71

Quite a lot of tags which are bad (and are hopefully still actively being cleaned up) have an excerpt starting

DO NOT USE:

often followed by reasons, and some alternatives.

Mostly, the tag-wiki itself gives further guidance, and sometimes a link to a meta-post.

Can the warning-system for posting questions (and maybe also for editing) be extended to check for that and give a warning?

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  • 10
    A while back I created a SEDE query for these tags and there are currently 93 of them. – Kevin Brown Mar 2 '15 at 1:48
  • 3
    See also What is the purpose of the "DO NOT USE" tags?, especially this comment thread discussing do-not-use enforcement. – Jeffrey Bosboom Mar 2 '15 at 2:57
  • @JeffreyBosboom I'm fairly sure the current pre-post warning-system is newer than that question about the use of "DO NOT USE". – Deduplicator Mar 2 '15 at 12:16
  • 39
    I know everybody hates PHP but this is a bit harsh ... ;) – The Blue Dog Mar 2 '15 at 17:51
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    @JeffreyBosboom I think you've got a few false positives there, because the phrase "do not use" comes up later in the description for perfectly good tags. You probably want to limit to descriptions starting with that text. That gives you 37 of them. – IMSoP Mar 2 '15 at 19:31
  • 2
    From one of my answers on MSE: … these tags would be still offered by auto-complete when editing a (probably new) question. Orientation in the jungle of deprecated tags would become gradually harder and harder. This would need support from the system to be solved – we can issue a feature-request for adding “burninated” attribute to a tag. Tag with this attribute would not show in auto-complete and would have some unified identification in tag wiki and its excerpt. This way they would be easy to identify. – Palec Mar 2 '15 at 19:33
  • @IMSoP Did you mean to ping Kevin Brown instead? – Jeffrey Bosboom Mar 3 '15 at 0:49
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    @IMSoP The query is only intended for quickly filtering them down. Quite often the statement comes in the middle/end which is why I'm not checking for the beginning. See apple, block, positioning, for a few examples. – Kevin Brown Mar 3 '15 at 0:54
  • related: Improve question quality by informing askers of expectations in some career related tags at Programmers meta. Frankly, main reason to establish tag tips warnings over there was that it turned way too difficult to properly cleanup some "historical" tags – gnat Mar 3 '15 at 13:24
15

Ehm… if there are tags that say "DO NOT USE" then why is it possible to use them?

Nuke 'em and ban 'em. Simple as that.

It would be nice though if we could have a message that explains why some given tag cannot be used, probably with the same sort of warning text currently in its tag wiki excerpt.

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  • 2
    As long as we don't do extermination by orbital bombardement, and the mods seem to really dislike that, it needs time. Quite a lot actually, especially as some mods seem to see any burnination as an assault on their front-page, restricting it to a handful posts corrected each day. This is mostly about using what we have (and can have with slight tinkering by SE) to bridge the gap. Retaining the "DO NOT USE"-warning afterwards is a good idea though. – Deduplicator Mar 3 '15 at 11:14
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    "Nuke 'em and ban 'em. Simple as that." - AFAIK the tag blacklisting process is far from simple and can only be done by SE devs. I've wondered about that for a long time; an easier blacklisting process accessible to mods would probably be rather helpful for cleaning up the tagging mess and making sure it stays cleaned up. – l4mpi Mar 3 '15 at 11:16
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    There was a good reason these tags are not simply deleted. Wasn't it "they will just get created again"? – usr2564301 Mar 3 '15 at 12:27
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    @Jongware "ban 'em" takes care of that, but that process is apparently too complicated/critical/etc to be useful (see my previous comment). – l4mpi Mar 3 '15 at 12:38
  • Now this is really becoming on-topic: Why do we insist on overhauling questions in a tag when burninating that tag? @ MSE – Palec Mar 3 '15 at 22:11
  • The very first result in Kevin Brown's query is the tag for iphone which states "DO NOT use this tag unless you are addressing Apple's iPhone and/or iPod touch specifically", so nuking that doesn't sound appropriate since it must still have some use – Sayse Mar 4 '15 at 7:53

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