Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!
Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.
What is the point of tagging a question with both a parent and a child tag?
On the old sites, if you wanted to tag something with [sql] and [mysql] that required two tags. However, because we have hierarchal tags where [mysql] is a child of [sql] you only need to tag it with [mysql] to have it come up in the search for the [sql] tag.
I am wondering what the use case here would be for tagging it with both as it will show up in the search by tag for both [sql] and [mysql] either way.
Personally, I think it would be cleaner if only one tag from a grandparent->parent->child relationship was used on a question.
3 answers
I can provide an answer based on Stack Overflow experience. SO offered watches by tags. By using a general tag along with a more specific tag, users interested in [sql] will also get the question in their feed.
While I could find this feature on Codidact, it makes sense to implement it in the future, when the question volume justifies this type of notification (by tags).
Tags also serve for someone who stumbles across the question directly from a third party link to find related content. Perhaps the child tag would suffice if the parent tag is automatically inserted in the page.
0 comment threads
An answer on a related Meta suggestion, Remove parent tags from a post where a child tag is present, provides a case where you might want to tag both.
For example, if mammal is a parent of deer, but a question is about how non-deer mammals in general and deer in particular get along with one another, you'd probably want both tags.
In general, however, there isn't any need to tag both. I don't see the harm in doing so though. And personally, I kind of like having the tag list "fully qualified" so to speak, though I understand why you think otherwise.
1 comment thread