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Allow tagging answers with tools and version numbers
TL;DR If we allow answers to be tagged with technologies and version numbers, people can more easily check if an answer is applicable to their technology stack.
A few days ago, I had a problem in Java Spring Boot. The error message was a pretty common one: "expected at least 1 bean which qualifies as autowire candidate."
When you search the web for this error message, you'll find a few pretty standard answers. However, in my specific case, it resulted from the combination of Spring Boot and the Mockito mocking framework.
I want to post my solution as a self-answered question on Codidact.
On "the other site", I could post the standard solutions as part of my question: "I tried A, B, and C".
But I would prefer to have the the standard solutions as separate answers; possibly provided by other people. (Didn't some of you want more questions to answer? ;-) )
That way, we have answers for the generic situation, and an answer that applies to the more specific situation.
In general, I think it would be useful if we could tag answers with the technologies to which they apply. That would also help us avoid Stack Overflow's problem of outdated answers. We could then tag answers about product Foo with the versions of Foo to which they apply. (We might want to specify a minimum version and/or maximum version, to give a range of applicable versions).
Should we allow answers to have tags, just like questions?
1 answer
I asked a question on Meta about allowing tags for answers a while back. You might find the discussion there helpful. I'd still like to do something to support these use cases; it's not clear what we should do.
If we did the smaller thing of supporting [tag:name] syntax in posts, so you'd get the tag styling and (if the tag really exists) the tag page with top-level posts, would that help? It's not true tagging in the sense of being able to search and sort based on them, but it's a visual indicator in the answer. Combined with a convention of leading with the pseudo-tag, it could help with scanning answers, being more consistent and visually distinctive than just writing "in Python 3.7...".
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