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Assessing the 5 tag limit
We currently have a limit of 5 tags per question.
Should we keep this the same or would any changes be of benefit?
For example:
- Should the limit be higher or lower?
- Should there be different limits for different contexts:
- Different communities?
- Different categories?
- Different post types?
- Is there a need for a limit?
I think this also depends on the community, so I suggest changing the limit at the community level instead of having a l …
9mo ago
The tag limit is a trade off. If you allow many tags, you have more freedom when tagging, but also you must work harder …
9mo ago
Such a tag limit seems low to me, though I can't think of any specific cases in which more than 5 tags would apply. Howe …
9mo ago
3 answers
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I think this also depends on the community, so I suggest changing the limit at the community level instead of having a limit across all the Codidact communities.
For the specific case of Software Development, the five-tag limit seems to work fine. If we aim to have meaningful tags as shown by Lundin in this post, having a rather low tag limit is actually useful because we want to avoid:
- generic tags
- tags about the question content
- company names in tags
The tag limit is a trade off. If you allow many tags, you have more freedom when tagging, but also you must work harder to clean up unnecessary tags from people who don't know better. That last one assumes too many tags is a problem. Steam, for example, has no limits on tags for a game, and functions just fine (partly because users are allowed to vote on tags and their search systems are sophisticated). However, I can see how some people on a Q&A site like this would get frustrated at seeing new users add unnecessary tags.
With fewer tags, you have less freedom, but there is also less work for mods to do to clean up tags. When you have few tags, you're more likely to think about what tags you are adding.
As for where the cap should be, I think the Pareto principle applies here. If you add 10 tags, probably only 2-3 are most meaningful, and the other 7 are basically noise. So why not skip the noise, and only add the 3?
Compounding the issue is "service tags". These are tags that are not necessarily about describing the subject matter, but to help categorize the type of question. They are most useful for active moderators, not regular users. These compete with subject matter tags that are useful to ordinary users for limited tag space.
Perhaps a solution could be that the number of tags you can add depends on your score? New user would start out being able to add 3 tags, and after the initial "onboarding" period this would increase to 5. Long time active users can add up to 10. I'm not sure what should happen if say a 3 tag user tries to edit a question that had 7 tags added to it by a 10 tag user, though.
Such a tag limit seems low to me, though I can't think of any specific cases in which more than 5 tags would apply. However, I'm not sure what the use in limiting this upfront is; I'm not sure it solves any problems that aren't better addressed in other ways. In case there actually is a need for more than 5 tags, this limit is nothing but an annoying barrier. In other cases, in which there's not a need for that many tags, but a user attempts to apply an excess amount nonetheless, that's an indicator that the post is in need of an edit anyway. As such, a large amount of tags serves as a sign that the post in question somehow needs an improvement. That is not a bad thing.
Completely removing the limit opens the system to abuse. That is not a good idea, but the limit doesn't have to be this low to prevent that. Increasing it to 10 should satisfy all the needs. There are possibly some cases where 6-10 tags might apply; more than that, seems too unlikely at this moment.
I suggest increasing the limit to 10 tags, and rather show a warning when a user attempts to add more than 3-4 tags; this ensures that one's never hard limited for when the need actually arises, and that users are cautioned and taught to attempt using fewer tags.
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