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One of our top four tags has the following description:

This tag will be removed, do not use it.

It's been that way for years. It's just about the least informative possible tag. And yet, at time of posting, it has more than 40% more tagged questions than soql (3077 to 2138), our query language. That's crazy. Do we have a way to definitively kill this tag?

EDIT

After looking at one of @Peter's posts on the tag, I realized that there is a problem with removing the tag entirely: some posts have only that tag. Since every post needs at least one tag, what do we do with such posts?

UPDATE 7/29

We're down to 2891 posts for salesforce-crm versus 2184 for soql. Headed in the right direction!

UPDATE 12/22

The salesforce-crm tag is out of the top four! And it's about to be passed for fifth as well! We've now managed to go over five months without any new posts being allowed to keep this tag. The actual tag deletion seems to have stalled, but we're heading in the right direction.

Top 8 tags as of today:

tag               |  posts
=========================
apex              |  15997
visualforce       |  10715
trigger           |   3825
marketing-cloud   |   2624
salesforce-crm    |   2578
soql              |   2518
unit-test         |   2318
javascript        |   2183
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    Maybe the mods can delete tags. I've hit Matt up, let's see. On a side note, I've been rejecting a lot of new tags without description or improvement recently. I see more and more people are chasing that badge without actually providing any benefits. We have to be carefully monitoring these things – Boris Bachovski Jul 15 '16 at 3:39
  • As the the post with only that one tag, there is always some other topic that applies. There have got to be a small number with only that tag, and with a little effort an alternative can be had, I'm sure. – pchittum Jul 21 '16 at 19:54
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    I just mean if we delete the tag, an automatic process has to be capable of retagging, no? – Adrian Larson♦ Jul 21 '16 at 20:00
  • The tricky bit with an automated process is that we don't want to end up with another tag on a really high proportion of posts again that isn't informative. – Dave Humm Jul 23 '16 at 10:25
  • You only really need to retag when it's the only tag. – Adrian Larson♦ Jul 23 '16 at 16:50
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    Just an observation I feel like I am seeing increased, inaccurate, use of the salesforce-communites and salesforce2salesforce tags now... – Girbot Feb 22 '17 at 7:57
  • @Girbot You're not wrong. The fight against lazy tagging rages on. – Adrian Larson♦ Feb 22 '17 at 15:02
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I think this is one for a SE employee... unless I'm missing something I can't find a way to kill it! Will chase it up.

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  • The way I see it there are two separate problem here. 1) The tag is more popular than much more useful tags. The posts that are already tagged with it should be untagged. 2) People keep using it. Getting it deleted should help with both, hopefully! – Adrian Larson♦ Jul 15 '16 at 12:54
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    I do try and remove that tag when editing posts but it being deleted would be helpful as it would mean it won't keep showing up. – Dave Humm Jul 15 '16 at 13:38
  • Thanks for looking into it! – Adrian Larson♦ Jul 20 '16 at 12:47
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    And once killed, how to prevent it from respawning? – pchittum Jul 20 '16 at 16:40
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    Make sure the killing blow was acid or fire damage. – Jonathan Hersh Jul 20 '16 at 19:22
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    Yes, hydra may rear another head. But at least it should be one of our least popular tags again. I wish there were a logical tag synonym. – Adrian Larson♦ Jul 20 '16 at 21:38
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    Also...what about the sfdc tag. I know it isn't a top tag by any stretch, but equally pointless. – pchittum Jul 21 '16 at 12:13
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    An SE employee will ask you to form consensus on meta that the tag should be removed, then will remove it for you. You will need to manually retag any questions that are left without tags. – ArtOfCode Jul 24 '16 at 18:31
  • @ArtOfCode What constitutes consensus? It doesn't look like anyone objects so far, but do we need to conduct some sort of yea/nay polling? – Adrian Larson♦ Jul 25 '16 at 17:38
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    @AdrianLarson "no objections" is probably enough, to be honest. – ArtOfCode Jul 25 '16 at 17:39
  • You should probably post this as an answer haha. I just have one more question. What happens with the manual retagging process? Does it fill up a queue or something? Will it be obvious how to find the posts that need such retagging? – Adrian Larson♦ Jul 25 '16 at 18:09
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    @Art I think it's fair to say we have no objections since the post has been open for almost two weeks and the reaction has been all agreement. – Adrian Larson♦ Jul 26 '16 at 23:07
  • @ArtOfCode <bump />. Do you know any more about who that SE employee would be or if the wheels are in motion? – Adrian Larson♦ Aug 1 '16 at 13:58
  • @AdrianLarson I don't, I'm afraid. One of your mods needs to talk to a CM, which I haven't seen going on in the Teachers' Lounge, but may have happened via other means. – ArtOfCode Aug 1 '16 at 14:11
  • Is this stalled out? It seemed like we were so very close a month ago. /bump – Adrian Larson♦ Sep 7 '16 at 14:01
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As you can see here, a Community Manager has deleted this tag for us. It has been blacklisted as an "intrinsic tag" and cannot be resurrected.

