Convention for sub-tags within a game system

Question

I saw a tag name format which I thought was interesting:

sr4.shadowrun - Tag for Shadowrun, 4th Edition

sr4.matrix - Tag for stuff related to matrix rules/info in SR4

What do people think about adopting this convention for other systems? Ex:

dd35.monsters - Tag for monster stats in D&D 3.5

Is this a good tag format? Or would it have been better to use separate tags:

sr4 shadowrun

sr4 matrix

Can tags have uni-directional associations? i.e., an sr4 tag is, by definition, a shadowrun tag; but, not all shadowrun tags are sr4 tags (they could be using 3rd ed).

Answer 1

I do not think that doing subtags like [dd3.5-monsters] is a good idea. That should be [dd3.5] [monsters] or even better [dd] [dd3.5] [monsters]. Otherwise we get tag sprawl with every single combination that you could have (oh look, this question should be tagged [discussion-tagging-community-wiki]). I think this is a crutch for those who don't know how to and/or tags.

That is also how it's done on the main trinity. On Stack Overflow, for example, you would tag a perl question [perl], additionally with [perl5] if it is specific to that version. There are very few exceptions to this. For example, there is a [perl-module] tag - but there are more questions tagged [perl] [module] than [perl-module].

My conclusion - no hierarchical, multipart, whatnot tags. Ones that exist should be retagged.

Answer 2

Personally, I think we should just stick with using -s as delimiters.

Does [dd3.5] mean [5] as a sub-category of [dd3]?

I think [dd3.5-monster] is better than [dd35.monsters].

Likewise, [sr4.shadowrun] I think would be better as [sr4-shadowrun].

(does that sr stand for "Shadowrun"? Cause if yes, then I think it should just be [sr4] or [shadowrun4])

Answer 3

Key technical note: you can search on multiple tags inclusive, although you can't explicitly exclude tags. I should see if there's a meta proposal on that.