Which tags are useless or blacklisted? [closed]

Question

This question covers our list of "bad" tags, tags which don't make sense in general or in the specific context of the site. These include meta tags, tags that are redundant with the focus of the site (game-development), non-specific tags, and so on.

Note that originally this question was set up as a community-wiki, with one answer per bad tag suggestion. Recently we seemed to have moved to a model where we post individual meta questions for each tag, which seems to foster better discussion. You can still post in this topic if you like.

This list can also cover tag synonym suggestions. For example, dx11 should be mapped to directx11. Note that you can vote on tag synonyms other people propose. For a list of synonyms currently in the system, go here.

Currently Blacklisted Tags

The tag link pages for each of these should be empty. If you add a new tag here, please preserve the alphabetical ordering for easier browsing. Please link to the discussion that lead to the tag being included on the blacklist for posterity.

• 2d-physics (just use physics and/or 2d instead; related post)

• actions (generic, discussion)

• api (meta-tag; discussion)

• artifacts (discussion)

• beginner (discussion)

• best-practices (discussion)

• buffers (generic; related post)

• circle (discussion)

• class (discussion)

• compilation (does not add value, related thread)

• computer-science (generic, off-topic; related post)

• conceptual (meta-tag; related post)

• delta (does not add value, discussion)

• design (discussion, tag renames)

• development (discussion)

• engine (meta tag; discussion)

• environment (too broad; discussion)

• feedback (too ambiguous; related post)

• framework (meta-tag; discussion)

• free (meta-tag, discussion)

• game (prior decision)

• hexagon (discussion)

• hobby-development (meta-tag with no value, executive decision based on similarity to indie)

• homework (Another executive decision, it's a meta tag that doesn't describe the content of the question.)

• indie (meta-tag with no value, see the related thread)

• infinite (too general; discussion)

• inspector (discussion)

• language-agnostic (Executive decision, this semi-meta tag adds nothing on the content of the question. Most questions are algorithm or math related, or specifics of a particular language. This tag is redundant, as any programming/math/algorithm question without a specific language tag is going to be assumed to be language agnostic.)

• language-choice (Executive decision, all questions tagged this way are a "which technology is best" type, which shouldn't be used anyway.)

• languages (discussion)

• learning (Executive decision, but there's precedence on other sites)

• libraries (meta-tag; discussion)

• limitations (meta tag; executive decision)

• middleware (discussion)

• old-school (meta tag; discussion)

• opinion (same as subjective)

• pre-processing (discussion)

• polygon (discussion)

• quads (discussion)

• rectangle (discussion)

• sdk (meta-tag; discussion)

• shape (discussion)

• size (too ambiguous; discussion)

• smooth (too ambiguous; related post)

• subjective (discussion)

• techniques (meta tag or too broad: discussion)

• tips (another meta tag)

• triangle (discussion)

• triangles (discussion)

• units (discussion)

• update (used broadly for content covered by game-loop deployment synchronization)

• surface(meta-tag: discussion)

Note that there's an easy way to link to tags nowadays. The format is:

[tag:TAG_NAME]

Answer 1

development

It's almost, but not quite as bad as having the word game in a tag on the "Game Development" Stack Exchange site. It's somewhat implied that all the questions are either about game development in some fashion.

Personally, I don't see any question on that list that if I was trying to categorize it or search for it would be helped by the inclusion of development.

Answer 2

flash-professional

Honestly, I don't understand why there's such a tag. If somebody has a flash-related question, they will tag it flash. I don't think flash-professional does any good for further classifying flash-related questions.

Answer 3

hobby-development

Is there a significant difference between hobby development and other forms of development? If I have a question about which physics engine I should use or what kind of school I should go to, will the fact that I'm hobbyist developer make a significant difference?

Answer 4

opinion

It is synonymous with subjective

Answer 5

collision

Make it a synonym of collision-detection

There were two collision detection questions with the tag before I retagged them (1, 2).

