Feature Request EOL Tags

Question

Feature Request for Tags

Some of the tags used on DBA.SE (and possibly other sites) are related to a specific version of a product or exist as part of a certain product. It would be nice to have a feature in the tags that would allow the community to mark a tag as obsolete, no longer required or EOL.

Reasons for Marking a Tag

Reasons for marking a tag could be:

• End-Of-Life (EOL)
• Deprecated (no longer used)
• No longer available
• other reasons?

Users would mark a tag via a check-box in the tag section of a site and be able to select from the above list of reasons.

Tag Handling

The tag would end up in the queue where community members with a score of 5000 reputation could vote to "soft-close" the tag.

Soft Closed Tags

Soft-closed tags would appear as greyed out or marked with a certain colour (orange?) to discern them from regular tags. When a user selects a soft-closed tag for a question a warning pops up à la:

Caution
The tag your are selecting is no longer supported. The product / software / hardware is no longer available and should be upgraded/replaced.

Benefits for The Community

Soft-closed tags are visible and allow the community to discern between relevant information and possibly no longer relevant information.

Open for Suggestions

This feature request is open for additional suggestions of how we could handle "old" tags.

Answer 1

Personally, I lean towards simply editing the tag wiki to include the deprecation date and/or the date the product became unsupported.

Most, if not all, subject matter experts know that specific products or product-versions are no longer supported, and hence don't really need to know from the color of a tag that the product is "old".

Furthermore, for old questions, all the tags might easily be "orange", reducing the opportunity for someone to provide a helpful answer. Admittedly, the older a product is, the less useful an answer will be to future visitors, but that's generally the case for all old questions at some point in time.

I just don't really see the benefit, personally. If someone comes here with a question about some old version, they probably actually need help, not to be shunned by the community because their question is about some old, tired, un-cool product.