We have many tags with “count: 1” as tag creation is not at all locked down and some folks just treat them as hash tags. I still believe in keeping permissions open for tags, but it’d be nice to be able to periodically weed the garden more easily.
I’d love to find ways to nudge people to consider tags as a means to “grouping” related topics and to only create tags when they think (or know!) that they will be used more than once.
But in the mean time, I think extending the existing feature to allow for “deleting tags used by less than __ topics” could be a nice improvement that we would use.
Even fancier, I could imagine a setting that would automatically sweep tags and delete tags based on the following criteria:
count < N && topic_last_updated > X months ago
Basically, you let tags have a chance to get a toe hold. Their life is renewed if new topics are posted before some timeout. But if no new topics have been posted for more than, say 3 months, and the tag has less than 5 topics, then just get rid of it.
I’ve never seen this button either, and I agree that an auto-cleanup feature would be useful. It should also be careful about not deleting tags that are staff-only. There are probably other cases where some tags shouldn’t be deleted automatically.
In the meantime, here’s a #plugin:data-explorer query that can help folks identify candidate tags for deletion:
-- [params]
-- int :months_since_used = 24
-- int :max_topic_count = 50
with
t as (
select
current_date::timestamp - (:months_since_used * (INTERVAL '1 months')) as cutoff_date
),
topic_tag_dates as (
select tags.id, tags.name, tags.topic_count, topics.last_posted_at as last_used
from topic_tags
left join tags
on topic_tags.tag_id = tags.id
left join topics
on topic_tags.topic_id = topics.id
),
max_last_used as(
select id, max(last_used) mx from topic_tag_dates
group by id
),
tag_last_used as (
select topic_tag_dates.id, name, topic_count, last_used from topic_tag_dates
left join max_last_used
on topic_tag_dates.id = max_last_used.id
where max_last_used.mx = topic_tag_dates.last_used
)
select id,name,topic_count,last_used from tag_last_used, t
where tag_last_used.last_used < t.cutoff_date
and topic_count < :max_topic_count
order by topic_count desc
Yes - this is heavily needed as some people on my forum decided it would be funny to joke around and post let’s say ‘interesting’ tags not appropriate for all ages therefore I’d like to see this sort of feature.