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Please change the title to something along the lines of "Equifax customer service is ineffective"

Sure thing, we've updated the title to a representative phrase from the article.

I thought there was a pretty hard rule of using the name of the article only, Even when it makes no sense in context. What are the exceptions to that rule?

You're right that there's a strong preference to use the original article title. That said, the guidelines go into more detail under "In Submissions":

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In this case I suspect the mods agreed with 'XR0CSWV3h3kZWg that the given title wasn't very good (and not obscure in the intriguing sense, maybe whimsical sense). Personally I find the "I did x. This is what happened"-type quite click-baity. As an aside, I wonder how far one could go using only "this" as a filter for click-bait titles.

Or you could make it even more simple and leave "customer service" out of it.

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