While it sucks we can't get them blacklisted, I'm pretty sure we've already ruled out the "nuke the tags" and "use a dummy tag" options, and we've already had stabs at disambiguating the tags (without enumerating every single question): Iteration the first: * https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/163/work-job-career-development-employment-career Iteration the second: * Aaronaught's answer on https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1946/tag-merge-discussion-jobs-career/1952#1952 * https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1963/posse-request-jobs-career-etc-tag-cleanup While those questions started with thinking we could merge everything into career and sort out the rest, in both iterations, the idea of merging them into one giant supercrap tag was considered to be worse than leaving the tags as they are while we sort through and disamiguate them. ### Nuke the tags Nuking the tag seems to be the worst of these options: while we'd have lower number of questions with onerous tags on them, we'd have several hundred questions with no career-related tag floating out there, without any way to track them. It "solves" the problem of the tag being available to users < 1,500 rep, but it doesn't actually deal with the questions or tag them correctly. ### Disambiguate the tags We already have lists of tags that need dealing with: the tag pages. We need people to use their best judgement while working through those tags to clean them up. That's what we're currently doing. Manually relisting all the questions in the tags just to avoid a blacklist seems to me to be a non-starter. ### Rename the tags Rebecca mentioned in her comment, having [please-remove-this-tag] doesn't seem to be a great user experience either, and I don't see how synonymizing tags to it would be any less disruptive to users. If we can just rename [jobs] and [career] (which have been used interchangeably anyway), it'd get people to stop using those tags while still leaving us with the questions to deal with, but it's still not ideal and has its own set of problems: namely that [please-remove-this-tag] becomes the most-used tag, being on about 1 out of every 10 existing questions. It's a bit bikesheddy, but calling it [please-remove-this-tag] seems to be counterproductive: if people see the tag and have no idea about the disambiguation process, they'll do what the tag says: remove it. It becomes a slower version of the "nuke the tags" option. Not sure what else it could be called to clue people into it being a tag you shouldn't use and you shouldn't just remove without replacing it with one of the approved career-related tags. ### Conclusion We have a problem with 1,300 questions that's going to take many manhours and months to fix whether they're called [career], [jobs], [please-remove-this-tag], or [untagged]. If these are our only options, disambiguating the tags on the fly—as we've been doing—still seems to be the least onerous of the three. I'd be okay with renaming the tags to some master crap tag and working through that tag in the same manner as we've been doing, but I don't see how that's any less disruptive to the user experience than just blacklisting [career] and [jobs]. ### Addendum Talking with Aaronaught about the Seasoned Advice cleanups, they were only working with 150-200 questions, which is a lot of questions, but a fraction of the problem set we have. It is, however, close to the number of [jobs] questions we currently have: 245. There are also 92 [jobs] questions tagged with [career]. If we did the rename *just* for [jobs] for now, we'd at least collapse this problem down to one tag. Removing the 92 questions from the [career] pile would bring the total number questions left to be dealt with through only disambiguation down to 1,000.