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I definitely prefer $\LaTeX$ in the body of a question. It's sharp, easy to read and adds a lot of quality.

However, in the title I find it highly disturbing. It also destroys the nice look on the 'Questions' page, if people put weird commands (or huge equations) into the title and it gets formatted.

Thus, is it worth disabling it?

I've added the Tag bug, because it might be unintended behavior. Although one could argue this simply is a feature...

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    $\begingroup$ Granting that this title is ugly, it's also so amusing that I can't bring myself to "quiet down" your very effective demonstration of the problem. At least, not here on Meta where there's little damage to be done. $\endgroup$
    – Air
    Jan 3, 2017 at 19:38

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Generally, there is nothing to stop users from inserting distracting elements in their posts, either title or body. (It can be emoji in a title 😒 🌟 🌠 🌰 🌱 🌲 πŸ• πŸ– πŸ— 🍘 🍟 or a cat meme in post body, etc.)

With the rare exception of trolls, users do it because they don't realize it's distracting. So, help them by editing the post and explaining (for example, in the edit summary) that this sort of things should not be used.

Stack Exchange does have the ability to block certain titles by a regex match. For example, on Mathematics site $$ is blocked in titles, which is meant to disallow displayed formulas in titles. This was done because there was enough such occurrences in practice, not because of "someone could" concerns. (Mathematics gets over 100 times as many questions as Engineering, and the proportion of formula-heavy posts is also higher.)

On Chemistry, LaTeX/MathJax formatting is strongly discouraged in titles, but there is no software-enforced ban; users edit it out. I think this is the best course of action: when you see a badly formatted post, edit it.

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  • $\begingroup$ guess thats another possible design philosophy. Though I would argue that there is no point in keeping it if it is discouraged anyways. On the other hand ... don't you get reputation if you edit someone elses post? $\endgroup$
    – FirefoxMetzger
    Jan 1, 2017 at 22:10
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    $\begingroup$ If it's blocked automatically, it would block using dollar signs in titles for any reason, including references to actual currency. And users wouldn't be able to make an exception for that rare question that actually benefits from having markup in title. $\endgroup$
    – user748
    Jan 1, 2017 at 22:13
  • $\begingroup$ @FirefoxMetzger Users who do not already have the edit privilege are awarded +2 reputation for each accepted edit suggestion, up to a limit of 1,000 total. Not that it seems relevant here. $\endgroup$
    – Air
    Jan 3, 2017 at 19:36
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    $\begingroup$ Chemistry mod popping in - here's why we don't like LaTeX/MathJax in titles (with a response from the SE staff as well). Essentially, having MathJax in the title can make the question URL go wrong: you can see it in this question itself - the URL has "-huge-" inside ;) I don't know how important MathJax is for you guys - for example on Maths and Physics enforcing such a rule would make life very difficult, and consequently they retain MathJax in titles. But I just thought I'd share that link. $\endgroup$
    – orthocresol
    Jan 5, 2017 at 18:52

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