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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
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I don't see anything wrong with a way to ban tags, other than it would require more coding from CD devs. Nothing wrong with that - you need to break some eggs if you want an omelette.
However, maybe it's actually not necessary? I've seen SO do a thing where they create the over-general tag, and the description begins with "DO NOT USE THIS TAG" in bold. Since SO pops up a card with the first few words of the description when suggesting tag completion, and people unfamiliar enough with the tags to be guessing them are likely to read the popup, that's a good way to indicate discouraged tags.
Why would this not work in this case? (I grant that implementation effort aside, it would still be better to have a way of actually forbidding tags)
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