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Summary

Ok, we have a lot of bad tags. I found at least half a dozen without trying over the weekend. Some of these tags have hundreds of questions in them, meaning that it will take a dev so that we don't clobber the front page.

For the next day or two, let's compile a running list of them here, so that we can make this one big request, rather than a bunch of annoying little requests.

How this question works

Post the tags that you want nuked in an answer. Discussion about that tag will take place in the comments. Anything generally agreed upon that had more than a handful of questions in it will be added to the list in this question. Please don't edit things into the list right away, wait until they've been voted on. (Unless, you're a mod of course) :-D

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  • Prolly too late now but home-server was quite possibly a valid tag for the Microsoft home server product as opposed to the generic 'I have a server at home'. (Also just because it is aimed at home does not always imply that it is off topic)
    – JamesRyan
    Commented Jul 16, 2012 at 11:45
  • 4
    @JamesRyan I think windows-home-server would be a better tag for that anyway so that it follows the naming conventions of the other windows server tags.
    – MDMarra
    Commented Jul 16, 2012 at 12:46

13 Answers 13

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I wrote a query a little over a month ago that sorts tags based upon their closure ratio. Some of them are legitimate tags ( seems like a keeper), but most are just signs of poor tag choices or topics that don't apply to this site.

For posterity and clickability, below are the top 100 at the moment. Since it's unwieldily, I've broken it into categories: Tags that need review, tags that we can handle ourselves (which have less than 25 questions), tags that we need devs to burninate, and tags from this list that we have handled ourselves.

Tags awaiting review:

Tags uncovered in the burnination audit

Tags we can handle ourselves

Tags we need devs to burninate

(empty set....for now)

Tags that need more cleanup prior to burnination

Handled Tags

Set Five:

Set Four:

Set Three:

Set Two:

Set One:

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  • I think that we want to weed out any tags with < 25 questions in it, since we can handle those ourselves. They should be moved into a new list.
    – MDMarra
    Commented Feb 28, 2012 at 13:48
  • Would think some of the DB related ones might merit migrating some of the Q's to DBA.SE
    – ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells
    Commented Mar 15, 2012 at 12:52
  • 1
    I unearthed another 100ish tags. I'll put in some for burnination. install and timeout need way more cleanup before I'm submitting those. General rule: if there's >150 questions in the tag, and most of those are open questions, I'm probably not burninating.
    – Aarthi Staff
    Commented Oct 10, 2012 at 22:51
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    What monster have I created?!
    – Jeff Ferland
    Commented Oct 10, 2012 at 23:10
  • I've gone through and purged the 'untagged' questions. A large number of these were questions relating to education/career/hiring, and ALL of those tags were purged. So I've been deleting all but the most popular. Our old-time users may see some rep-loss due to that.
    – sysadmin1138 Mod
    Commented Oct 11, 2012 at 15:17
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seems like it's pretty ambiguous. There's already , so I think anything related to DNS wildcards can go in there. It looks pretty superfluous on all other questions.

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Found some more that seem bad, while cleaning up the existing bad tags. They're all relatively unused, so we can handle them ourselves.

, , , , , , , and and probably .

Not so sure about , but it seems to only be used in old threads that are currently out of scope, and I'm having trouble thinking of a legitimate use for it under the current rules.

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  • 1
    Your retagging efforts are appreciated, not least because they drag some old crud to the surface where we can cast close votes, but can you slow down just a little please. New questions are struggling to stick their heads up past the edited ones.
    – John Gardeniers
    Commented Aug 28, 2012 at 21:10
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I just noticed the tag and for the life of me I can't think of a reason for it to exist. On it's own it's absolutely useless. Not only does the "I" in IT stands for information, each and every question must relate to information, which if nothing else makes the tag superfluous (my big word for today).

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is also a thing. Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!??!?!?!

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  • 2
    Dunno but maybe we should track its usage :) BTW, is that your big word for the day? It's much bigger than "superfluous".
    – John Gardeniers
    Commented Sep 20, 2012 at 1:18
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There's quite a few off topic questions still open with the tag. Can this tag be added to the pile?

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Nuke it: . Totally useless on a site dedicated to, you guessed right, administration.

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Should the tag exist? I don't believe so and further believe that those questions carrying the tag are off topic.

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NUKE:

All are not needed as the is enough

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should go. I can only find 7 question with that tag. 4 are already closed and I don't believe the tag is correct for the remaining 3.

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Presenting to the chopping block:

It has nothing to do with DNS, and seems to be the burial ground of failed attempts to tag questions with "certificate authority".

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is another generic manufacturer tag. Like there is such a broad range of products it could cover that it's basically worthless.

- I'm not sure what it's for. Many Backup Exec questions seem to have been tagged with this, along with .

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  • The questions with both backup and exec should probably be retagged backupexec.
    – user9517 Mod
    Commented Sep 24, 2012 at 20:49
  • There were only 3 so I retagged them.
    – user9517 Mod
    Commented Sep 25, 2012 at 8:13
-1

Generic manufacturer tags:

These result in people not using more specific tags related to a product line or technology - e.g. .

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  • 2
    ...what if there is no specific tag? Feels like the general-tag should remain, and people should just retag as appropriate.
    – nickgrim
    Commented Aug 15, 2012 at 16:33
  • Fair point. I should do that in future :-)
    – dunxd
    Commented Aug 16, 2012 at 12:20
  • 1
    I've added partial lists of better tag choices to the full tag wiki for each of these. Feel free to continue to grow those lists. (I've also added an admonition to the microsoft tag that it should probably NEVER be used -- this one I think can actually be burninated since there's ALWAYS a more specific tag...)
    – voretaq7 Mod
    Commented Aug 22, 2012 at 17:46
  • If you quickly type "microsoft exchange" into the tag field, you get both words converted to tags. The auto-suggest feature doesn't kick in fast enough to head this off (not that there is a tag microsoft-exchange anyway), so killing off the microsoft tag probably would be the best method. But there are only 90 questions tagged microsoft compared to 400+ hp and 1,300+ cisco, so not such a big deal.
    – dunxd
    Commented Aug 22, 2012 at 21:31

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