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This tag is a broken window, and it's causing problems by its continued existence:

We've already discussed how bad this tag is, and should it go away, none of the questions still tagged with it would be untagged.

Can please be blacklisted once and for all?

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  • Why does this need a blacklist? Why can't you just synonymize it with [career]?
    – Shog9
    Commented Aug 18, 2011 at 20:31
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    @Mr.CRT career is next on the list (see linked discussion), but requires a large tag cleanup effort. Forwarding people to use career instead of career advice just pushes back the problem for no benefit.
    – user8
    Commented Aug 18, 2011 at 20:34

2 Answers 2

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You have six questions in that tag, all closed - you could just delete them and the tag would go away... looks like the bigger monster here, but you obviously have your work cut out for you before that can be removed easily.

If people are re-creating the tag for bad questions, then you have bad questions to close. If they're re-creating it for good questions, then it should be synonymized with something else. Blacklisting it seems like sweeping the problem under the rug - the problem being the questions themselves...

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    The rest of the career-advice questions have been deleted: hopefully the tag doesn't pop back up again.
    – user8
    Commented Aug 18, 2011 at 22:14
  • Deleting the questions that are using the tag doesn't stop any user to tag another question with that tag; if the tag is black-listed, nobody could use it anymore.
    – avpaderno
    Commented Sep 3, 2011 at 14:17
  • By and large, blacklists are for bad tags... Not bad questions. @kia
    – Shog9
    Commented Sep 3, 2011 at 14:47
  • I know, but deleting the questions using that tag doesn't stop users from asking another question with that tag. If the tag is bad, then it should black-listed; if the tag is good, but used on questions that should not use it, or bad questions, then that is not the fault of the tag. I didn't mean the tag should be blocked because it is not used correctly.
    – avpaderno
    Commented Sep 3, 2011 at 14:58
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The linked post has the tags , , . and . Except for , they could all be synonyms.

However, there are other tags with a similar problem. Here are the tag wiki excerpt and body for each tag:


  • Excerpt: Questions about career, rather than a specific programming project.
    Wiki: See the separate tags for hiring and interviewing.


  • Excerpt: The tag has no wiki summary, would you like to help us create it?
    Wiki: No wiki

  • Excerpt: This tag is no longer used. Please see tag wiki for better alternatives.
    Wiki:

    This tag is no longer used, as general career advice questions are not on-topic here. Please use the following suggestions instead:


  • Excerpt: Career prospects as programmers in general. Likelihood of getting hired if one is seeking a new position,a.k.a. job. There can be some cases where the question is rather specific in terms of applying to a small geographic area however.
    Wiki: Same as Excerpt.

With the exception of , none of these tags mention that they should be exclusive to programming. For honeypot tags like this, it's important that the excerpt mentions that they must be applied to programming-specific problems. is colloquially synonymous with , but it has no excerpt. By blacklisting one pair of words, you're just killing the messenger.

Fix the excerpts, so that users see something useful when they type the tags in.

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  • The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. Career-advice sucks today and is being used as a justification for asking general career advice questions today. We need to start somewhere with cleaning up the tags, banning career-advice is a big first step.
    – user8
    Commented Aug 18, 2011 at 20:42
  • The career-advice tag excerpt was changed because what was there was awful. The career-development tag was also reintroduced today as part of the implementation of this discussion.
    – user8
    Commented Aug 18, 2011 at 20:44
  • Whoops, should have looked at the revision history. Still, I suggest you include "as applies to programming" in the excerpt of potentially bad tags.
    – Kevin Vermeer
    Commented Aug 18, 2011 at 20:48
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    I've fixed the wikis for career-advice and job-market and added a wiki for career-development and jobs. But I don't think we need to address all the problems with related tags before getting rid of the obviously bad ones.
    – user8
    Commented Aug 18, 2011 at 21:02

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