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Was just in review queue and had a quite a few pop up with a tag add ember-invalid. Not sure what was "invalid" so I looked in more detail at the new tag and what it's purpose is, as I haven't seen a tag used in this manner before.

So, I get what the guy is trying to do, there's a ton of older code all over stackoverflow, and I've seen in comments where people will indicate that, FYI this is deprecated code, or offer a up to date answer. This has been discussed here before.

Tags are used in different ways on different systems, here I believe you would use it primarily to search out your topics of interest. That being said I would never purposely lookup "invalid" code, so it doesn't feel like the right usage(maybe the naming on this tag is too strong).

The premise that this will help current questions bubble up isn't true since all of the old ones still have their ember.js tags which is what someone would search on. Unless of course they then took the additional step of adding ember.js to favorite tags and ember-invalid to ignored tags.

It seems like the tags will get junked up very fast if this becomes a trend. There was a bit of discussion when ember-old-router was introduced

So the question is, is creating special "invalid" or language specific "deprecated" tags the right way to go? And if not, is there any way we can flag questionable tags for review (other than via meta)?

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    And if not, is there any way we can flag questionable tags for review (other than via meta)? Meta is the place to complain about improper tag use.
    – Servy
    Feb 17, 2014 at 21:34
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    That seems like a meta-tag to me, not a valid use of a tag.
    – Bart
    Feb 17, 2014 at 21:34
  • @Servy thought so, but didn't have the occasion to report one yet, just making sure
    – curtisk
    Feb 17, 2014 at 21:34
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    I also saw this and asked meta.stackexchange.com/questions/221611/…
    – GS - Apologise to Monica
    Feb 17, 2014 at 21:36
  • @GaneshSittampalam yeah, for a little while they were hard to miss in review queue :) looks like the main conversation is over on your thread
    – curtisk
    Feb 17, 2014 at 21:46
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    Really this is only a problem because the folks running Ember are amazingly allergic to meaningful version numbers. It's not a real problem with the rest of world, where we can resort to version number tags as a last resort to make it clear that question has version-specific components and might be invalid for other versions.
    – Charles
    Feb 18, 2014 at 6:06

2 Answers 2

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Tags like these are what we commonly refer to as "meta tags."

The function of tags is to detail the actual content of the post. For a tag to be considered valid by the community, it needs to represent some piece of critical information about the question.

The community has decided through hard experience that tags which do not say anything about the content of the question (i.e. ) should be removed. They don't actually say anything about the question; rather, they say something about the question asker, the state of the software being used, or the pancakes I ate for breakfast.

In this case, the -invalid extension is a meta tag. It doesn't actually hold any bearing over the content of the question, but is rather a commentary on . That is why it should be removed.

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I refer to Is the `ember-invalid` tag acceptable? and https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/

It is said that "xyz-old" is a meta-tag and should be avoided. Just imagine that another ember version appears. Then the ember-invalid will contain two distinct (and incompatible) subsets of old apis.

A tag like "ember-0.7" would be acceptable though.

So for now I am rejecting these edits as invalid. I am sorry for the guys that retag these questions, but as it stands, the tag should not be used.

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