46

Tag burnination, as far as I understand it, is a process that occurs because a tag is used when it shouldn't be - it's ambiguous, or adds nothing to the question, or is confusing, etc.

Yet the default stance once a tag has been burned seems to be not to blacklist it, but instead just blacklist it if questions with that tag start reappearing, potentially creating yet more cleanup work down the line.

This seems odd to me - why not take a stance of blacklisting all burninated tags unless there's a particular reason to do otherwise? The only reason I can think of not for doing this is if the tag may be useful at some point in the future again, but that would seem like a reasonably rare occurrence. The movement tag seems to be a prime example - why should we not blacklist it immediately, rather than wait for it to become a problem again before doing so?

8
  • 2
    It might be relevant to figure out what exactly is done while burninating. If it's simply the removal of the tag from all questions, I can see while blacklisting is an extra step. You don't want to blacklist all tags that are no longer used.
    – Mast
    Commented Aug 7, 2018 at 10:31
  • 8
    Well, a mod is always involved to at least mark the burninate request status-completed. That mod could also blacklist the tag afaik (I don't know if that's a CM-special). Sounds like a good idea to me, if there's a good reason to recreate a burninated tag it should go through meta imo.
    – Erik A
    Commented Aug 7, 2018 at 10:34
  • 5
    @ErikvonAsmuth moderators can't blacklist tags. They only have power to merge tags, otherwise they are just users with binding votes.
    – Braiam
    Commented Aug 7, 2018 at 10:49
  • 1
    Highly related meta.stackexchange.com/questions/242624/…
    – Chris_Rands
    Commented Aug 7, 2018 at 12:25
  • 2
    What are the statistics? How often does a previously burninated tag need to be blacklisted?
    – rgettman
    Commented Aug 7, 2018 at 16:24
  • @ErikvonAsmuth I think a dev or Community Manger currently needs to blacklist (which seems broken to me - it seems like it should be possible for the community to do that without having to appeal to a staff member).
    – EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine
    Commented Aug 7, 2018 at 16:53
  • 2
    Slightly related. If you're an user with the access to moderator tools, there is a page where you can see the list of new tags created. Using that you can see if someone has created a tag again. We've managed to create a list of the burninated tags here, which you can access using this userscript. It highlights the tag in red, if it has already been burned once.
    – Bhargav Rao
    Commented Aug 7, 2018 at 22:43
  • I wonder how much overhead it would incur to actually have every [burninate-request] blacklisted...
    – Andras Deak -- Слава Україні
    Commented Aug 9, 2018 at 17:04

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
26

No, they shouldn't.

First off, once a tag is removed, the bar for using it in the future is much higher - you need to have 1,500 reputation to recreate it. Most tags which have been destroyed in this fashion don't ever get recreated, which means the blacklist is useless. No one would ever see it's blacklisted.

The blacklist itself is also a very expensive thing to run. It's literally just a bunch of regular expressions that have to be run one by one every single time a question is created or edited. So adding every tag that gets destroyed to this list continually increases the amount of processing time and power that gets used up every submission, for little and oftentimes no gain whatsoever because, as stated above, most tags don't experience this problem and don't need to be blacklisted.

12
  • 37
    The meat of the problem is that the tool is poorly designed and has not scaled with Stack Overflow. If the tool wasn't so poorly designed, the argument that it wouldn't be a regular occurrence that someone would be trying to recreate a burninate tag, wouldn't hold water IMO. It happens enough that it would be a good idea, if the tool was better.
    – user4639281
    Commented Aug 7, 2018 at 16:53
  • 9
    Why do you need to run it every time a question is posted or edited? Why not just run it when someone tries to create a new tag?
    – EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine
    Commented Aug 7, 2018 at 16:56
  • 1
    @EJoshuaS Tag creation doesn't actually occur until the post is submitted.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Aug 7, 2018 at 16:57
  • 7
    At some point, the system "knows" that the user is trying to create a new tag. Why not just run the script then? On a "mature" sight like Stack Overflow, the vast majority of questions are just using existing tags - it seems pointless to run those questions against the blacklist given that they're not even trying to create a new tag.
    – EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine
    Commented Aug 7, 2018 at 17:00
  • 10
    @EJoshuaS This is just a makeshift system that runs off something else, because we don't have a formal system. The blacklist covers more than just tags, and you can't "just run" it for only a part of something. There are a bunch of rules for blocking certain text in posts and titles too, and all of it runs at post submission. As Tiny Giant mentions, solving this problem properly requires completely different tooling which we just don't have right now.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Aug 7, 2018 at 17:02
  • 1
    That makes more sense, then.
    – EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine
    Commented Aug 7, 2018 at 17:04
  • 10
    I agree with the content, but not the first sentence summary. I read this answer as "Yes, we should, (but we can't sensibly at the moment because that particular part of SO isn't designed adequately.)"
    – Michael Berry
    Commented Aug 7, 2018 at 17:42
  • 1
    @MichaelBerry flagged for not welcoming enough (?)
    – Braiam
    Commented Aug 7, 2018 at 22:42
  • @Braiam I'm hoping that's sarcastic :-)
    – Michael Berry
    Commented Aug 7, 2018 at 23:26
  • 2
    If tags marked as "deleted" require 1500 reputation to recreate, but enforcing this rule doesn't overload Stack Overflow, why not use a similar mechanism to mark some tags as "blacklisted" and block creation regardless of reputation (without overloading SO)?
    – nyanpasu64
    Commented Aug 9, 2018 at 7:52
  • 3
    @jimbo1qaz I could be wrong, but I'd guess tags aren't marked as "deleted" - they just behave as though they were never there in the first place (hence the 1500 reputation required to create a new one.)
    – Michael Berry
    Commented Aug 9, 2018 at 11:00
  • 16
    The blacklist itself is also a very expensive thing to run... ooh! an optimization opportunity!
    – Andrew Morton
    Commented Aug 9, 2018 at 16:46

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .