Questions asking for hidden features of languages are off-topic on Stack Overflow, and that's fine as I am not here to question that. What I am interested in is the tag itself.

While (all) questions still tagged with it are locked you can easily find them through google, but when using the internal Stack Overflow search box with [hidden-features] as the search query, it returns 0 questions.

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The excerpt history for the tag is also quite confusing...

Can anyone explain why the search box shows 0 as a result? How should I interpret this? Is it a bug or is this done on purpose?

Additionally, since the internal search box does not allow us to see questions tagged with but I think we are still able to tag our questions with tag do you think tag should be removed from the site?

At a glance, all of the googleable questions look like they're locked. (Y'know, just in case that detail ends up being important) –  Dennis Meng Jun 11 at 8:15
Frankly the problem is the locked questions not appearing in a tag search. If the questions themselves are so "valuable" that you don't want to delete them, why hide them from users using your internal search. –  psubsee2003 Jun 11 at 8:18
To remove the tag we'd need to be able to edit the questions - which we can't do because they're locked.... –  ChrisF Jun 11 at 8:19
Found a way to list them all. Just use some restricting operator in a non-restricting way for the search, like answers:0... Wrote it up here: How can I find hidden questions? –  Deduplicator Jun 11 at 21:33
Those features sure are hidden well. –  Quincunx Jun 12 at 7:20

2 Answers 2

up vote 10 down vote accepted

Dennis Meng is spot on, the questions you find with Google have historical locks on them.

From What is a historical lock, and what is it used for?


Indeed, if you search for Hidden Features of C# you will find Hidden Features of C#?, which is tagged with but also has a historical lock.

So you could say that it's a hidden feature of the 'Hidden Features' tag, that if you search for its posts directly, they're hidden. –  anotherdave Jun 11 at 23:00

You point out something I'd forgotten about: we never blacklisted this tag. I've remedied that:

The 'hidden-features' tag is not allowed.

Given these questions cannot be edited, this serves to preserve the categorization of those in the archives while discouraging folks from posting new ones.


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