What do we do with gamemaker* tags?

Question

Please note first that some things have been written and done in the past by some users that are still active today, and this post does not aim at all at pointing fingers if something went wrong because of their actions. I very much appreciated the contributions of those users back then and I still appreciate them today. I'm looking at this from a "today's" perspective since things evolve over time.

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A recent question about renaming the game-maker* (to gamemaker*) tags had a by-product about how we should handle "legacy" or "deprecated" questions/tags regarding older vs newer versions.

I have not used GameMaker, so I'm no sure what this is completely about, however I see this:

1. GameMaker was called "Game Maker" until 2011.
2. YoYo Games kept adding features, they released GameMaker Studio in 2012, but here I'm confused about things:
   1. on one hand this suggest that the "studio" introduction did change a lot of things
   2. and on the other hand this suggests that
      1. GameMaker: Studio and GameMaker: Studio 2 are very much similar
      2. we should have a tag synonym from game-maker-studio-2 to game-maker
      3. we should merge game-maker-studio, game-maker-studio-2 to game-maker

3. In January 2022, YoYo Games changed GameMaker Studio 2's numbering scheme so the version corresponds to the year and the month it was released (For example, 2022.1 for January 2022).

   In April 2022, YoYo Games dropped the GameMaker Studio 2 name in order to match its new version numbering scheme, changing it to simply GameMaker.

4. GML Visual has replaced the "drag and drop" name at some point in time

Right now we have these tags:

• gamemaker (441 questions)
• gamemaker-studio-2 (30 questions)
• gamemaker-dnd (6 questions)

And these synonyms:

• game-maker-dnd -> gamemaker-dnd
• game-maker-studio-2 -> gamemaker-studio-2
• game-maker -> gamemaker
• game-maker-studio -> gamemaker (this is a proposed tag synonym that has not been approved, so it is not visible to the users)

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My conclusions from all of this, from the point of view of "tags" for the site:

• Game Maker: Studio made Game Maker 8.* obsolete, so back then, folks asking things about the "newer version" should have used game-maker-studio
• Game Maker: Studio 2 was an improvement/addition to Game Maker: Studio, not a "change", so the tag game-maker-studio-2 should never have been created and a synonym from it to game-maker-studio should have been created instead
• The naming scheme features adopted in January and April 2022 blows everything up because current-version-users will just see "Game Maker" and will tag with game-maker (or gamemaker).
• The current users likely don't know what is "dnd" or "drag and drop" so will be unlikely to use the tag gamemaker-dnd (dungeons and dragons?)

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So, the question(s):

• Do I get this right?
• What do we do with the three current tags that we have?
• Do we want to have more of a discussion here then create a more formal "what we do with the tags" meta question (where vote counting is easier)?

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^{Most of the information I share here come from Wikipedia and the linked questions.}

Answer 1

Given that YoYo games dropped the "Studio 2" part more than two years ago, we can presume that 1) current users will use the gamemaker and gamemaker-studio-2 will be seldom useful and 2) the first version that dropped the "Studio 2" part was not a "big change" w.r.t. the previous "Studio 2" version, so in normal times, it would not have required a new tag.

Given that the current name matches the old pre- "studio" name, it's hard to differentiate the tag solely by its name with questions already tagged.

I propose this:

• rename (merge) gamkemaker-dnd to gamemaker-gml-visual to make it more current (maybe more folks will use it)
• rename (merge) gamemaker-studio-2 to gamemaker, as suggested by liggiorgio here
• remove the proposal from game-maker-studio to gamemaker
• update the gamemaker tag description to remind folks to write the version they use (of course, they won't read it anyway)

Yes, tags are used to connect "experts" to question they would be interested in, however such "experts" are smart folks and can often infer the version from the date the question is asked, and from the content where often folks will write the version of the software they use.