I think the most important tip for asking about a story is composing a concise title and first paragraph.
The title issue has been discussed Consensus on Story Identification titles? and the quality of titles is better than it was a year ago, but I'm not sure how much of that is people reviewing questions vs people writing them well in the first place.
When I scan down a list of questions and see something like Need help finding fantasy book series with no helpful snippet underneath, it's useless.