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I saw some new tags appear today: , , , and . Since all questions are about helping someone, I don't see the benefit of the -help suffix. would even be completely redundant.

Why were they added and what should be the definition of them?

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    My first reaction to these is I think they create inconsistency and unnecessary complexity. I'd love to here @Jeff Atwood weigh in on these.
    – MikeSchinkel Mod
    Commented Feb 4, 2011 at 14:26
  • et al: "help" has been removed. Those tags don't exists any longer due to another night passed by and the valuable feedback here.
    – hakre
    Commented Feb 5, 2011 at 10:42
  • @hakre: Et voila, another case that we as a community solved! Maybe we should hold another chat meeting, now that we are nearing the end of our beta?
    – Jan Fabry
    Commented Feb 5, 2011 at 14:53
  • sounds great!
    – hakre
    Commented Feb 5, 2011 at 16:09

2 Answers 2

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I do not see any value in these tags, and even worse, they are meta-tags.

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/the-death-of-meta-tags/

I also agree that help-* is totally redundant in general.

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  • I had removed the subjective tags prior to jan asking the question as I already got an idea that those are not working. For help considered to be redundant, I've removed it, was just a pattern and I have not problem to anti-pattern those. support should better be named technical-support but mainly that's configuration or server in the end, true. Anyway, I started those tags not in the meaning of being of subjective nature and unless not subjective, I don't consider meta disconnect from content but a higher level of the same if done right. - I should add: not that I say it's easy.
    – hakre
    Commented Feb 5, 2011 at 10:16
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I'm currently introducing those tags while working through the list of unanswered questions from behind. Depending on the question, there are different needs for help and I tag those questions which didn't get any attention so far, because they are about help needed but not yet given.

coding-help is about help needed in doing PHP coding in a wordpress related context. Probably such a question could be moved to a PHP related coding forum/wiki, but as it appeared here in wordpress context, to answer that wordpress related question, some help in coding might be needed to answer that question.

support-help is about assisting the question asker about debugging and tackle configuration issues with the wordpress installation in question and/or the server it's running one.

server-help is even more specifically tagging questions asking for help configuring a server to run wordpress.

css-help is quite the same like coding-help, but about how to write css instead of how to write php or javacsript.

Well if those questions wouldn't have the help suffix you didn't know that this is about helping someone, right? This is in contrast to questions where that someone just asks and you know the answer to because it's knowledge that is already available.

Older questions can then be answered based on their *-help tag, e.g. a coder can look into those and pick them up.

spamming-help is not of use right now but it could be used if the one who is asking a question is actually asking for help setting up a wordpress based splog. It might be useful when reviving an old question that might have not got any attention because some community users might not want to support such a wordpress administrator. But well, this is sort of contradictory, as it's not easy to say, subject to opinion etc.

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    There is already native mechanism of "Unanswered Questions" that supports filtering by tags as well as favorite/ignored tags. Isn't extra set of tags for that excessive? Maybe I miss linguistic nuance, but like @Jan I don't understand -help suffix because all questions are about helping others in some form.
    – Rarst
    Commented Feb 4, 2011 at 14:59
  • Oh sure, I use that already. Those tags were just in addition. Most probably it's excessive as the question run-down yesterday was of excessive nature.
    – hakre
    Commented Feb 5, 2011 at 10:20
  • I see you still use the [support] tag, but I don't really understand the definition of it. Can you explain that again, or maybe suggest a better name for it?
    – Jan Fabry
    Commented Feb 10, 2011 at 10:48
  • @Jan Fabry - Probably Support in the meaning of technical support not help-support. Let me check.
    – hakre
    Commented Feb 10, 2011 at 14:09

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