Recently I asked a question about Far Cry: New Dawn and the tag didn't exist. This is a major AAA game release by Ubisoft... shouldn't at least all AAA games get tags auto-generated to prevent the horde of "please create this tag" requests on meta?

Is it to prevent tag confusion or is there some other reason?

I would also like to know if this is a missing feature in the suggested-tags functionality

  • tags don't exists unless they are used in a question. when they are orphaned (used to be used but no longer) they are cleaned up at some point. to auto-generate tags questions have to be auto-generated to – Memor-X Mar 18 at 13:38
  • if a tag doesn't exist and you don't have the rep to make a new one, either make it clear what game your talking about in the question or leave a note at the end indicating the tag you need created. a higher rep user will come along and make the tag for you (and remove a "create this tag" note) – Memor-X Mar 18 at 13:41
  • 1
    @Memor-X This site in particular does not clean orphaned or underused tags. Other sites like StackOverflow do. – Unionhawk Mar 18 at 13:52

To expand on what Wipqozn states: Autogenerating tags sounds like a good idea in theory, but the practicalities of implementing this would mean a lot of work for very little (if any) gain.

Where would this automated tag generation system pull it's list of games? Who maintains the list of games? Anything built by SE that pulls stuff from say Wikipedia, or PSN/Steam/XBL/Switch services etc would no doubt need a few handshakes, written contracts and months of effort to integrate with their systems. That's a whole lot of cost and effort for a problem that only occurs a) Once per game, when b) the asker is under 300 rep, and c) is the first to ask a question.

That's a very small subset of the community that gets affected. Is it worth going to all that effort for the couple of times this happens per year?

Even if this was still an onerous burden, there are probably other ways we could solve it, such as replacing the reputation requirement with a review system for new tags (similar to Suggested Edits). I'm not saying that this is a perfect solution either, just a lot less effort and more potential gain.

It's also worth noting that our community's workaround to this issue is codified in our question:

I want to ask a question about a game which has no tag yet, how should I tag it?:

State the game name clearly in your title and question body.



  • communities having their own faqs is a new one to me, thanks! – kkarakk Mar 19 at 4:23
  • @kkarakk - no worries, glad to help :-) – Robotnik Mar 19 at 6:40

This feature likely doesn't exist because it would be a lot of work for the dev team for absolutely no gain. Creating a new tag takes a matter of seconds, and handling the occasional tag creation request from new users doesn't take much longer.

You must log in to answer this question.

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