When I went to search for Ratchet & Clank related questions, it only shows the tag As shown in the screenshot.

However, most Ratchet and Clank games have their tag in the form of (due mostly to this question)

Could we somehow link these tags, so that when someone is searching for "Ratchet and Clank" the other tags come up as well?

soul crushing disappointment at the lack of tags

Also, there were two questions with the , I retagged an obvious one to (awaiting approval), the other is more generically about "Ratchet & Clank: Future" which could be re-tagged to the three separate games in this series, but I was unsure if it was appropriate to do so.

Note, at the moment the only Ratchet and Clank tags that exist are


The appropriate solution is probably to create synonyms that reverse the acronyms. As we've seen, is far too long for the tag limit, so we use . I see no reason that we couldn't have a synonym of there to provide for better autocomplete functionality to those typing 'Ratchet' into the tag field.

Going forward, we should probably look to do this with most series where we end up acronymizing the leading title, where possible. It is actually of great use to have a synonym that properly spells out the first word fully in most cases.

  • 1
    This is clever!
    – BoltClock
    Sep 6 '12 at 10:49
  • +1 this makes the most sense to me as well
    – Robotnik Mod
    Sep 6 '12 at 11:08
  • 1
    Possibly ratchet-nc-<subtitle>, assuming it fits? +1 regardless. Sep 6 '12 at 11:08
  • To expand upon myself, given the edit window is passed: "ratchet-nc-crack-in-time" is 24 characters, and "ratchet-nc-all-4-one" is 20. These both are short enough to fit, fulfill searchability with "ratchet", and are clear enough to synonymise, I would say. ("ratchet-nc-full-frontal-assault" is too long at 31 characters, but "ratchet-nc-ff-assault" would work, at 21.) Sep 6 '12 at 11:18
  • 1
    @RilgonArcsinh I don't see any reason to change the current canonical rnc-all-4-one as canonical. Given that, the synonym does not need to maximize searchability, it merely needs to provide an effective autocomplete and be distinct. I think the 'ratchet-nc-<subtitle>' format is just awkward when we can simply have a canonical RNC-<full subtitle> and Ratchet-and-Clank-<Abbv. Subtitle> as a synonym. Trying to hybridize them doesn't gain us anything. Sep 6 '12 at 11:35
  • Fair enough. Someone familiar with the series would probably be able to get the abbreviated subtitle anyways. Sep 6 '12 at 11:36
  • 1
    "ratchet-nc" is not just awkward, it's all kinds of awkward.
    – BoltClock
    Sep 6 '12 at 12:12

Going by LessPop's proposal, limiting myself to tags that exist at this point in time, this is what I have done:

  • 1
    Hmm, I just tried entering "ratchet" in the tag search but it still only turned up [ratchet-and-clank], not any of the others. Typing "rnc" turns those up instead.
    – BoltClock
    Sep 6 '12 at 14:37

If we were to make long-form synonyms, that would probably fix the issue.

  • 3
    The problem is that those tags are too long, which is why we have the shortened tags in the first place. Sep 6 '12 at 6:37
  • Is there a length limit on tags? AFAIK, whenever someone uses the synonym, the default tag is the one that actually shows on the question. These synonyms would exist for usability purposes.
    – KOVIKO
    Sep 6 '12 at 6:52
  • 3
    @Koviko: 25 characters. This limit applies to synonyms as well.
    – BoltClock
    Sep 6 '12 at 7:50

If I understand you right, you want to synonymize with the other three tags. This is not how we use synonyms on this site. When you synonymize two tags, all questions with either tag only show the target tag in the synonym, so creating these synonyms would destroy any distinction between the games in the tagging system.

Most people look for questions with the search (or Google), so it should be sufficient that the question text has the full game name.


You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .