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The tag covers so many rather unrelated things:

Questions related to virtualization, virtual devices, virtual terminal emulators, etc.

It's of little use for searching or following. Can we remove this? We do have and (of which is a synonym), so it doesn't serve much of a purpose.

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  • 1
    Think it's gone now. Thanks to all who worked on removing it!
    – Zanna Mod
    Commented May 9, 2021 at 7:49

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Yes, I agree that the tag is too vague and that more specific tags should be used instead to properly define what these questions are about.

I suggest that we cause the tag to be deleted by removing it from all the questions that have it. This is a good opportunity to tidy up:

  • When editing, fix everything else about the post as well, and also check any of the answers to see if they would benefit from editing or deserve up/down votes or should be flagged.
  • You may be able to answer an unanswered question, or upvote good answers that are underappreciated (use this query to check the feedback by users who are unregistered, not logged in, or have insufficient reputation to upvote)
  • Close/downvote/delete low quality questions in the tag.
  • Avoid editing a large number of posts in one go, as editing causes them to be bumped (this is also a good argument for checking and fixing the answers in the same shot).
  • If you have more than 10k reputation, check the deleted answers to see if any of them are useful and should be undeleted - I find quite a few when I'm doing tag work.

As usual I'm more than willing to do this work myself.

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Didn't disagree, went ahead and did it did some of it.

Edit: D'oh. I had a filter on, there's lost more to be done. But spend some time with it. Don't just remove the tag until there aren't any more virtual instances. Try to make sure your edits are actually benefiting the questions.

This will probably need doing again at some point because it's quiet a natural word to want to use when you're describing software-implemented things that might normally be handled by hardware (displays, routers, disks, etc).

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  • Isn’t there a way to forbid creating a specific tag? meta.stackexchange.com/questions/295148/…
    – Melebius
    Commented Aug 4, 2020 at 10:49
  • 5
    @Melebius doesn't blacklisting needs SE support? Probably not worth the hassle unless we can show this tag is repeatedly causing problems. Oli: sorry, what exactly did you do? The tag still seems alive and well, so is it scheduled for deletion or something?
    – muru
    Commented Aug 4, 2020 at 13:31
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    No, I started cleaning up but only did 20-odd questions. I had thought I'd accomplished a great feat of human endeavour, but it turns out I had a filter on which meant I was only seeing ~10% of the problem. Crack on.
    – Oli Mod
    Commented Aug 4, 2020 at 20:58
  • An automated deletion is —as you suggest— not really an appropriate out here, not only because it means calling up SE, but also because it's a good opportunity to fix tags, rather than blindly killing one. I found many amongst the 20-odd that benefited from having better tags.
    – Oli Mod
    Commented Aug 4, 2020 at 20:59

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