Answer 6

sound & audio

They seem to overlap quite a bit. If no one has any rationale against it, I'll merge.

Answer 7

learning & education

I don't really see the need for both of these. Can we keep education and merge/remove learning?

Answer 8

best-practices

Probably a controversial opinion, but best-practices, kind of like discussion, subjective, poll, etc. are tags that more often than not describe the type of question and not the content. Most best-practices questions are either 1) mistagged, or 2) lists of things to do (i.e. subjective community-wiki questions).

For more discussion: Are questions about best practices bad?

If that's really what you're after - a practice widely-recognized as "best" that you can adopt as your own, then go for it. All too often though, i see people asking for a "best practice" when what they really want to know is:

"Given my situation, what are the available solutions to my specific problem, and which one should I choose?"

Note the key difference: if you aren't free to make changes, potentially major, to what you're doing and how you're doing it, then "industry best" is irrelevant - you just need something you can use now. Perhaps it'll happen to be a Best Practice; perhaps it'll merely be the best of a bad set of hacks necessitated by the particular corner you've been painted into. But regardless, the focus has to be on you.

Answer 9

turn-based-strategy (Destruction)

Specifically, I'm advocating its replacement with the tags turn-based strategy. It probably does not need black-listing, just the initial destruction to remove it from the queue.

Normally I'm a promotor of singular combo tags, but in this scenario I'm actually leaning towards the former. Browsing strategy shows a lot of questions about the Strategy genre that can be safely abstracted from the game's being real-time versus turn-based. Likewise, turn-based can be applied to other genres, most predominantly RPG. Those two tags have important meaning to be used on their own as a result, and their combination is literally identical in meaning to the combined tag.

Unlike with what I see on the Gaming Stack Exchange, there seems to be no huge ambiguity as to what "strategy" means - to game developers it applies to the genre. There is one exception, but it needs a big retag and otherwise does not seem like it should trend dangerously. Most "unit strategy" questions actually properly get tagged with ai.

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Turn-based strategy is a much more defined genre compared to, say, turn-based RPGs. You could easily get away with tagging things as RPG without needing to differentiate the different expressions of it, but being turn-based versus real-time is often part of the soul and definition of a strategy game. So a preference to keep turn-based-strategy is more than understandable. But if this is the case, then it feels like something should be done about the other two tags instead.

Answer 10

beginner

First off, it's probably off-topic as this site is supposed to be for "professional and amateur game developers." It's also subjective and localized to the person asking the question. It is also indicative that a lot of the questions tagged with beginner are also tagged with tutorials. It's almost redundant.

I'm not really sure of the purpose of that tag. Maybe there's some value in that beginners might be able to search through the beginner tagged questions to find some good starting points, but they would just be as likely to find things under tutorials.

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edit: It's also now banned on the trilogy sites: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/

Answer 11

design

Based on the conversation here: Should the "design" tag encompass architecture AND game design questions?, design is too ambiguous a term in game development. It can refer to the art side of things (i.e. character design), the game design side of things (or a subset of that, level design), or the engine design side of things.

I went through and renamed the existing design to game-design, and retagged design questions that were talking about engine design to architecture (which may also be due for a rename to have the word engine in it).

Note that this tag (at the time of this writing) doesn't exist, but I wanted to put this answer in this question anyway for safe keeping.

Answer 12

jobs & career (Synonym)

As opposed to this group, this pair deals with the variety of occupations in the game development world, as well as advice on getting those jobs. Between the two tags, there aren't really any distinguishing factors that I can find.

Answer 13

learning

Another "meta-tag" that describes the type of question instead of the content. SE sites aren't a discussion board, and questions with this tag (usually) are the kinds of questions that don't have a point.

It's kind of like beginner.

Answer 14

graphics

While looking at some retagging I added a graphics tag before realizing it was overloaded and questioning my decision. It refers to both 3d rendering programming (which rendering would seem to cover better) and art, and graphics-programming is on a few questions as well. Does the graphics tag by itself make any sense?

