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On a "Signal Processing" site, adding a tag to a question actually carries absolutely no information.

Worse, even, is that most of the questions tagged with it are of mediocre-to-bad quality¹ (not surprising, since it shows the poster didn't take a step back to consider what tags would concisely describe his/her question) and that people seem to type things "audio signal" into the tag field and end up with .

Since the existence of this tag alone allows people to just post questions without finding a better tag to use, I think the appropriate measure would be to not only remove the tag (manually, probably) from the 160-something questions that carry it right now, but also to blacklist it from being created again.

Hence the question: Should we do that? Does the esteemed moderatorship agree?

¹ from the 155 non-closed, non-migrated, non-duplicate questions tagged with at the point of writing, we get this score histogram:

fancy barplot with the sole purpose of proving my point :)

which hopefully is a lot worse than the average tag's score histogram.

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I agree. I'm digging into how to delete tags; the only way seems to be to remove the offending tag from all questions and then wait.

Funnily enough, the processing is also there, though with only about 70 tagged posts.

There is other great advice here.

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  • $\begingroup$ As hinted at, there should be a blacklisting capability that inhibits adding the tag to new questions completely; without that, removing the tag from all questions is but a temporary solution. $\endgroup$
    – Marcus Müller
    Commented Nov 11, 2016 at 17:21
  • $\begingroup$ At least that's how it's over at StackOverflow. See the case of the [godaddy] tag on meta.SO. $\endgroup$
    – Marcus Müller
    Commented Nov 11, 2016 at 17:23
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    $\begingroup$ Began to work on the manual un-tagging. Started with the zero-score questions – sorry to spam everyone's close vote queue! I've been applying close votes liberally; many of those questions had comments asking for clarification that never received a reaction, and thus, "unclear" is a common close vote reason this afternoon. $\endgroup$
    – Marcus Müller
    Commented Nov 13, 2016 at 13:44
  • $\begingroup$ bringing your attention to this again: I'm again in the process of de-tagging questions. There have been several questions tagged with signal since we 2016-11-11; have you been able to figure something out regarding blacklisting? $\endgroup$
    – Marcus Müller
    Commented Nov 20, 2016 at 22:45
  • $\begingroup$ @MarcusMüller Ya it needs the tag to be burninated, which mods can't do. Developers need to be involved. meta.stackexchange.com/questions/120640/… $\endgroup$
    – Peter K. Mod
    Commented Nov 21, 2016 at 8:30
  • $\begingroup$ I'm traveling at the moment (and my flight yesterday was cancelled :( ), so I won't be much use until tomorrow. I started helping with removing the tag, but too many seemed to be popping up again. $\endgroup$
    – Peter K. Mod
    Commented Nov 21, 2016 at 8:31
  • $\begingroup$ Don't get all worried! It was really just a ping :) I'll do some cleaning up! $\endgroup$
    – Marcus Müller
    Commented Nov 21, 2016 at 12:16
  • $\begingroup$ Done! I'm going to celebrate this by having lunch. $\endgroup$
    – Marcus Müller
    Commented Nov 21, 2016 at 12:58
  • $\begingroup$ Done! With both signal and processing. $\endgroup$
    – Marcus Müller
    Commented Nov 21, 2016 at 13:09
  • $\begingroup$ Please approve my processing tag excerpt edit. $\endgroup$
    – Marcus Müller
    Commented Nov 21, 2016 at 13:10
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FYI: This type of bad tag is called an intrinsic tag and there is a feature specifically to blacklist that kind of tag. It can be found in the moderator links as “Blacklisted User Input”. (I can't actually view that link, not myself being a moderator here, but I guess it will turn out to contain “dsp” but not “signal”.)

Moderators may ask for tags to be added to this blacklist but cannot do it themselves.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks! yep, that's what is what I was hoping we'll find out. $\endgroup$
    – Marcus Müller
    Commented Nov 24, 2016 at 6:11

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