Stop rewriting trailing exclamation marks as question marks

Question

This question was originally titled

Parsing irregular prototypes? Need an advice?

Because I'm hilariously funny, I commented: "No, I don't need any advice. Cheers, though"

But as it turns out, the OP had in fact entered:

Parsing irregular prototypes? Need an advice!

I confirmed via my own edit attempts that the trailing exclamation mark is converted into a question mark automatically on post submissions.

Now, OK, the title is not great. But this seems like a broken "feature" to me; what percentage of poor question titles with a trailing exclamation mark are fixed (rather than made more broken) by rewriting that punctuation as a question mark?

I vote we kill this feature.

Answer 1

status-completed, sort of. Probably not what you intended, but oh well.

We're forbidding trailing !s^† in question titles on the trilogy, but they won't be converted to ? anymore either. This will take effect soon-ish.

The logic for trailing punctuation re-writing becomes.

• Multiple ? collapsed into one
• Multiple . collapsed into one
• ?! and similar collapsed into ?
• Spaces before trailing punctuation removed (with one exception)
• Everywhere but the trilogy, multiple ! collapsed in one

As an aside, the correct response to encountering questions like that is to edit the title. It was garbage, with or without !. ? didn't help, but that wasn't what ruined the title either.

_{†This is a very strong signal of a bad title. See the last 100 questions of that form for convincing evidence.*}

_{*If I've learned anything from the title quality filter posts, it's that there's no point in arguing from data with some people (thankfully, not all people). In this case, the data is conclusive (and in this case, publishable without privacy concerns); there's not a single title in there improved by the trailing !.}

Answer 2

If the argument for the existence of this feature is that most questions that end in an exclamation point should be replaced by a question mark instead, it's a very weak one. Also considering the actively harmful replacements done on Math.SE, I see little/no reason to keep this one around.

I looked at 100 titles ending with an exclamation point and I found two, maybe three where changing the exclamation point to a question mark would've actually improved the title. The vast majority of the substitutions would've resulted in a more confusing title due to a new, unintended interrogative tone.

Intended Title                                    ->   Modified Title
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Database under source control again!              ->   Database under source control again?
Save us from VSS!                                 ->   Save us from VSS?
Sorting strings is much harder than you thought!  ->   Sorting strings is much harder than you thought?

Not to say that the titles are good to begin with, but this feature makes no sense. Nothing is gained: you have a bad title, and change to it a bad and confusing title.

I can see why we'd want to get rid of extraneous punctuation, but this "correction" is practically useless.

Answer 3

Automatic edits that are quietly applied without history are, in my opinion, A VERY BAD IDEA. (See for instance the myriad examples of cell phones humorously changing the meaning of a text message in the broken belief that the user would rather have their spelling corrected than send exactly what they entered.) This particular "feature" is mild since it applies to just one character in one location and the automatic change is mostly harmless. But the principle is unaltered.

Now there are two reasonable fixes:

1. Notify the user that they should use a ? instead of a ! so that they may re-write the question.

2. Record the change within the edit log.

Of the two, I prefer the first as it minimizes surprise.

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Alternatively, we should ditch this feature altogether. Do you know what a question that ends in an explanation mark is called? A rant! So the system is throwing out a perfectly useful bit of data that we can feed to our mental Bayesian filter and replacing it with gibberish. Seems like this feature turns signal into noise in most cases.

Answer 4

Since this has been re-opened, I'll summarize what I've already said in comments and in chat...

The original feature request was to strip multiple trailing punctuation marks. Because they look dumb, and make the question look dumb, and in sufficient quantity even help make the site look dumb. These titles tend to be lousy anyway - but unless / until a human editor can take the time to improve them, stripping repeated punctuation is a quick way to at least ease the pain.

If you look at Jeff's answer, the intent does not seem to include this conversion of single exclamation points into question marks. This seems like a bug. It has been pointed out elsewhere that this can even cause harm in cases where the exclamation point is used to indicate a factorial. Titles ending with a factorial are extremely rare, and can always be avoided by rewording the question a bit, but it's probably the most legitimately-confusing side-effect.

That said, if you come across one of these incorrectly-transmogrified titles... Don't look for a way to circumvent the conversion! As I said, they're almost universally terrible - take the opportunity to make them better. Editing to restore the OP's desire to rant or express frustration instead of summarizing the question does absolutely nothing for the quality of the question.