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What should be the main tags on the site?

Tagging by game is obvious, any question specific to a game should be tagged.

I don't see the point of board/card tags; they supply very little information and many posts won't have them. Perhaps if a question is not game specific then that would work.

house-rules is a great tag. Could we use rules-as-written or perhaps just rules for rule questions that don't invite people to write their own rules?

PS this would be community-wiki if I could. At least I don't get rep for it!

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  • I like just rules for clarifications on existing rules, personally.
    – lilserf
    Commented Oct 19, 2010 at 21:16

5 Answers 5

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I don't see why we need a house-rules or a rules tag at all (or tactics or strategy or board-games). I consider all of these meta-tags that do not add value to the questions. See also http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/ for more.

I can't imagine myself ever wanting to search by "house-rules" to find all the various house-rules people have come up with. I would want to search by a specific game.

In my opinion, most questions should have 1 tag - the game they are asking about. I'm not seeing much value from the extra tags.

Here (on Gaming) is a question where it makes sense to have 2 different tags - It's about combining 2 different specific things into 1 question.

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  • Damn, when you're right, you're right.
    – Richard Gadsden
    Commented Oct 20, 2010 at 17:14
  • I'm torn on this. I can see where you're coming from, but I do kind of like viewing dominion and then seeing the subtags of stuff people are asking about within the dominion tag.
    – lilserf
    Commented Oct 20, 2010 at 20:41
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    I disagree. Having a rules tag might be good for someone who's a rules lawyer and wants to highlight questions about rules, since they're good at figuring out rule intricacies. Some people are interested in only the official rules, and may ignore house-rules questions. Some people may be more interested in talking about strategy than rules, and follow the strategy tag. There are plenty of reasons to have tags beyond just the game name; you might be asking about a whole genre while using one game as an example, or you might just have interests that are finer grained than an entire game.
    – Brian Campbell
    Commented Oct 25, 2010 at 23:28
  • I also disagree. What about if I wanted to see all questions that have specific game tag and house-rules, just to find out what kind of modifications people make to rules of this game? How about this: I'm preparing to teach some people rules of the game X. If I type in search field [X] [rules] I will get questions about rules clarification in the game X. That's exactly what I wanted - I was looking for the list of rules, that might be most confusing to other players. Why take this option away?
    – beam022
    Commented Oct 31, 2012 at 23:10
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I'm seeing a board-game tag that I think is unnecessary. This site is for board games, card games, things like Dominion that feel like both at once. Anyone interested in a particular game can easily discover which specific type of game it is - this tag just clutters things up.

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  • Whoops, didn't see your mention of this in the OP.
    – lilserf
    Commented Oct 19, 2010 at 21:15
  • What if people want to search for all questions about board games?
    – Michael Mrozek
    Commented Oct 19, 2010 at 21:23
  • Hm. I have a hard time seeing that as a likely use case - why would they need to know about all board games ever? Just to look for questions to answer, maybe?
    – lilserf
    Commented Oct 19, 2010 at 21:24
  • @lilserf Exactly, if they're interested in board games but not card games (or the other way around), which is rather common. We should also probably have a separate tag for card games that use poker cards instead of special cards
    – Michael Mrozek
    Commented Oct 19, 2010 at 21:25
  • I'm still unconvinced that this will provide enough usefulness to offset the fact that nearly EVERY question will have one of the two tags on it, and that some games (like Dominion) will be difficult to classify. If every question is tagged either A or B, do those tags really need to exist?
    – lilserf
    Commented Oct 19, 2010 at 21:32
  • @lilserf If an asker had six tags they wanted to use and needed to drop one, I would say drop board/card-games, but if you've got five spaces why not use them? It's not like it takes up more space on the page, the tags are in one row either way, and we're going to end up with the same problem as on the Unix SE where half the posts have [unix] or [linux] tags and the other half don't. (Also, you can use @Mic to reply to my comment)
    – Michael Mrozek
    Commented Oct 19, 2010 at 21:40
  • I like this type of tag but this is clearly a meta tag and meta tags don't use to be well accept on other sites.
    – Maniero
    Commented Oct 19, 2010 at 21:52
  • @bigown I'm not super attached to it (and it sounds like we're going to end up not using it), but it's definitely not a meta tag; it's a tag about the game in question itself, not about the post
    – Michael Mrozek
    Commented Oct 19, 2010 at 21:53
  • I don't like it because it will be the subset of all questions about board games that the questioner has remembered to tag board-games. It's about as pointful as a loops tag on SO for every question that involves a loop.
    – Richard Gadsden
    Commented Oct 19, 2010 at 21:56
  • These tags seem like the perfect example of a useless meta-tag as seen in The Death of Meta Tags
    – lilserf
    Commented Oct 20, 2010 at 16:00
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We need create a standard to some words. We already have boardgames, board-games and board-game.

For me the correct is board-games

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    I retagged a "variations" to "house-rules" already.
    – Richard Gadsden
    Commented Oct 19, 2010 at 21:59
  • @Richard: English is not my native language, so I know little about some expressions. I just learnt it. Thanks.
    – Maniero
    Commented Oct 19, 2010 at 22:14
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Tactics vs Strategy? Do we need both as tags?

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  • On a purely pedantic level, they can be quite different. Not sure how often they really are different in most board or card games though.
    – lilserf
    Commented Oct 19, 2010 at 22:09
  • Someone has a good example to keep both?
    – Maniero
    Commented Oct 19, 2010 at 22:15
  • @lilserf There is a difference, but I doubt how much they will be used differently. Strategy seems to have a lot more use so far.
    – Richard Gadsden
    Commented Oct 19, 2010 at 22:17
  • Yeah, and the average user will probably not care about the difference. I think strategy is likely to be the more common tag.
    – lilserf
    Commented Oct 19, 2010 at 22:22
  • For most that do care, doctrine is what is really meant rather than tactics, anyway.
    – Richard Gadsden
    Commented Oct 19, 2010 at 22:25
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For those of us who remember them, can we use the old Avalon Hill three character abbreviations as tags - DIP, CIV, ACV, A3R, 3R4, or should we tag more like diplomacy, civilization, advanced-civilization, advanced-third-reich, third-reich-fourth-edition?

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    I think generally the full name of the game is the better tag - it will be easier to find questions that way for Google and for the casual reader. I believe we can set up aliases so that if someone tries to tag a question with DIP, it automagically becomes diplomacy - anyone have a link for that?
    – Erik P.
    Commented Oct 19, 2010 at 21:11
  • Full names of the games are more consistent with the other SE communities as well. Additionally, if someone types "dip" into the tag box they're going to get autocompletion to "diplomacy" right away and see our pattern.
    – lilserf
    Commented Oct 19, 2010 at 21:14
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    But the odder codes would make good tag synonyms. Agreed.
    – Richard Gadsden
    Commented Oct 19, 2010 at 21:20
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    @Erik boardgames.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms
    – Michael Mrozek
    Commented Oct 19, 2010 at 21:35
  • See also meta.boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/81/…
    – Erik P.
    Commented Oct 20, 2010 at 16:32

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