As Gilles has said in his other answer "version tags are massively overused on AU", I think is our fault that such things happens. We allow them be alone we them shouldn't and we do nothing to fix that. So, when an user ask a new question and gets offered XX.XX as only tag, is obvious that the user will only use that tag unless the system offers more tags.

So, I think that the system shouldn't suggest the tag at all, and let the user to explicitly tag it as such instead of suggesting it to prevent that questions gets tagged with only this tag.

  • Not only does the system suggest those tags, but they are also used frequently as "example tags": "Tags: At least one tag such as (command-line 13.10 dual-boot), max 5 tags" – Richard Apr 24 '14 at 1:32
  • I feel like this has been requested before. I can't find it but I feel like I've asked for this before. Edit: I requested this as part of a much bigger set of tag feature suggestions. I'm not against it on its own but it would be helpful to do more than just this. – Oli Apr 24 '14 at 8:42
  • @Oli I'm trying to split the problem in several tasks that can be archived easily by the team. – Braiam Apr 26 '14 at 18:48
  • 1
    As Giles has said in what "other answer"? – TRiG Apr 28 '14 at 16:02
  • @TRiG this one – Braiam Apr 28 '14 at 16:05

If there is no version tag and the version is not listed in the question, the 1st comment will probably be to ask for the version in many cases because it is needed to answer. Certainly a lot of questions doesn't need the version but we can't rely on the asker to know if the version is an important parameter or probably he wouldn't be asking the question.

Regarding the KB point, for future usefulness of the answers, with the version tag I think the search result are better and help to choose between proposed solutions to test when you find them (an answer for 12.04 has more chance to work for your 14.04 than an answer for 8.10).

I think it also should be used to mark duplicates. It is not always used and a lot of questions are marked as duplicate of an old version and the accepted answer there doesn't work (or is not the best) for the new version. Questions related with network configuration, grub or windows manager (ubuntu, xubuntu, kubuntu, ...) for example.

Last, questions about unsupported versions are off-topic so we need a way to identify them.

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