The tag is a tag with 1720 questions, and its description is

In computer security, general access control includes identification, authentication, authorization, access approval, and audit.

Note: For Microsoft Access questions, use ms-access instead.

It is being misused a lot, mainly for questions that should be posted under (417 questions tagged both and , 157 questions tagged and , 201 questions tagged and ). While some may be valid (you can ask about access control in Microsoft Access or VBA), in a quick search I haven't found any.

There are even 20 questions tagged both and where both tags are improperly used (referring to the macro functionality in Microsoft Access)

There is further misuse with questions about limiting internet access to programs, access-denied errors (which could be posted under the tag), and accessing various things in various programming languages (offsite resources, global variables and such).

In my opinion, there are two ways to go about this:

  1. Burninate the tag.
  2. Merge the tag with

Burninating the tag may be appropriate. There's a lot of misuse, but the tag is on-topic and might add meaningful information. It's a very broad tag, but might mean approximately the same in most common contexts.

If we accept the narrow use of provided in it's description instead of its actual broad usage, we could also merge it with , since its tag description already refers to it as access control. If we make sure is the main tag and is the synonym, this might also avoid a lot of misuse (someone asking about Microsoft Access will surely realize is the wrong tag).

Note: there's currently a vote on the tag to mark as a synonym (I didn't even know this was an option for already existing tags). Merging these two is a bad plan, since they mean very different things.

  • 20
    Kill it with fire. – Chris Sep 4 '17 at 7:47
  • 3
    It's hard to think of a good question that would need this tag... To begin with, there are too many concept in the tag's description – Antoine Pelletier Sep 5 '17 at 13:37
  • 2
    How is "access-denied" a useful tag? – Matthieu M. Sep 6 '17 at 12:06
  • @MatthieuM. Haven't thought about that actually. It might be useful for people running into access-denied errors, but you might argue it adds little to the question, and that would certainly be true – Erik A Sep 6 '17 at 12:25
  • 1
    @ErikvonAsmuth: We generally don't have a tag for each kind of error one can encounter, there are too many of them. The error will appear in the title/body of the question and be searchable without a specific tag. – Matthieu M. Sep 6 '17 at 12:26
  • Very true. I'm just pointing out it exists, and is especially made for these questions that are wrongfully tagged access – Erik A Sep 6 '17 at 12:31
  • @MatthieuM. Doesn't "access-denied" refer to people who didn't purchase the Professional version of MS Office? ;-) – YowE3K Sep 7 '17 at 1:09
  • Yes, please do that. – a_horse_with_no_name Oct 21 '17 at 8:33

Suggestion: Most of the questions belong to . The others should be checked, renamed, and then should either be made a synonym to or banned.

  • Change it to just banned to get an upvote. – Joshua Aug 10 '18 at 0:21

I wholeheartedly agree that issues surrounding the tag need to be addressed in some way, however, given that:

  1. The main reason for the misuse of this tag is the incorrect tagging of questions.
  2. There exists the single-word tags , for other MS Office applications.
  3. Most users refer to MS Access simply as 'Access' and are too lazy to read the tag descriptions.
  4. The current incarnation of the covers such a broad and vague subject area, applicable to any programming language and a multitude of fields (access to files, networks, accounts etc.), rendering it useless for anyone searching for questions on this topic.

Would it not be more appropriate to reassign this tag as a synonym of the tag?

You must log in to answer this question.

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