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    For anyone who wants to help out in re-tagging all of the questions that were previously only tagged with salesforce-crm, they are now tagged as untagged. salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/… – Derek F Feb 3 '17 at 18:20
  • I've started helping out with the re-tagging, made me realise that we had some more tags required and tag descriptions to do. – Dave Humm Feb 4 '17 at 11:39
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I have been trying to curate this tag specifically by only removing the tag from posts created within the last 24 hours. I think it's really important we not bury the front page too far and snow it under with cruft. I started on July 13 and our newest post with the tag is still July 12.

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  • not sure I understand what you mean. do you mind explaining? specifically about not burying the front page. – pchittum Jul 21 '16 at 19:40
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    I think I get it now...because of the "active" filter. I hadn't even thought of that...although I hardly ever visit that view...does anyone? Or do people mostly visit due to google search results. Either way, I'll hold off for the time being. :-) – pchittum Jul 21 '16 at 19:41
  • Right, I think it will harm usability for a lot of us if we mass update posts to remove the tag. I use the home page with the active filter almost exclusively. It makes it easy to see what's getting the most recent interest. What view do you use @Peter? – Adrian Larson♦ Jul 21 '16 at 19:43
  • I typically look at "recent", or am looking at a specific tag (like Lightning Components lately). – pchittum Jul 21 '16 at 19:57
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    It is sort of a bummer that just adding/removing a tag pushes a question into "active". Kind of makes an unnecessary obstacle to curation. – pchittum Jul 21 '16 at 20:01
  • Totally agree with you there. Retagging doesn't really make it any more relevant, per se. – Adrian Larson♦ Jul 21 '16 at 20:11
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    I mainly use the Active filter too so I can see that would be a pain for me and a lot of the community if we start getting all the old questions and answers surfacing again. – Dave Humm Jul 22 '16 at 10:44
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    When old questions are getting pushed back into active by the 'community' account I take the chance to remove the tag as they are already in the Active filter list, but that would take forever to deal with the backlog of old questions with it. – Dave Humm Jul 25 '16 at 9:38
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    Spotted a couple today after reading this, I'll keep an eye out too :) – Girbot Dec 26 '16 at 14:15
  • Whoops, forgot about edits removing tags showing up on the 'active' page. I'll try to spread out my effort a bit more (hell, if all of us combined only untag/retag 10 per day, we'll be done by the end of September this year). – Derek F Jan 26 '17 at 18:15
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    @DerekF We may have a Community Manager stepping in soon to nuke this tag. Stay tuned. :) – Adrian Larson♦ Feb 2 '17 at 3:01
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    @AdrianLarson good to hear! I guess I'll shift my focus to retagging the questions that only have the salesforce-crm tag. – Derek F Feb 2 '17 at 3:09
  • @DerekF Only 275 of those! – Adrian Larson♦ Feb 2 '17 at 3:11

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