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See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8719732/does-ambit-really-helps (the link is for 10k users).

The tags are , , , , . It's presumably spam, but that's not the point. I claim that at least four of these tags are either noise or equivalent to off-topic. We have so much noise in the tags that the rep limit for creating new ones has almost no effect on preventing this sort of thing.

Perhaps limit low-rep users to 2 or 3 tags?

To clarify the burr under my saddle ... The tags of a question should not make up a sentence. A question with a long dribbly list of common word tags isn't helping anyone. And that list is a pretty good symptom of a pretty bad question. One solution is to control tag inventory, by discouraging tags that are simple common words. Even if they have technical semantics, they are so ambiguous as to be useless for search. 'power-architecture' or 'power-shell' or 'power-management', not 'power'.

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    Why don't we just get a flashy bus, some guys with cameras, and charge people to view the videos we make of these tags going crazy? :P Jan 3, 2012 at 23:13

3 Answers 3

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Stating that these tags are all noise seems like a non-sequitur to me since the entire question is nothing but noise. Your proposed tag limit wouldn't prevent scummy spam like this in the future, but it would hamper honest low-rep users from using all the tags they need for their questions.

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Obviously that bit of spam has annoyed you and is an extreme case, but how much of a problem is this really?
Most tags are created with genuine good intent, even if they end up being merged or burninated. Tidying up excessive tags on a question can also help towards a couple of badges, so there is incentive for people to help with any questions that are out of control with their tags.

My real problem with limiting new users to three tags is that tags can be a useful part of a search. For example, if a new user is limited to the tags [c#] [wpf] and one other, that really limits the ability to differentiate their question from a whole bunch of others and can make the question impossible to find by tags alone, or it can end up diluting the results of a search.

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I saw some edit suggestions in the queue yesterday that made me wonder something similar.

I thought one tag added to a question was a good addition to the site:

https://stackoverflow.com/suggested-edits/171968

The others almost served as indicators that the questions themselves were so bad that either:

  • the edit should have gone significantly further than just adding tags or
  • the question being edited should be closed and deleted if not improved

https://stackoverflow.com/suggested-edits/171966
https://stackoverflow.com/suggested-edits/171964
https://stackoverflow.com/suggested-edits/171986
https://stackoverflow.com/suggested-edits/171970
https://stackoverflow.com/suggested-edits/171995
https://stackoverflow.com/suggested-edits/171991
https://stackoverflow.com/suggested-edits/171988

Similarly, the burr was under my saddle in part because these relatively simple and minor tag edits inconveniently lock the post for improvements by someone else who might have cared enough to fix the posts better. I applaud this user's enthusiasm for improving the site, but it felt a bit misdirected when there were glaring formatting and grammar errors that hindered the legibility of the question.

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