Answer 15

2d-physics

A bit more subjective, but the distinction between 2D physics and just physics probably isn't worth making.

_{Plus the programmer in me hates tags that start with a number. Variables aren't supposed to start with a number.}

Answer 16

generated

I'm not sure what this tag is supposed to mean. Perhaps it's mostly a synonym for procedural-generation?

Answer 17

units is ambiguous as users have asked questions tagged with it that are both about entities (i.e. enemy units) and measurements (e.g. unit conversion).

I also believe it doesn't exactly add much in the way of filtering (i.e. searching for questions that are about units in games (usually contained into a much more major category e.g. strategy games where one expects to find units) and units in physics (physics here is a tag that's enough)).

I recommend deletion.

Answer 18

languages & language-choice

• I think these should be merged under languages.
• I think languages should also link to all the language specific tags (although this will require a moderate amount of upkeep)

Answer 19

infinite

Not sure what this tag really means. It's been used 8 times: half of them are asking the same question about an infinite scrolling background; the other half are asking a variation about an infinite scrolling level that's has a procedural component.

Answer 20

project-management & management

Unless there's sound rationale against it, these should probably be merged.

Answer 21

Is there a need for tags like 3d-engines when you could just combine the 3d and engine tags? This would ensure that anyone interested in engines wouldn't have to search through engine, 2d engine, 3d engine, xxx engine, etc.

Answer 22

game-industry & business (Synonym)

Deals with game development as a business, usually for corporate matters such as profitability and legality. Game industry is the business this site deals with, and the questions under both tags cover mostly the same ground.

Answer 23

game-component and component-based

They're both about the same thing.

Answer 24

time-management seems to be ambiguous.

About kill cams: Handling game states like Braid's timeshift or Shooter's Killcam

About slow-motion: Easiest Way To Implement "Slow Motion" and variable game speed in XNA?

About update speed: Stuck at enemy movement

About time-travelling gameplay: How to implement time traveling into a game?

About time zones: What time to display in text messages in multiplayer game?

About software design: Splitting a tetris game apart - where to put time-management?

The last one is actually the only one to mention "time management" in the question, but I'm not sure it is actually a thing in the way the asker is using it: a software component.

Answer 25

logic

Seems more like a meta tag, and a pretty bad one at that.

One popular use of the tag is as a synonym for "reasoning" or "method", e.g. "Whats the logic behind XYZ?" but you wouldn't use reasoning would you?

Another popular use is part of "game logic", as opposed to things like rendering, and the separation thereof. Analogous to "business logic" in software. But then it's better served by tags like architecture or programming.

Other times it's a synonym for ai or algorithm, which just shows how uselessly broad this tag is.

Of course there is a proper thing called logic in math and philosophy, and is perhaps the right tag to use if someone were asking a question about making a logic puzzle game. I haven't checked if any of the tagged questions fall under this case. It seems doubtful, and in any case this might be better served by a tag like formal-logic.

Answer 26

assets & resources (Synonym)

With a couple exceptions, the latter seems to refer to the same asset management and handling that the former tag covers. I think it may be useful to make these two the same for the more common scenario, while leaving tags on the non-asset posts to refer to what they are resources for (such as "ai" in the first example).

Answer 27

programing This is just misspelled programming, for which there is already a tag.

Edit: This should be deleted, not made into a synonym.

Answer 28

uvw-mapping

It should be a synonym of uv-mapping, as UVW-Mapping is a small subset of that, and is covered in the tag wiki.

Answer 29

procedural should be replaced by procedural-generation

procedural-generation has a lot more usage and a much better wiki entry and, as far as I can tell, both tags are being used to mean the exact same thing

Answer 30

smooth

The term is hardly ever descriptive without other words nearby (surface, movement, edge, etc).

It can't be used on it's own.

There are no experts in general "smoothness" area.