Unity Answers has a lot of problems with it. One of them is the fact it lacks a meta, which means there’s not even a proper place to discuss how to improve it. Another one is the tagging system. Let me list some of the wonderful tags that exist:
Oh, and just as a cherry on top for that prior question, look at the title. “Help!Script Errors!”
Obviously these tags have no value whatsoever. But it’s actually worse than that. Every question is required to have between 1 and 5 tags. This is a simple automated system to make sure that the person asking the question can at least show the tiniest bit of thought or research, by requiring at least a single valid tag. The problem is that by allowing these tags to exist, you can completely bypass having to think about what you’re asking.
There’s a lot to fix on this website, but I feel like getting rid of these tags (and similarly useless ones) is something small that can be done to yield a pretty big quality increase.
Tags are a mess. They’ve been a mess as long as I’ve active on this list. At some some moderators work to fix them or in some cases, will reject questions with bad tags. But the efforts are individual and non-comprehensive. Of more concern to me are titles. They suffer from a similar problem with titles like “Help me,” “What is wrong with my script,” “What am I doing wrong,” “How do I fix these errors,” etc. Tags and titles are the most important way that people find answers. So if our efforts at answer questions are to have long-term value, the questions need good titles and tags. Many times I’ve written an answer or read another’s answer that I want to reuse for a similar question, and I simply cannot find the question with Google or using Unity’s own search. This is almost always due to a bad title.
Ninety percent of all questions with tagging and titling issues go through moderation, so in theory we could either fix the questions as they come in, or have the OP fix them. BUT:
Without a workable send message feature, anything we reject just disappears. The OP has no idea why something was not published, nor what they have to do to get it published.
It is an issue I’ve harped on lots of times including:
As I’ve mentioned a number of times before, the consequences of the moderators not being able to communicate with the OPs is far reaching. The alternate of fixing them is time consuming at a time when few moderators are active. It is not unusual to see the moderation queue stack up 45 to 60 messages, with the oldest being six hours old. So an effective means of pushing back poorly written questions (as opposed to fixing them) is a must. In theory we could publish them and then close them, but this process is cumbersome and has it own set of consequences. Does the list really want to see every time a questions is close for a poor title or bad tags?
Any user with enough karma (not sure what the limit is) can create tags. This happens just by typing in the tag. No “are you sure you want to make a new tag”
As far as I have discovered there is no way to delete tags or manipulate tags in bulk.
There are some tags that are good, but duplicate. Such as tag, tags and tagged. As you have pointed out there are some that are just plain useless.
The other problem with tags it that when you retag a question it counts as an edit and pops to the top of the list.
Maybe someone will see this and get onto the fix. But its just one of a long list of functions that do not work properly here.