The helper text
what's your programming question? be specific.
has shown up as the title of a question a number of times that I have seen, (with this being the most recent one) and it's obviously never ever the proper title for a good question.
Can we just have the submission process detect that they haven't entered anything there and kick them back to the question submission page with a warning that they need to fill out the title?
Note: I understand that in most sane browser implementations that helper text isn't submitted as the default unless you actually type it in, of course, but it's apparent that some browsers do not behave properly with the helper text as I doubt folks are actually typing in (with the exact casing/spacing and proper spelling) the helper text phrase
Update with links:
After figuring out how to massage Data.SE appropriately, I figured out how to find all the questions that had that exact text as their title once upon a time, and it's only been done six times in total that I can tell (all in the last six months):
- https://stackoverflow.com/posts/4769276/revisions
- https://stackoverflow.com/posts/5317924/revisions
- https://stackoverflow.com/posts/5755750/revisions
- https://stackoverflow.com/posts/5806571/revisions
- https://stackoverflow.com/posts/5931701/revisions
- https://stackoverflow.com/posts/6204827/revisions
So, the good news is it's not as bad a problem as I suspected it might be. The bad news is that it does appear to be happening and it's not just one or two problem users, it's six entirely separate users. So I'd certainly understand if this was status-deferred, but I think it's a pretty easy change and it makes problems go away!
**Data.SE query:**
Data.SE query that shows all the posts that have the placeholder text in their revision history