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The tag picker currently ignores hyphens when you are typing a tag, and will prevent non-diamond moderators from creating a tag with hyphens when one without exists (or vice versa).

I've encountered a lot of people creating new tags for things with dots in their name when there is already an existing tag with a different dot status.

This happens most frequently in newer Javascript libraries. The trendy naming convention is to give your library name the suffix js. Unfortunately tagging for these libraries is amazingly inconsistent, which can make it hard for users to find the right dotted or undotted tag. This is sometAngularJSimes because the libraries themselves are inconsistent. and , for example. I've found myself fixing once a week. We've also recently had and coexist accidentally, as another real, live documented example.

The problem is amplified by component and plugin names that alternatively use periods or hyphens in their name.

This can also happen in languages that use periods to separate names, or where the period is part of the name. I'm looking at you, .NET. I see someone doing things in occasionally when they should be doing things in . Hell, today we had . 100% preventable.

Adding periods to the list of ignored characters would greatly reduce the number of users creating a new tag when an existing one should be used.

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    What do we do about the tags that already have periods? Strip them out? That's not going to work. Why not just synonymize the variants? That's a very easy thing to do.
    – user102937
    Commented Dec 5, 2012 at 21:21
  • There are dozens of cases where you'd need to make a synonym. If you're volunteering to do the work, that's totally a solution for many cases. I don't think the tags should be normalized, so to speak, but they should be consistent with the actual naming of the product. For example, angular.js could be a synonym of angularjs, as the latter is closest to the actual name of the library. On the other hand, thinking about creating synonyms for the plethora of asp.net tags make me cringe.... on the third hand, that example only happens once every other week or so. The JS ones are daily.
    – Charles
    Commented Dec 5, 2012 at 21:23
  • angular is already synonymized to angularjs. angular.js does not exist. The ASP.NET tags looked OK, last time I checked.
    – user102937
    Commented Dec 5, 2012 at 21:25
  • Checked again... The ASP.NET tag cloud still looks OK. There are a few rogue instances of aspnet-something, but the number of affected questions is very small. aspnet is already synonymized to asp.net.
    – user102937
    Commented Dec 5, 2012 at 21:27
  • Yeah, 'cause I nuke it frequently. Over and over. The thing that pushed me over the line, so to speak, was actually clojure.core.logic, which should have been clojure-core.logic. There was also a passport.js today, which should have been passport; that one's doubly annoying as the product name is Passport, but the domain is passportjs, and passportjs is occasionally used on the internets. This request wouldn't have solved that one.
    – Charles
    Commented Dec 5, 2012 at 21:28
  • Also, just to put this in perspective, this is pretty much on the "paper cut" level of annoyance. I see one or two of these a day, usually different ones, rarely the same thing in a row, etc, etc. There's no single big problem tag, as was the case with server for a long time.
    – Charles
    Commented Dec 5, 2012 at 21:29
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    clojure.core.logic now synonymized to clojure-core.logic. This won't be paper-cutting you again. :)
    – user102937
    Commented Dec 5, 2012 at 21:32
  • datejs and date.js had this until recently when I edited all of the questions to consolidate them to just datejs. Fortunately there were a small number of them. Maybe not the best thing to do, but it's better then waiting around for voting on tag synonyms, which seems to take FOREVER.
    – Matt Johnson-Pint
    Commented Aug 15, 2013 at 3:29

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