If a tag existed, and then is removed, raise reputation needed to add tag again

Question

As a result of https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/128315/the-great-stack-overflow-tag-question-cleanup-of-2012, a number of ambiguous tags are in the process of being cleaned up.

However, as they get cleaned up, and reputation requirements (currently 1500 on Stack Overflow) for new tags are put back into place, I've noticed that there are still people that will use those tags and resurrect them (I go over the eliminated list regularly).

That said, the feature request is require that if tag has been created before, but then removed from all questions, then the amount of reputation required to bring the tag back should be raised (or perhaps only allow moderators to do so). By how much is left to you, but it should be very high, IMO.

Also, the following conditions should be satisfied:

• The tag is of a certain age. This will prevent someone who creates a new tag on a question and then removes it shortly after from triggering this restriction
• The tag has been applied to a certain number of questions at one point. This also helps with the situation above, as well as for tags applied to a smaller amount of questions.

The main goal here is to help massive retagging efforts to tags which don't have synonyms applied (because there it's not a synonym but just vague) from going to waste; there's no point if the tags have been removed if they're just going to sprout up again in places we don't see/know about.

Answer 1

You're too nice casperOne! Have a tag bonfire and blacklist the lot...

_{(source: wikimedia.org)}

If the community at large has decided that a tag is so bad / useless that every question has been removed from it what reason is there for it to still exist?

That way the tag doesn't just re-appear when you least expect it and there's no need for a feature-request.

If, at some point in the future, a language is created called discussion ( far fetched I know but meh ) then a request to create this can be bought up on meta and the tag given some cream for all the burns. By controlling how it appears it's also possible to ensure that a wiki and excerpt are created immediately so there's less room for ambiguity in what the tag is for.

Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting automatically blacklisting just a more proactive and brutal method of doing so, i.e. rather than just blacklisting discussion, tax should also be blacklisted. If this requires that some sort of feature should be put in place so that moderators can blacklist tags then I think that'd be a good thing.