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Comments on How can tags be deleted?

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How can tags be deleted?

+7
−0

I started heading into the rabbit-hole of organising tags on the mathematics site, and there are some which are obvious typos and have no questions associated (because the questions have been retagged to the correct spelling). In the interests of tidiness it would be nice to delete them, but even though I'm a site mod I don't see any way to do this.

Is the only route to delete tags currently to flag them here for a member of staff to deal with?

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+6
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This is a gap we need to address, yes. There's another way to get rid of them that's a little hacky: you can merge the bad tag into another one. If there's an obvious target (like there were two tags for the same thing but one was misspelled) I would merge into the correct one. If there's no obvious target and you're just trying to nuke a tag, you'll need to pick some target -- be sure there are no posts currently using that tag first.

When you merge tags, it affects the post history for posts that originally used the now-dead tag. This can be confusing if a post was tagged one way, you fixed the tag, and there are comments about the original tag. Ideally tag history would be visible in the way that post history is, but it's not, or at least not yet.

In the merge interface, pay attention to source and target. I don't remember for sure, but I think the interface on SE approaches it from the other side. Here, you go to the tag you want to keep and choose what to merge into it; I think over there you go to the tag you want to get rid of and choose what to merge it into. If you are or were a mod there, this might catch you the first time.

Update: We've added the ability for administrators to delete tags. (It touches a few things in the database, so it's restricted for now.) If you don't want to use the merge trick, ask one of us for help (or ask a support question on your community's meta and we'll see it).

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2 comment threads

Just do it like SE? (4 comments)
Workaround (2 comments)
Just do it like SE?
Lundin‭ wrote about 3 years ago

Can't we just implement it like SE? That is, if a tag exists and no post is using it, the tag deletes itself after a certain time. This enables tag clean-ups by regular users and not just by mods. Mass deletion without manual edits is likely a useful mod tool to have as well.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote about 3 years ago

I'd like both -- some sort of auto-cleaning, and also better tools for mods to manage this. We haven't gotten to it yet, but I'll make sure we have issues tracking these (might exist already; will check and create if not).

Monica Cellio‭ wrote about 3 years ago

Github issues: https://github.com/codidact/qpixel/issues/719, https://github.com/codidact/qpixel/issues/720. I haven't proposed auto-clean first; I think first we need to enable deleting and then have a way to be alerted that there are unused tags (and which they are), so communities can clean them up. There might be tags that should exist even if they have zero posts, like the status tags that are automatically created on metas and tags with descriptions, so I'd want us to think through that more before implementing something. But meanwhile, let's at least make manual deletion easier!

Monica Cellio‭ wrote about 3 years ago

Admins can now delete tags. Mods can escalate a request to admins. (Removing a tag involves touching a bunch of places in the database, because it's "as if it never existed", so admin-only for now at least.)