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Based on the proposal to update the moderator-only tags posted earlier this week, I propose that moderator-only tags be made not to count toward a question's limit of five tags.

The limit means that on meta sites, every question is effectively limited to three tags describing the topic of the question instead of five tags as on the main sites. Per this staff statement, the required tag effectively doesn't count since it's a meta tag in the general sense of the word (i.e., it describes the nature rather than topic of the question), so questions are already limited to four tags describing their topic as is. The status tag (or tag) takes up one of those four slots and is also such a meta tag, leaving only space for three topic tags.

Per that proposal and the way the status tags are currently being used today, a status tag is now considered an essential part of a question, including from the time it is escalated for a team member to view, and it can also be applied to non-request questions (s and questions). This effectively increases the proportion of questions that would be affected by the current limit.

This was previously requested at Don't apply the tag limit to moderator-only tags, but that was declined the same day as it was posted without an explanation. It did get a disagreeing answer from a then-community member, and I'm going to assume that the staff member declining the request based their decision on that answer and had nothing to add. That answer makes two arguments against the request:

  • Only two or three tags are essential. However, searching for questions shows up plenty of questions without moderator-only tags using four tags other than the required tag. Many of those are clear cases where a status tag would be essential, i.e., reports and s. Also, in some cases, it is essential to use two tags to express one concept, such as specific review queues - this effectively reduces the amount of categorization for questions about these topics to just two.
  • There are few users watching the other tags. Per the same staff statement above, the watched tag feature is rarely used on sites other than Stack Overflow. Those other sites get to categorize their question into more bins, so why not us?

Therefore, can we reconsider the prior decision to not exempt moderator-only tags from the tag count?

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    There's not really much to "reconsider" here. It's not possible without basically rebuilding the tag engine at this point. Quite a few Teams customers have also requested the ability to increase max tags but our software as designed simply does not support it.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Aug 17 at 4:37
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    @animuson I vaguely recall a statement from Shog9 somewhere that the check can be bypassed at times with developer-level server access. Is there somewhere else in the system that assumes that questions won't have more than five tags?
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Aug 17 at 5:39

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TL;DR: Making this happen would be a significant undertaking due to the way our system is designed, and that work is unlikely to happen any time soon.

Our tag engine doesn't support more than five tags

We have something called the "tag engine" which is used for linking questions (and other post types) to a tag as well as for searching by tag. This engine is hard-coded to only allow for five tags, and the assumption of only having five tags is made in a lot of places.

Changing the tag engine to be capable of handling more than five tags at a time for a post would not be an easy task.

We have a site setting, but it's not useful

Technically, it can only be used to reduce the maximum number of tags below five, not increase past it. While we can set it higher than 5, doing so doesn't achieve anything. You'd be able to enter more than five tags onto your question, but because of the way our tag engine works, any tags past the fifth entered will be purely cosmetic. By that, I mean they would not serve any functional purpose. Because tag engine only supports five tags, it acts as if the others do not exist. That means the question would not get categorized properly as belonging to that tag and would not appear in search results for the tag, causing a lot of confusion.

We actually ran into this oddity when implementing articles, where the article type was using one tag slot (similar to a required tag on meta) but exempted from the limit of five. This caused problems with the fifth tag on articles not being recognized properly, causing us to reduce the tag limit on articles to four instead.

Making this work

To exempt moderator-only tags from the tag limit would be essentially doing what we tried to do with article types before and determined wasn't viable. Tag engine needs to be rewritten to allow for more than five tags before this could even be considered.

At the point that work potentially gets done sometime in the future (as far as I know, this isn't on any current roadmap), it'd also probably make more sense to just increase the tag limit on meta sites to 6 or 7 to cover at least one required tag and at least one moderator-only tag being added, rather than explicitly exempting moderator-only tags since that could potentially lead to questions with a dozen tags. Sure, that would mean people could use 6 tags to describe their question if it never received a status-tag, but it'd be far simpler than exempting them completely and potentially allowing questions that far exceed the tag limit given multiple moderator-only tags can be applied at once.

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