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Last month, we completed a big tag cleanup of the Minecraft tag family. A big part of this cleanup was the removal of in favor of version specific tags like and . However, can be (and has been) recreated after this cleanup.

We're proposing that we add to the tag blacklist, and add a tag error with guidance on what tags should be used instead. This would look something like this:

Sample "Ask Question" page from Anime.SE with the message "The Identification Request tag is deprecated and now off-topic, see our discussion on the topic. Existing questions are currently in the process of removal."

In our case, the guidance could read something like:

The Minecraft tag is no longer in use. Please use one of the version specific tags instead:

  • minecraft-java-edition
  • minecraft-bedrock-edition
  • minecraft-legacy-console
  • minecraft-education-edition

Does this sound like something that would be useful? Let us know, and if we as a community decide to go with something like this, the mod team will contact the CMs to get this on the site.

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  • 13
    YES! DO IT NOW!
    – MBraedley
    Commented Mar 4, 2020 at 21:38
  • @MBraedley I literally thought those same exact words and then I saw your comment... DO IT NOW!
    – Timmy Jim Mod
    Commented Mar 6, 2020 at 12:44
  • As Davie504 once said.
    – Corsaka
    Commented Mar 6, 2020 at 15:08
  • 2
    Ooohh, why don't we have a pretty custom background like that here? I would love to make one..
    – Joachim
    Commented Mar 6, 2020 at 22:34
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    Thanks for the feedback on this everyone, I've gone ahead and contacted the CM team to get this moving
    – Unionhawk Mod
    Commented Mar 9, 2020 at 16:38
  • Seems that "-edition" at the end is unnecessary; thes tags could just be "minecraft-<version>" or better yet "<version>-minecraft".
    – TylerH
    Commented May 4, 2020 at 14:24

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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The blacklist for ^minecraft(-console)?$ is now in place. Since there is no way to dynamically specify a wildcard (so that we could pull a dynamic list of all existing examples of minecraft-* tags to show), we went with this as a the error message:

The Minecraft tag is no longer in use. Please use a version-specific tag instead, such as: minecraft-java-edition, minecraft-bedrock-edition, minecraft-legacy-console, or minecraft-education-edition.

It looks like this:

enter image description here

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    Awesome. You rock.
    – Wipqozn Mod
    Commented Apr 3, 2020 at 12:16
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I'm in favor of this.

If we clean up without addressing the underlying source of these tags then Arqade members & moderators will have to continually retag these posts.

It'd be a lot easier to blacklist the Minecraft tag now while there are only one or two currently than allow their numbers to slowly creep back up.

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I already had that in mind when planning the tag cleanup, apparently I just forgot to actually write it down. So: Yes!

Also, should be blacklisted for the same reason.

I just removed the tag from the one question that had the tag. It was a commands question, so I just replaced it with and then voted to close as "unclear" because the asker didn't state which game it actually was.

Two nitpicks:

  • The cleanup isn't really completed, it just appears that nobody wanted to do the tag wiki edits of MCBE and MCCE related tags, so the meta post just got un- after a while of no activity.
  • The tag was never intended for all games of the Minecraft family, that's just what it was very, very often misused for, which was one of the main triggers for the cleanup. The tag used to be only for MCJava.
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  • This is mostly a step of due diligence before we get the CMs involved. Also, it does make sense to me to have the old console tag covered too, though I'm less worried about that one getting created again since there's less volume. The blacklist is a regex, so it'd be pretty easy to cover both at once.
    – Unionhawk Mod
    Commented Mar 5, 2020 at 13:24
  • Please tell me the entire blacklist is not literally a single regex… But yeah, "minecraf.*" matches both tags, so that should be easy. :P
    – Fabian Röling
    Commented Mar 5, 2020 at 13:28
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    No, each item on the blacklist is regex though, for example ^bugs?$ is on the tag blacklist as a single entry to cover both bug and bugs
    – Unionhawk Mod
    Commented Mar 5, 2020 at 13:29
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Yes, absolutely.

The community here has done an incredible job of organizing content. If we do not blacklist it, new content will slowly (but 100% surely) become disorganized again.

Blacklisting this tag also comes with the added advantage of forcing askers to provide what platform they're playing on. This might very well help some questions avoid closure.

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