Tags not appearing in tag dropdown (v2)

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Paul_King reports that in Discourse v3.5.0.beta1-dev, the tag dropdown when creating a new post displays only 16 of 24 available tags, despite increasing max tags in filter list to 100 and clearing browser cache. Tags not shown in the dropdown still appear on old posts, and typing them manually doesn’t trigger suggestions. The issue persists across all categories—even with admin permissions—and seems linked to recent changes involving public/private category permissions, though no explicit tag restrictions are set. A workaround involves creating a Tag Group containing all tags and assigning it to each category, but this is cumbersome for future tag additions. Removing the Tag Group restriction from a category causes the dropdown to show no tags, suggesting the system regenerates the list based on prior state rather than recalculating from all available tags. Paul believes the intended behavior—tags available by default unless restricted—is not functioning. Screenshot shows category settings with no tag restrictions applied. The issue appears unresolved since a prior thread on the same topic was closed.

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Unfortunately the previous topic by this name was closed, although the issue is either unresolved, or has re-emerged

When creating a new post, the Optional Tags field dropdown does not list all the available tags (shows only 16 out of 24 tags), does not hint that any others exist when others do exist, and does not find a valid but not shown tag when correctly typed in in the drop down search field box.

I increased the setting max tags in filter list variable to 100, but this made no difference to the number of tags displayed.

Clearing browser cache did not help either.

Old posts created using tags that don’t now appear in the dropdown still display their original tags.

I am not sure when this problem started, but I have recently reorganised my site to provide different forum areas depending on user permissions granted on sign up, and I suspect this issue might be associated with the private vs public categories I set up. However I can’t find where else the number of tags available might be limited by a setting, other than via max tags in filter list

The affected categories are showing as having no restrictions set for tags under any category’s Tags settings.

This image is a screenshot of a website's form for creating a new category related to architecture, showing options for setting tags and access restrictions. (Captioned by AI)
This image is a screenshot of a website's form for creating a new category related to architecture, showing options for setting tags and access restrictions. (Captioned by AI)1724×1103 159 KB

The same tags are missing from the drop down of my own new posts whichever forum category I try to post in, and with my administrator profile I have full permissions and full access to both public and private forum areas, as far as I can tell.

I found a workaround by creating a new Tag Group (none existed previously) containing all current tags, and applying this within the ‘Restrict these groups to this category’, and repeating for each category.

This works, but I think should not be needed - because every time a new tag is added in future, I would then need to remember to update the tag group.

As far as I can see, the intended/correct behaviour is that all tags should be available to all categories by default, unless a restriction is imposed

  • but it just isn’t working that way.

When I tried deleting that tag group restriction from a category again (to see if toggling on then off again cleared anything), then no tags at all appeared in the Optional Tag drop down list when posting to that category.
So it seems the available tags list is not being regenerated from scratch drawing from the list of all possible tags to match current category tag settings, but instead is being regenerated based only on making changes to the previous active list of tags (I hope that makes sense).

This is under version 3.5.0.beta1-dev