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There are a number of questions asking about whether some homebrew material is or isn't balanced. Some questions are tagged as , others are tagged as .

According to the meta discussion "Do we want a [homebrew-review] tag separate from the [homebrew] tag?", this is intentional, and the tags should be distinct and used exclusively.

However, it seems that the tags are often used interchangeably, ultimately asking the same types of question. For comparison, see the following search results:

  1. Questions tagged as [homebrew] with the word "balance"

  2. Questions tagged as [homebrew-review] with the word "balance"

Substituting "balance" with words like "review" or "feedback" yields similar findings.

This isn't a pressing problem, although it's a complication when searching for prior homebrew questions.

If a question tagged as should instead be tagged as , should we edit the question to change its tags?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Time for some archaeologists to surface =) \$\endgroup\$
    – nitsua60 Mod
    Sep 25, 2019 at 1:48

2 Answers 2

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Yes, we should edit the tags

There was some initial discussion about simply renaming the existing tag to and retagging the smaller subset of tag, but it seems that that isn't going to happen now.

So yes we should start retagging the old questions with the wrong tag. However we should do so slowly. There are over 600 questions with the tag and we don't want to flood the frontpage.

Do note that the presense (or lack) of the term "balance" from a question does not put it in one category or another. It is a likely indicator of a review question but not a hard and fast rule.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Just as a heads up, I am writing up an answer that will at least explain why no action has been taken yet :) \$\endgroup\$ Sep 24, 2019 at 12:59
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Rubiksmoose Thanks for the heads up. I can understand the reasons it wasn't done and fully support your decision there. \$\endgroup\$
    – linksassin Mod
    Sep 25, 2019 at 1:38
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Yes, go ahead and edit them as they come up (or edit the backlog slowly)

Background

I previously said that we would rename to and then retag all the appropriate questions back to .

We had several reasons to sit on this and wait. One was that at least some of the mods had concerns about how the tags were currently defined. I certainly did. I combed through the list multiple times and each time ended up with a big pile of questions that were ambiguous as to which tag should be applied. So we waited a bit to see how the tag definitions worked out for the current stack before taking any action. For the questions we commonly get here they seem to be working well.

The other issue we had reservations about was that retagging all the questions to created a situation where the questions had to be manually fixed and preferably sooner rather than later (because, in my mind at least, having regular homebrewing questions under is more wrong and confusing than having review questions under the general tag).

And for those reasons and others (one certainly being that it wasn't super pressing as an issue), we haven't moved forward as we originally planned to.

Best way forward: retag manually

I agree with linksassin in that we should just retag the questions from to manually. There's a bunch of them, so it'll take a while but since it isn't a huge issue to have review questions temporarily under the general tag, there's no reason to rush it.

That being said, our usual guidelines apply here when it comes to making minor edits to old posts. Don't flood the recently active page with a bunch of tag edits. Do them in small batches over time. If one of the questions resurfaces naturally obviously, make edits as you normally would.

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