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The tag is fail - how meta is that? And I'm posting this on a meta site. It's meta meta meta.

offers no benefit. It's not likely to be searched, it does not distinguish a question's content or help people find answers or discover questions to contribute to.

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EDIT 1

I argue that in and of itself isn't enough of a modifier to really help in the search for posts. With a name like ServerFault I would bet that half of all posts (at least) would be strong candidates for the tag. Now specific failure as tags would be awesome.

Is it something of a recurring tag? I don't think it's too terribly recurring, no. After two years we only have 13 survivors. Once a year we could sweep through a list of tags like this and kill them dead.

The nicest solution IMO would be to blacklist it. Think we can convince the right people? HAW! HAW HAW! wipes tear I'm so crazy sometimes.

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  • This is getting tweeted too!
    – Shane Madden
    Commented Jan 5, 2012 at 23:41
  • 4
    @ShaneMadden Don't hate me because I'm awesome.
    – Wesley
    Commented Jan 5, 2012 at 23:42
  • I think someone needs to invent products with names/acronyms "fun", "fail", "humour" etc.
    – Andrew
    Commented Jan 6, 2012 at 0:59
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    And here's me trying to search for a humorous fail, just for fun.
    – John Gardeniers
    Commented Jan 6, 2012 at 1:56

2 Answers 2

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This is a meta-tag, and it and its brethren should be blacklisted. They don't classify anything atomically, and by themselves they don't mean anything; they must be used with another tag. We don't like meta-tags around these parts, so they should go.

Because of their recurring nature, they should be put on the tag blacklist like is.

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  • As per the numbers above there aren't many and if removed none would result in untagged questions.
    – user9517
    Commented Jan 6, 2012 at 20:31
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I'm less convinced of this one since the usage of this tag seems to less in the mode of the lolcat and more in the mode of putting the error message in the tag. By the same reasoning , , and should also be expurgated. This tag just needs a bit of pruning.

The use-case is one of a modifier on an existing tag. A meta-tag, but perhaps a useful one. A post tagged with:

Tells you at a glance what the main problem is.

This distinguishes it from other such now-gone metatags like:

Where the meta-tag (windows) is merely an overly broad and mostly useless classifier. These tags are somewhat useful, they just need some regular maintenance to keep clean.

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    error was next on my list and now that you bring it up, fault and crash would be on that list. It adds nothing and doesn't seem to help searches either for solutions or people looking to contribute.
    – Wesley
    Commented Jan 6, 2012 at 4:18
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    If we "need" tags like error, fault and crash then perhaps we should also create and start using running-properly, all-good, stable, etc.
    – John Gardeniers
    Commented Jan 6, 2012 at 10:01
  • These are tags that naturally reoccur, so we'll either have to convince the devs to blacklist them or remember to go through every so often and purge.
    – sysadmin1138 Mod
    Commented Jan 6, 2012 at 12:49
  • @JohnGardeniers You forgot about I-like-turtles
    – Wesley
    Commented Jan 6, 2012 at 17:09
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    Oh, and downvoted to show disagreement with an idea, but I still think you're swell.
    – Wesley
    Commented Jan 6, 2012 at 17:10
  • @sysadmin1138: That's fairy easy - you just have to mail them and ask and reference the discussion. I think they have to have no questions attached too but that should be fairly easy as they just being deleted rather than retagged.
    – user9517
    Commented Jan 6, 2012 at 20:17
  • @iain When adding to the blacklist, it's best to have bigbig numbers in the answer voting. So we have a ways to go before we get there.
    – sysadmin1138 Mod
    Commented Jan 6, 2012 at 20:31
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    vmware and amazon which are both blacklisted had no more support that @wesleydavis's current proposal does.
    – user9517
    Commented Jan 6, 2012 at 20:36

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