This is part of a series of Tech Tips aimed to assist Orchard users in adjusting to our migration from Invision Board 1.3 to Invision Board 2.0.

Ideally, when you create a topic on the Orchard, one of your foremost goals, presumably, is to get that topic noticed. Our "healthiest", most robust and most well-rounded discussions occur when users who are looking for a topic are able to easily locate and identify it.

In practical terms, that means that often you may have to sacrifice some amount of wit for clarity. In our experience, topic names which are sensational but which don't properly identify a topic get a lot of response initially, but quickly sink into obscurity soon after. Use proper names when possible, avoid abbreviations unless you have no choice due to the length of your title, check your spelling in the title carefully, etc.

Another key strategy... our internal search engine is more "accurate" if the topic title portion of your topic name contains the most specific "keywords" to identify your topic. Often, users will name a topic something like this:

Topic Title: What the heck?
Topic Description: Drew Vogel elected King of the World

Frankly, with this particular name and description, it's far less likely that someone using our search engine (especially the sub-component which searches ONLY on titles) will be able to locate this topic.

However, if you simply turn things around:

Topic Title: Drew Vogel elected King of the World
Topic Description: What the heck?

It's far more likely that a searcher will find this topic. Some key terms "Drew", "Vogel", and "King" are all in the title, and will be more easily "noticed" by most search routines.

In other words, we expect the "Topic Title" field to be more descriptive than the "Topic Description"--which is better used to "support" the chosen title, perhaps with that witicism you are dying to use.

Remember, the best thing you can you do for the board in terms of topic naming is to make every character in the "Topic Title" count. And the second best is to make every "Topic Description" count.

One more point... sometimes a moderator seeing the above will change a topic name and sometimes not. Moderation is not an exact science. One goal of ours however, is to try and keep the title as close to the original as possible, while also presenting the most searchable name, or the most representative if topics have been merged together.