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I'm having a hard time tracking down where went. I know there have been a few requests (example) to ban/blacklist/synonym it, but I can't find which one caused it to stop existing.

Regardless, at some point, it was no longer a thing. And now, it is again. It showed up on the 10k tools new tag list this morning. I've been retagging questions out of it all day, but clueless new users keep trying to use it.

I'm firmly in the "it's ambiguous and you should use or instead" camp. Unfortunately without knowing what made it disappear, it's hard to recommend the next step. Our options are:

  1. Make it a synonym of , which seems to be how most of the questions that used it today wanted to use it.
  2. Make it a synonym of
  3. Blacklist it so that users can't possibly pick it and get it wrong.

I'm going to suggest #3, as it has the least horrible outcome at the possible cost of confusing users that don't know that we call pre-.NET ASP "ASP Classic."

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    Option 3 seems like the most optimal solution. I think there must now be a generation of developers out there who've no idea what classic ASP is and assume asp => asp.net. I am intrigued as well as to how all evidence of it has been wiped clean.
    – Kev Mod
    Commented Jan 14, 2012 at 1:26
  • @Kev Is it possible that someone actually manually retagged those questions and the tag just aged away until someone used it again? I'm not sure how many questions were in it to begin with.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Jan 14, 2012 at 2:06
  • According to Joel, there were over 3000 a month or two ago. I doubt someone would hand tag that many posts.
    – Jeff Mercado
    Commented Jan 14, 2012 at 2:19
  • Last year I manually retagged about 1,300 questions over ~1 week, with the help of a greasemonkey script. It'd certainly be possible to do twice that, especially with a team. However, given the number of questions, I'd really expect someone to have checked in with meta first.
    – Charles
    Commented Jan 14, 2012 at 2:55
  • @AnnaLear I actually re-tagged somewhere between 300-600 questions (IIRC). The 3K+ number was accurate at the time the statement was made but declined steadily because of a number of people who took it upon themselves but not all coordinated (some might have been, I was not a part of an "official" movement).
    – casperOne Mod
    Commented Jan 14, 2012 at 4:13
  • Please see Let's Ban the ASP Tag on StackOverflow!
    – John Saunders
    Commented Jan 18, 2012 at 19:40
  • Indeed, it's the very first link in the question.
    – Charles
    Commented Jan 18, 2012 at 20:25

1 Answer 1

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I consider "Dev-Only" solutions like blacklisting the tag to be a last-resort proposition. Developers should spend most of their time on developing, not on tag support.

ASP should not be blacklisted, as it has an actual meaning; it is Classic ASP, and there will still be an occasional classic ASP question. I favor the synonym solution, with as the master tag.

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  • What proportion of users use asp to mean Classic ASP? If it's a small minority, then no matter what the “proper” meaning of ASP is, the asp tag should not mean Classic ASP.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Commented Jan 15, 2012 at 17:59
  • Given the community's current desire to use highly-specific tags, users should be using [asp-classic] anyway. The synonym will direct them to [asp-classic], at which time they can either choose it, or pick a more appropriate tag such as [asp.net]
    – user102937
    Commented Jan 15, 2012 at 18:02
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    Of the dozen or so questions that I edited asp out of on Friday, all but two were for Classic. Given that someone has added the synonym, I'm going to mark this as accepted.
    – Charles
    Commented Jan 15, 2012 at 19:08
  • Questions tagged at one point with asp seem to have relatively evenly ended up with asp.net or asp-classic one way or the other (keeping in mind that the query doesn't imply that asp was necessarily replaced), so the synonym seems fine.
    – Tim Stone
    Commented Jan 15, 2012 at 21:14

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