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Wesley
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Are certain blacklisted words in question titles not just a bit scorched earth and unhelpful?

Recently an operating system's error message included the word "help" in it. I added the error message to the title (always helpful for those perusing questions and most certainly for SERP placement) and of course got stiffarmed by ServerFault's word blacklist for titles. "Please do not use these words in titles: help" Now I cannot include the exact error message in the title (Google search results are now buzzkilled so future searchers are less likely to find it).

  1. Are we certain that this is the best way to handle the word help?
  2. Error messages that have the word help in them occur often enough, and including the error message in a question's title really... sunglasses ...helps.

Bonus question: Is there a canonical list of blacklisted words somewhere?

Wesley
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  • 37