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Trying to edit the title of this question to fix the spelling of "alignment": I'm having problems aligning the content region (in pink) and the nav region (in red) on my site

I got the "question with that title already exists" error, linking to this question: How do I get my tabs to line up properly using CSS?, and preventing the edit from going through.

Is this something which could be fixed/changed?

disclaimer: could be considered a dup of I can't edit a question when the title already exists, but I can ask? but it seems like the context is different. It also leads to the followup question of, if the desire is to do away with people making use of common titles like this, is having a minor misspelling in the title a way of evading that intended result?

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Is this something which could be fixed/changed?

What should be fixed here is the question title. "CSS alignment issue" is a terrible title. It says nothing about the actual problem.

As much as I dislike them, the OP's title choice is a malicious circumvention of the automated quality filters. I would tend to downvote the question for that reason - it shows that the OP doesn't care about anything apart from getting his problem solved.

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    Good point, I got tunnel-visioned on trying to make my spelling change & couldn't see the forest for the trees
    – kekekela
    Jan 19, 2012 at 21:50
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If two questions (that are not duplicates) have the same title, this is not a good thing. It generally means the title is confusing or unclear, since it can classify two separate problems. It would be a better idea to clarify the title to something more usable and unique to each problem. The kind of thing where, looking at the question title, you can get a greater picture of the situation.

This is pretty much why the system blocks questions that have the same title. It's primarily for people who use extremely vague titles like "regex problem" or "css alignment issue" - what is the Regex problem? What isn't working with the CSS alignment? These things should be, at the very least, alluded to within the title, and then explained in full in the question body.

So, to conclude, if you can't fix a typo because it causes a matching title, change to a new title.

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  • Ok. I've always stopped short of rewording things unless it was for grammar but I'll do that going forward.
    – kekekela
    Jan 19, 2012 at 21:47
  • @kekekela Yes, please do so. The title is an important part of the question; often you can improve a question a lot simply by adding a few formatting touches and replacing the title by one that doesn't suck. Always strive for a title that both gives some context and mentions what is uniquely interesting about the particular question.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Jan 19, 2012 at 22:06
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This should go without saying, but the real problem is that both variants of the title suck.

I fixed that for you.

Also here.

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