No symbols, emojis, emoticons, or special characters in post titles

[Chris Allingham]

For a while, I was trying to keep on top of threads that contain symbols or emojis in the post title, deleting them when I found them. But today I realized I have fallen down on the job, finding many such posts with these symbols embedded in the title going back several months.

I know adding little graphics to post titles looks fun and interesting, but my concern is that doing so makes URLs hard to read and I think affects the way pages are indexed by our search engine as well as Google, Bing, etc.

Here's an example of a thread title:

ranch ​

The author says this thread is about "Chicken bacon ranch pie" (pizza). The symbols look fun, but I'm not sure the search engines index the symbols and can only understand the word "ranch". Search engines may index on "chicken bacon ranch pie" in the body of the post, but I believe the thread title carries more weight in ranking the page than does body content.

I don't think I have it within me to go back to every post to find/delete such symbols, but moving forward I've installed an add-on that prevent these from being added to post titles. You're welcome to continue adding them to the body of your posts.

Thanks for your understanding on this,
Chris

 

[Bruce]

Chris:
I prefer clean titles anyway.
Thanks for working on this issue and thanks for keeping this forum running so well.

 

[Joan]

Yes Chris, what Bruce said.

 

[BFletcher]

For a while, I was trying to keep on top of threads that contain symbols or emojis in the post title, deleting them when I found them. But today I realized I have fallen down on the job, finding many such posts with these symbols embedded in the title going back several months.

Come on, Chris; step it up