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Should we clean up tags?

I'd like a way to group similar problems in similar products together -- e.g. battery problems in all iPhones or iPod Touches. It seems like tags would be a good way to do this, but the way people have added tags to their questions is very inconsistent.

As an example, start typing "water damage" into the tags field -- and look at all the options that come up. Many of them have the device name in the tag -- maybe we could blacklist common device names in the tag field? Or maybe we should not let people create freeform tags (or at least discourage it)?

Answer this question I have this problem too

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What if we sort by & show the # of questions tagged with that specific tag in the auto complete? Do you think that would help people choose the same tags?

The autocomplete would look like:

Water Damage x 100
iphone water damage x 3
ipad water dmg x 1

when you typed "water" in for the tag. I'm always worried more data will just lead to more confusion.

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+sounds good

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yeah, that would be perfect. (Well, together with a suggestion on the Question form to reuse an existing tag when appropriate.)

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I've been told technically it's impossible to do this right now. We have some other features that are not public, mainly synonyms for tags. I think the correct direction is to make this tool more public somehow.

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This is what tags were designed for. Unfortunately, most people haven't understood. I'd like to hear some more suggestions about what we can do with tags. IIRC we don't let people use the device name as a tag. You can sort by a tag and a device, but maybe people don't do it much?

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Yeah, but I see a lot of "ipod water damage", etc. (so the device name, or a variant of it, is being used as part of the tag name.) I'm not really sure what the right was to handle this is, either...

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Currently, only exact device names are being filtered out from tags. I agree that we should consider adding some extra filtering to new tags being that are added, so as to prevent device specific names from getting from getting into tags at all.

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Yeah -- I'm not sure what can be done except for more "fuzzy" matching (or blocking) of tags, making it harder to make new tags, and maybe presenting the most commonly-used tags first? Other than that, it's a question of education, I suppose.

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So you'd want "water damage" to return cars, bikes, mowers, mp3 players, phones, laptops, furniture, etc all mixed together? If I were searching for help with a specific item I'd use that as a Boolean/keyword filter in the search. BTW is iPhone different than iphone? Are searches case sensitive?

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Searches should not be case sensitive. I would want water damage to return all devices, unless I specified a device. If you navigate to a device, any search or tag filter will be within that device.

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bushing will be eternally grateful.