The remove icon on interesting tags is easily misclicked

Question

The safe clickable area for selecting a favorite tag (especially for one letter tags, illustrated above) is quite small compared to the size of the remove button right next to it. Considering that the user is much more likely to want to filter by a tag rather than delete it, how about we move that option somewhere else.

Jeff even wrote about this situation on Coding Horror.

Answer 1

Well, you can also remove it from within the box itself by clicking the highlighted star:

So the additional X is indeed not really required - I agree for its removal.

Answer 2

Yes! This is annoying. I have accidentally deleted my favorite, favorite tags a few times and it shifts the tag order in annoying ways.

Proposed fix:

1. Kill those X's.
2. Add a delete link that opens a pop-over dialog.
3. The dialog uses checkboxes to select tags to remove from the list. All checkboxes should default as unchecked.

Answer 3

We've pushed out changes to this on meta. Feedback always welcome:

• The text fields and advanced tag management link are now hidden behind an edit link in the header of each section
• Clicking on edit reveals the add text box and button and also adds X's to the tags.
• Clicking anywhere outside the favorite/ignored area returns the tags and form to the default state

Hopefully this should eliminate the problem of accidentally removing tags, and I think it looks better to not have hanging form fields in the right sidebar.

Answer 4

It happens to me all the time, and is quite irritating. I think a confirmation dialog would be great, especially since re-adding a favorite tag, puts it at the end of the line, changing the order you had them in.

Answer 5

For those who like userscripts: [Script on StackApps]

Answer 6

I was having this problem as well today. Would it be an idea to add a small time delay before actually activating the delete button within the tag? A quick point and click would trigger the tag, a short (~0.5sec?) delay would activate the delete button and make it clickable.

Answer 7

I don't know how many users I can speak for, but I frequent a few less-prominent tags, and it's a very common use case for me to click a couple of my Interesting Tags to go see what's happening.

On shorter tag names, the delete button can often occupy up to a third of the button's area. This hardly seems ideal for a button that surely cannot be intentionally clicked that frequently.

The sum of the question votes for these four questions (all addressing the same issue) is currently 96, which would make it the fourth most popular feature request.

^{Yes, I know, I could just take that extra half-second to make absolutely sure I don't click that delete circle. But all those half-seconds add up. That's like, 30 seconds of my life!}