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Any opinions on removing the tag?

There are currently 34 questions tagged advice. This tag doesn't seem very helpful.

Inspired by: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/

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With upvotes, but no answers. I mentioned it on the chat room and after discussion, went ahead and did this. No more advice tag.

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  • Did you remove the tag without manually editing each question (and therefore bumping them back to the top of the active page)? If so, could you use the same method again, assuming the community still agrees that the tag shouldn't exist? – John Bensin Aug 12 '13 at 21:05
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The tag removal via a fake merge mechanic that Chris W. Rea mentioned doesn't work anymore (by design, although the error we're showing is terrible), but I went ahead and removed and blacklisted the tag, so you should have no more trouble with it.

As a result of the removal, there are now a few questions in the "tag" that should be retagged or removed, depending on what's more useful for a given question.

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Since the tag was recreated shortly after this question was posted and 25 questions are now tagged with it, I'll add my opinion.

I don't think the tag is necessary because if a question is asking for advice about a specific situation, I don't see how the answers will differ enough from answers to other types of questions that aren't asking for advice.

Furthermore, the purpose of tags is to facilitate searching (I think), and I can't picture someone searching for "all questions asking for advice." I imagine someone would search tags/keywords related to their specific situation instead.

Incidentally, I don't think we need the tag on meta either. If someone needs advice on how to use a specific aspect of the site, there are other tags for that. I presume it will be trimmed automatically after a certain amount of time has elapsed because it's only present on one question.

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  • If we don't want this tag cropping up again, it will need to be blacklisted. – Chris W. Rea Aug 13 '13 at 16:21
  • @ChrisW.Rea I don't think the tag is necessary, but you mentioned to me before that blacklisting a tag was for extreme cases only. Does this qualify? Hopefully more users will chime in here over the next couple of weeks; it seems difficult to attract attention to a meta post, unfortunately. – John Bensin Aug 13 '13 at 23:00
  • 59 times for a useless tag...? Banning might be helpful in this case. – Chris W. Rea Aug 14 '13 at 23:25
  • @ChrisW.Rea Maybe so. I also just noticed the price tag, which is another tag that doesn't seem to help with sorting much, and is applied to a whole range of questions, e.g. security pricing, small business pricing, finding the best price on something, etc. Think it deserves yet another meta question? – John Bensin Aug 15 '13 at 2:25
  • @ChrisW.Rea Maybe a blacklist would be helpful; the tag was just used on another question, but this time I caught it early and removed it. – John Bensin Aug 16 '13 at 19:00
  • I'd leave the 'price' tag for now. It could be split into more specific tags. Also, I saw your edits to remove the tag 'stock-split'. Can we please leave that? I don't see a reason to remove it. We should be adding the 'stock-split' tag to other questions about splits, not removing it from the few that have it. – Chris W. Rea Aug 16 '13 at 21:44
  • @ChrisW.Rea Yeah, let's keep it. It's useful for sorting/searching purposes, and it's specific enough to be effective. Not sure what I was thinking there. Mea culpa! – John Bensin Aug 16 '13 at 21:51
  • If you want to obsess about tags, obsess with a Hippocratic philosophy: First, do no harm :) While some Stacks take a more spartan approach to tags (and I'm thinking about Ask Different), we've encouraged a rich set of tags at Money. (Yet, I agree about the "advice" not being very useful.) – Chris W. Rea Aug 16 '13 at 21:57
  • @ChrisW.Rea Well said. I'll err on the side of not removing a tag in the future. As for the "advice" tag, if a few weeks go by and no one disapproves on meta, there isn't a mod tool to remove it silently, right? Outside of a blacklist? – John Bensin Aug 16 '13 at 23:03
  • I did try to use the moderator merge-tag tool to silently nuke it again, but it failed. I've emailed Stack staff to inquire, and blacklist it too. – Chris W. Rea Aug 17 '13 at 0:15
  • @ChrisW.Rea Looks like SE staff removed it. These three questions (1, 2, 3) were untagged, so I added a few basic tags. – John Bensin Aug 18 '13 at 21:29
  • Yes. See @AnnaLear's answer to this question. And thanks! – Chris W. Rea Aug 19 '13 at 0:00
  • @ChrisW.Rea Yep, I saw it. I wanted to save the links in case they were hard to find (since they're no longer "untagged", technically). – John Bensin Aug 19 '13 at 0:17

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