationships, or events that appear in multiple episodes. For example, the question of why Wilson Fisk turned to crime (trivial, but nonetheless possible) is not tied to any particular episode, but a question about it could easily spoil a few. What to do then? This policy risks being confusing and complicated.
• It’s a bit inelegant. Instead of having Is this person Jessica Jones?, we would have Is this person Jessica Jones? [Iron Fist, Season 1, Episode 8, “Blessing of Many Fractures”]. Ugh! Also, we want questions to have nice, attractive titles when they show up in HNQ, not titles that look we’re trying to access array elements.
• It would be extremely labor-intensive. Many of our questions are about TV shows, and this would be a policy that most users (particularly new ones) would not be aware of. It might require a lot of editing on the part of our veteran users.
• This could drastically increase the chance that titles could exceed the 150-character limit, given how long episode titles can run. Consider, for example, the Orphan Black episode title “Ruthless in Purpose, and Insidious in Method,” which adds a full 44 characters (including spaces) to the title of a question. This is before we even consider the necessity of including seasons for the same reason, as mentioned.

As an alternative, I would suggest simply asking another user in chat what the question is related to. As long as a user has at least 20 reputation, they should simply be able to ask a user less concerned with spoilers what time period a question is related too.