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Comments on A way to prohibit creating certain tags.
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A way to prohibit creating certain tags.
On EE.CO we have some tags that are utterly useless, but people keep on using them, for example voltage.
For non-experts: voltage is one of the main physical quantity used to describe the behavior of any circuit or electrical system.
Such tags become kitchen sinks used to tag questions of all sorts, so there is no benefit to use them to organize questions.
I was thinking whether we would need a new feature like a "forbidden tag" thing, with which mods could define a set of tags that cannot be created (when a user tried to create them, some kind of message would be displayed to warn them). They could appear on the tag list in a different color, with a notice to not use them.
However, I think this behavior could be emulated with existing features.
If we define a tag like do-not-use-this-tag-ever and then create synonyms with all the tags we want to prohibit, the users wouldn't be able to create them and the platform would already point that out.
Do you think this is a sound idea?
A problem I can see is that probably there is a limit on how many tag synonyms can be created (is it a DB limit or a UI limit?).
I've already created tags with 4 synonyms, but in this case we could be dealing with dozens of synonyms (commonly used words used in the field that are too generic to mean anything as tags). Maybe the system is not designed to handle this.
What do you think about the idea?
Category settings include some tag settings: - Required tags: a set of tags, one of which must be included in a post …
9mo ago
Moderator only tags Another existing feature that might be relevant as part of a solution: some tags can only be added …
9mo ago
Some thoughts: 1. If e.g. profanity in tags is becoming an issue, that should definitely be dealt with, perhaps with …
9mo ago
I don't see anything wrong with a way to ban tags, other than it would require more coding from CD devs. Nothing wrong w …
9mo ago
Post
Category settings include some tag settings:
-
Required tags: a set of tags, one of which must be included in a post (this is how discussion, feature-request, bug, and support on meta work)
-
Topic tags: tags with a visual difference but no other restrictions (the Proposals site uses these)
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Moderator-only tags: what it says on the label.
It seems reasonable to me to add blacklisted tag names as a fourth type of setting. Everything else in this section involves actual tags and I don't know if the code is assuming that, so I don't know if this is easy or hard. I'll have to ask.
Category settings are admin-only because there's destructive stuff in there too. This approach works if blacklisting is expected to not be a super-frequent operation. Our team is generally pretty quick in responding to requests from moderators for configuration changes, but I do acknowledge that it's an extra step, so if we think it'll be needed a lot we should look for another way to approach it.
(Possibly it makes sense to move these settings from the category settings to new options available from the tags page, like the "new" button that is available to moderators. But that's a bigger job.)
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