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This tag is fully useless IMO. We don't need it.

So... we have a tag on Meta Ask Ubuntu (NOT the main site). IMO, it is useless. Let's go through the criteria to get rid of it:

Does it describe the contents of the questions to which it is applied? and is it unambiguous?

Certainly not. It provides zero info about the contents of the question.

Is the concept described even on-topic for the site?

Yes, but the entire purpose of AU Meta (and AU) is help with problems. So it literally gives no information, as it is implied when asking a question.

Does the tag add any meaningful information to the post?

Absolutely not.

Does it mean the same thing in all common contexts?

Sure, the OP wants help with something. But tags should describe the subject of a question or what it is about., not just what it contains.

Most of the questions can get retagged to , but a few are .

It's a fairly small tag, so if nobody objects, it's probably safe to go ahead and do it

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  • And just to get the discussion going there is a nice post on merging / destroying / synonyms for tags here: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/119111/… IMHO this particular tag issue could be solved by merging 'help' into 'Support' without creating a synonym. This of course destructively removes the 'Help' tag from older questions (replacing with 'Support') and leaves the tag clear to be removed by the system after 24 hours of non-use.
    – andrew.46 Mod
    Commented Aug 17, 2022 at 6:40
  • @andrew.46 Ehh… There’s at least one that is already a Discussion, as well as at least that’s a Feature Request. So if you merge them, we should manually go through and remove the help tag from those few first
    – cocomac
    Commented Aug 17, 2022 at 6:46
  • Mind you there are only 17 questions so it could easily be done manually rather than formally merging. But nice to see some discussion from the community first of course...
    – andrew.46 Mod
    Commented Aug 17, 2022 at 7:07
  • 6
    I agree with the removal of the tag for all the reasons mentioned.
    – BeastOfCaerbannog
    Commented Aug 17, 2022 at 8:29
  • Given that it's been a day, and this is at +8/-0 with no objections, I'll go ahead and do it tomorrow if nobody objects between now and then
    – cocomac
    Commented Aug 18, 2022 at 6:10
  • @cocomac Sounds good to me...
    – andrew.46 Mod
    Commented Aug 18, 2022 at 7:23
  • This tag should be not used in any posts. It has been blacklisted multiple times but has never gone away. See meta.askubuntu.com/questions/2179/why-do-we-have-a-help-tag and meta.askubuntu.com/questions/3706/please-blacklist-the-help-tag
    – Missing User
    Commented Aug 20, 2022 at 6:56
  • 2
    @linuxtechnical Thanks for that. The tag has been again pruned out, I will look into getting the tag more permanently barred.
    – andrew.46 Mod
    Commented Aug 20, 2022 at 21:46
  • @linuxtechnical: Both of those links seem to be about the help tag being used on the main Ask Ubuntu site, not on the meta site. (And it looks like the first request just wasn't acted on; the tag was only blocked on the main Ask Ubuntu site once the second request was acted on.) While there are better tags to use instead of help on meta, I'm not sure the tag's actually been removed from meta before this discussion (so I'm not sure it's actually been recreated).
    – V2Blast Staff
    Commented Aug 24, 2022 at 23:56
  • 1
    Based on a quick search, I've only found one previous post specifically about getting rid of the help tag from this meta site: Burninate the meta tags {help} and {features}? – but nothing in that discussion necessarily confirms that it was actually burninated at the time. Any other past discussions on Ask Ubuntu Meta seem to be about the help tag on the main Ask Ubuntu site, not on this Meta. (I haven't found anything to suggest that the help tag has actually sprung up again after being burninated on this meta site...)
    – V2Blast Staff
    Commented Aug 25, 2022 at 0:04
  • 1
    I've tagged this post as [status-completed], since it looks like the help tag has been removed from all questions on this Meta site. There's a separate request to block the tag on this Meta site, which I've declined because the tag currently hasn't been recreated after being burninated.
    – V2Blast Staff
    Commented Sep 30, 2022 at 18:00
  • help tag is pretty much a generalized version of most tags on the meta.
    – Rishon_JR
    Commented Mar 7, 2023 at 12:15

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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As always I have been to the Moderator Cheat Sheet for this one and it says in part:

A bad tag's sprung up. Can I destroy and/or block it myself?
No: moderators don't have the ability to outright destroy or block tags. For that, you need to create consensus on your meta-discussion site that the tag must not exist and contact Stack Exchange to perform the destruction and/or blocking. Alternatively, you can ask the community to manually clean out the tags, which helps identify off-topic and low-quality questions.

So we are well on the path to ridding ourselves of this tag:

  1. Achieve Consensus: We have established that the tag does not belong on the Meta site of AU by both the up-votes and comments attached to this question. Interestingly enough this consensus has been reached before for the main site at least: @linuxtechnical has found consensus for the tag removal on the main site 10 years ago!
  2. Manual Clean: The Community has cleaned the tag away on Meta manually so after 24 hours of no use the tag should disappear. The danger is that any user can easily recreate this tag and then the process restarts.
  3. Block the Tag: I have started the process to request the tag be blocked by SO. This was done for the main AU site previously by Shog9 but it appears as if Meta was not considered at the time.

And thanks to @cocomac for pushing this through :)

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