Let users with sufficient reputation use "problem" in titles

Why not allow problem if it's within a quoted statement?

Examples:

Subject Line: I am having a problem with app XYZ (disallowed, as under current rules)

Subject Line: Crashed with "A problem occured in module DEF"? (allowed, as it's within quotes)

I imagine it should be straight-forward to incorporate this as a validation rule. Sure it could be exploited, but people exploiting or misrepresenting through the subject line get downvoted/moderated anyways. This proposed validation would still filter most subject lines according to the original intent, but allow @slhck's subject line through (which I agree is useful when hardcoded error messages are involved).

Overall, this would satisfy @slhck's situation while not separating abilities into two classes of user as @Frédéric and @Kevin brought up.

What we have here is very rudimentary spam filter. The system has a number of other approaches to spam:

• rewriting trailing punctuation,
• bouncing questions that don't meet some nebulous quality criteria,
• post flagging,
• post editing,
• question closing,
• and, of course, reputation itself.

Some are built into the system and others are ad-hoc solutions that are bolted on over time, develop institutional inertia, and will likely bug people for many years. (I'll let the reader categorize the above and other approaches I haven't thought of.)

When it comes to ad-hoc solutions, such as filtering on the word "problem", the system slowing devolves into a mass of unintelligible exceptions to the model. Most programmers have the mental tools to deal with that sort of system, but we are now inflicting it on non-programmers and that seems a mistake. (I gather this particular tweak is only for Stack Overflow itself, but I'm going to argue that there is a better way.)

A good sign that a solution is ad-hoc is that actual users (not fresh-off-the-street users, but people who have already participated in the site) start finding ways (such as Unicode) to get around the annoying rules. They start defending questions that end in "!??!!" on the basis of some obscure programming language where this is valid syntax. They aren't doing it to be annoying or because they legitimately like those sorts of questions or even want to read more of them, but because the rule is (in their opinion) stupid. Plus it's a basic hacker impulse to find clever ways around system limitations.

Ultimately the whole idea of creating an ad-hoc spam filter has been invalidated for years. Here's what Paul Graham says about them:

If I thought that I could keep up current rates of spam filtering, I would consider this problem solved. But it doesn't mean much to be able to filter out most present-day spam, because spam evolves. Indeed, most antispam techniques so far have been like pesticides that do nothing more than create a new, resistant strain of bugs.

If we are already going to try to automatically filter posts for "quality", why not go all the way and use a Bayesian filter? Given human votes, reputation, and a massive corpus of posts and edits, there ought to be more than enough information to work with. And of course there's ten years of prior art.

One additional benefit is that it will be possible to give users a qualitative reason for what's wrong with their question:

99.3% of questions that include the word "problem" in their title have a score of -3.
Maybe, just maybe, you should rephrase the question.

I'm not sure about implementation details, so this particular behavior might be as bad an idea as the current system. It would be a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy as people would learn not to use certain words and the only posts that have them would be bad ones. Perhaps adding reputation in the mix would make the filter more than just banning certain words. The point is to make the system more objective than just "I've seen a lot of bad questions that have the word "problem" in the title, so we should ban that word."

You can do this already with some cheating.

Inserting U+200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER somewhere in the word "problem" bypasses the filter. That character is invisible, and should be ignored by text processors that understand Unicode.

I applied this technique to a Super User question, and Stack Exchange search can still find it perfectly fine, as can Google. I did make sure to include a non-ZWNJ'd version of the error in the body of the question for search engines that don't handle Unicode quite right.

On Windows, you can copy a ZWNJ to your clipboard using the charmap utility. Search for "zero width" and U+200C is the second thing found.

I believe this loophole should not be closed. (Better yet, just implement the change asked for in this question.) I don't expect non-effort-expending users will exploit it to write bad titles, and if they do, they were warned. Sometimes, it really makes sense to have an error message in the title verbatim.

Update: In light of your comment, I guess I missed the main point of your question, and I should be more specific about the last paragraph of my original answer.

Truth is, I don't think that allowing trusted (2k+) users to bypass the problem filter is the way to go, mainly because:

• Either the filter is useful (not having problem in question titles actually helps the site), and then I can't see why my edits or yours or Jon Skeet's should be able to bypass that filter,

• Or it isn't, and putting problem into titles should be allowed for everyone.

I understand we want to discourage low-quality questions, and the aforementioned filter should apply to edits in order to prevent clever users from editing problem into their question titles right after posting them. Then again, I don't think 2k+ elitism would serve us there as well as it does on other aspects of the site.

In short, if the problem filter indeed causes problems, let's improve it for everyone or get rid of it altogether. Ignoring the issue while making 2k+ users immune to its effects looks like a fix for the symptom, not the root cause.

Original answer follows:

Well, to be fair, There is a problem with the Office database is an incredibly generic error message.

Your edit aims to give that message more prominence in searches, and that's fine, but are you really sure the question actually represents such a notable manifestation of that message? Or that the answers provided will solve more than, say, 10% of the problems related to that message?

Because if it's not the case, your edit might prove counter-productive in the long run, as it will shadow other, maybe more appropriate questions about the same message in searches (assuming, of course, you don't edit these questions as they come).

Now, regarding the filter, maybe we could allow problem in titles when enclosed in double " (and maybe single ') quote characters? That seems like a natural way to include an error message in the question title (you're using it twice in your question), and it doesn't offer a filter-circumvention path much stronger than pro-blem or zero-width spaces IMHO.

Or maybe we can get rid of the problem filter altogether, but I'm too young here to know the importance of the issue it was supposed to solve and how efficiently it ended up solving it. So, I can't really advocate that.