What can be done about (new) users who don't take feedback regarding community expectations/standards on board?

Question

We have a relatively new user (their profile currently says they've been a member for 16 days) who seems to be particularly interested in Harry Potter, and has asked a number of questions about the books under the harry-potter tag. However, there is a problem: Every single question is originally posted with a title of the form "Book title - Character name".

Everybody reading this should be aware that this is not a suitable title for a question. This user has been told that this is not a suitable title for a question. Repeatedly. On multiple questions. By more than one person (myself included).

For whatever reason, they refuse to take this feedback on board. New questions get posted using the same structure for the title, and are then edited by other users (often with a comment informing them, yet again, that it's not an acceptable title). They don't - as far as I've seen - respond to these comments, so it's possible they haven't seen them. It might be a (lazy) method of avoiding spoilers in the question title. Whatever the reason, the feedback is not being taken on board.

In situations like this, what can be done? Ideally an answer would cover:

1. Methods for ensuring the user has seen the feedback.
2. Methods for encouraging - and, if absolutely necessary, forcing - compliance in the future.
3. Further options if all other actions fail.

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I don't want to get into a discussion about whether this is an issue. We have community standards, rules and guidelines, and all users are expected to comply with them, so a user not doing so is a problem, especially if they continue after being informed of what the expectation is. It's disrespectful to continue to expect other users to do basic things for them, but it's also not exactly disruptive enough to warrant a suspension or question ban (other than the titles, the majority of their questions aren't particularly low quality).

Answer 1

For what it's worth the user in question is the second user who has acted like this in recent times. The first user eventually took the feedback on board after lots of prompts and editing by community members and has since gotten better at writing titles.

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Now these titles aren't great but lets not forget...

Writing good titles is an art

For some general guidance on writing good titles I'd recommend reading this post over on Meta.SE. It's a fairly decent post to link to users who may need some pointers as it covers the general guidelines and is a network wide guide.

Now for some specific links from our site that can be helpful to point users too:

• Should questions about TV shows include episode titles? Conclusion: No.

• How does the community feel about including asterisks, underscores or similar plaintext conventions in question titles? Conclusion: Use it if you want but we'd prefer not to have markdown looking titles.

• Consensus on Story Identification titles? This one is more of a guide on what story identification titles should look like. Useful if the person is mainly asking story-identification questions.

• Is it OK for titles to have tags in them? Conclusion: Yes, as long as they occur naturally.

• Abbreviations in question-titles, okay? Conclusion: Generally no, abbreviations, especially on first use, should be expanded.

That's about it for specific metas, that I can find, on our site. An attempt for a guide on What are the guidelines for 'descriptive' and 'searchable' title? went unanswered so we have no formal meta policy on descriptive and searchable titles. The best guide we have is really the one from Meta.SE I initially linked.

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As for what can actually be done, well do what we are currently doing. At each step if the title has not already been fixed I would encourage the user to edit it. I would also suggest linking to one of the metas above if you feel it is appropriate.

1. Comment on the user's post and politely explain the situation to them.

2. Comment again, maybe a bit sterner. Should go without saying but all comments should still comply by the Code of Conduct.

3. Rinse and repeat a few times.

4. If nothing else works and all attempts fall on deaf ears flag for moderator attention, explain the situation and let them handle it. It's out of the community's hands at that point. The flag doesn't have to be too wordy but explain the situation briefly. For an example flag text, edit as needed as I'm not the most eloquent user, see below.

   This user usually has less than ideal titles of the format: format. All attempts to reach them have failed and poor titles continue to come in. Can you send them a message to ask them to improve?

Beyond commenting and raising to the moderators there isn't much you can do and I wouldn't get too worked up about it. Remember the community can always edit and with the active users we have titles are usually fixed nice and quickly anyway.

I will note though that personally I wouldn't comment to the same user more than N times, where N is an arbitrary number. It may feel like you are personally "attacking" the user and you don't need any retaliation to come your way from trying to help. At some point it's best to walk away and let someone else handle it.

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Further reading

• Are non-question titles desirable or undesirable? Conclusion: It doesn't really matter as long as it is a "good" title.

• Should this be a clickbait site, or should we stand by SE standards of question quality? Conclusion: Use a clear as title as possible. This would have been up in the "guides" section but I'd recommend not linking it because of the conversation surrounding the title question.

• Is it okay to have spoilers in question titles? Conclusion: Yes, descriptive titles are more important. However, don't go out to intentionally spoil something, avoid them if possible (to a point though).

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Side note

Most of these questions are generally well received, some have hit the HNQ, and they have undoubtedly brought traffic here. If all that is wrong with them is a poor title that is something I can live with when considering the benefits. After all it is trivial to fix the title with a simple edit and can be sorted out quite quickly considering our active users.