UPDATE: Since has been burninated much of this Q has become moot so acceptance of the existing A closes this version for me. More here though.

Q When is appropriate, on its own (~0 uses), as opposed to either (~2 uses) or (~5 uses) or one or more other tags instead?

Apparently , along with several others, has in the past been merged into (Merge [facebook-] into [facebook]).

There have been comments, such as (referring to ):

This tag can't stand alone as the only tag on a question; it would always need another tag to give context. This seems to me to be a classic Meta tag.

which hark back to one of Jeff’s blogs where he wrote:


though the (extreme) examples he gave were , and ( may be another), which to me seem far removed from the likes of or .

It seems that if a tag can “stand on its own” the chances are most Qs should only even have a single tag (maybe like ?) – or the Q is likely to be “too broad” (for covering more than a single topic) anyway.

Considering that was the topic of Merging [doc], [document] and [documents] tags. It can mean different things to different people (eg Word, PDF, a file in Google Documents, evidence for account recovery such as driving licence or passport (or images thereof, etc) and not so far actually applied in isolation (for a very small sample).

Related Q but inconclusive: Why are more general tags getting removed from questions?

Also related but not conclusive: In the context of Web Applications, which are the tags that are not specific to a web application that are not meta-tags?

May only be temporary, but does not exist at the moment (though it did when this Q was asked).


seems awfully close to a meta-tag for me. Sure there may be some web applications that are games, but someone coming here looking for questions to answer isn't going to be looking for "games" questions; no one is going to be an "expert" on all web app games.

A quick glance at the questions in there bear that out. Just in the first few results I see questions about:

  • GameFAQs, which probably doesn't count as a web app
  • a generic browser game
  • Google+ games
  • Facebook games
  • developing a language learning app as a game
  • a request for a recommendation for a recommendation engine
  • VM hosting
  • request for recommendation of sports standings
  • request for recommendation for web-based arcade games
  • request for recommendation for dice-rolling apps

None of them have any real context without another tag to go along.

Personally, I'd prefer simply to generically cover all Facebook applications, including games, but I can see the argument for as places like the Google Play store segregate out games from "regular" apps.

I think is okay, as either one describes the topic of the question; one's just more specific than the other. Someone qualified to answer a Facebook question is almost certainly going to be able to answer something about a Facebook game.

  • 1
    Same. "Notifications" is too generic, especially when facebook-notifications already exists. – ale Sep 15 '17 at 1:18
  • Probably not. "Games" seems more clear-cut to me. – ale Sep 15 '17 at 1:23

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