I agree managing tags can get confusing. I don’t know if this is on the roadmap, but I’ve been wondering if some AI functionality could be added to tags. For example, to help users select appropriate tags.
There are a couple of settings that might help:
Discourse allows you to create tag groups:
By default, this doesn’t do anything to improve the site’s /tags page. To fix that, enable the tags listed by group site setting. With that setting enabled, this:
is cleaned up to look like this (I’ve created Authors and Categories tag groups for this test):
Users aren’t given an option to add tags they create to a tag group, but staff members can add them to groups from a tag’s page. For example:
The text in the above screenshot says “To add restrictions,” but tag groups can also be used to just keep a site’s tags organized. This would also allow you to add restrictions at a later time if you wished. As a bad example, you could have a “books” category that required a tag from both the “authors” and the “categories” tag groups.
The ordering options are limited. By default tags are ordered by popularity, but you can override this by enabling the tags sort alphabetically site setting. Users can also switch between alphabetical and popularity ordering on the tags page.