3

This is in reference to Which is the Best Engineering College in Bangalore?

It was deleted, but here is the text for anybody who can't view it:

i recently completed my 12th class i wanted to do engineering kindly suggest me best engineering college where i can full fill my dreams.some one suggested me couple of colleges please give me suggestion to select the best of it.

The question has nothing to do with English, but is a request for college suggestions.

It's been tagged with .

Before it was deleted, I started to edit the tag to replace it with something appropriate, but realized that there is nothing appropriate. Nor can a question have no tags at all.

Ideally, short of the question simply never having been asked in the first place, what should the resolution to this be? At present, it seems we have to live with a tag that is simply wrong. However, that pollutes the tag corpus. (Although in the case of it actually being deleted, that might not be a huge concern.)

Searching Meta, I found What tags for a totally off-topic question? The answer there is that all tags should be removed and replaced with . That, in addition to raising a moderator flag to have it deleted, helps to bring attention to it—or at least it used to.

So, is using still the recommended method for this? If so, can a moderator change the tag on this particular question to that?

1 Answer 1

7

You can't add to a question; that tag only appears when a question is migrated (and none of the original tags exists on the destination site) or when all tags on a question are pruned. If you try to add it on an existing question, you'll get an error:

enter image description here

The Meta.SE post you found is rather old, I'll update that answer or post a new one there.

The question you linked to is a spam seed; if it's not closed soon enough, the same person will post an answer (usually with a different account, to make it look like a real answer) with promotional content. IMHO, you shouldn't bother editing those questions, it's a waste of time.

4
  • 1
    +1 for it's a waste of time tagging/editing. The question will eventually be deleted by the system, how many days will it take? Seven?
    – Mari-Lou A
    Jun 26, 2020 at 8:34
  • @Mari-LouA nine days: english.stackexchange.com/help/roomba, it's the RemoveAbandonedClosed part of the Roomba script.
    – Glorfindel
    Jun 26, 2020 at 9:08
  • Can I take it, then, that an unstated aspect of this answer is that incorrect tags used with deleted messages do not harm the tag corpus, because it will be removed entirely? Jun 26, 2020 at 12:47
  • @JasonBassford yes. There's no way to find that question you linked to, except when 1) you already have that link 2) you're a ♦ moderator 3) you're the author of the question.
    – Glorfindel
    Jun 26, 2020 at 12:53

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .
https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13718/what-tag-should-be-used-when-a-question-is-completely-off-topic/13719
english.meta.stackexchange.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-33
105339
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:5PGHMJM4Q56KED7U2ZXK2Z4S4TOCZNER
<urn:uuid:acb4a174-e668-487b-b198-13ea39b18b52>
2022-08-15T04:11:27Z
151.101.193.69
text/html
sha1:ZNW3II6ZLOEJMVWUBBFXXRVSWY3TOQSE
<urn:uuid:1bc293be-52fe-4ded-94c2-22ab6a2e081c>
https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13718/what-tag-should-be-used-when-a-question-is-completely-off-topic/13719
response
<urn:uuid:6e12ca6a-1228-4ba4-a98b-e24f3f375c3f>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-33
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-209
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/