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(the manufacturer meta tag, see Manufacturer & Company tags are back. Again), was cleaned up a little over a year ago. It stayed dead for almost a year, but starting in July of this year, it began showing up again and we already have 41 new questions. Is this tag a sufficiently large pain in the butt to blocklist?

Update: It was cleaned up again, and just showed up again. Can we PLEASE blocklist this sucker?

Update 01/04/2019: And it's back again! A question came in with the tag (recreated by a user with enough rep to do it), and it was migrated away. However, the tag remains active here for 30 days, with no way to get rid of it. So it was available, and got used on another question by a new user. It's hard enough getting rid of the old manufacturer tags without continually having to repeat the work. Can we PLEASE blocklist this problematic tag?

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    Whatever is decided here, we need to add the featured tag so everyone can know we want to blacklist Google :-P JK
    – Canadian Luke
    Commented Nov 21, 2017 at 17:53
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    If it does get blacklisted on superuser SE, all such posts should be put on the Web Applications SE - webapps.stackexchange.com
    – El8dN8
    Commented Nov 25, 2017 at 7:51
  • Another consideration: Questions concerning google-related applications such as the Chrome Browser program and Google Drive desktop application should still persist on superuser; otherwise, they should go to another SE (if they concern working with, for instance, Google Docs).
    – El8dN8
    Commented Nov 25, 2017 at 7:58
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    @El8tedN8te, I probably should have clarified the question (in fact, I'll do that). We've got about 35 Google-related tags. The one in this question is a "manufacturer meta tag". It refers just to the company name, which doesn't add value as a tag. Sorry for the confusion. See discussion here: meta.superuser.com/questions/8402/….
    – fixer1234
    Commented Nov 25, 2017 at 8:09
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    Blacklisting is pretty extreme. What if we cleaned it out, then simply synonymised it with the largest tag (which is [google-chrome] by a large margin)?
    – Robotnik
    Commented Nov 25, 2017 at 12:38
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    @Robotnik, it's a big hammer but seems like the appropriate tool. We don't want it used, and the majority of the time, any synonym will be incorrect and misleading. By making it impossible to use, it will force users to look at the suggestions that pop up or the larger list and pick a useful tag.
    – fixer1234
    Commented Nov 25, 2017 at 17:15
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    What about to change the excerpt in something like: "This tag is deprecated. You have to search for an appropriate one among the others! If you nonetheless decide to use it, you should know that the use of deprecated tags on SuperUser brings a considerable quantity of bad luck." :-)?
    – Hastur
    Commented Nov 27, 2017 at 21:45
  • @Robotnik: bad idea. [google-chrome] is not a synonym for many of the recent questions, they range from Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Cloud Print, Google Mesh, Google Drive, Google Compute Engine... really there is no common synonym. So unfortunately I think it needs to be blacklisted.
    – smci
    Commented Dec 1, 2017 at 23:13
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    @Hastur: no, because many users are really lazy, esp. the ones who misuse this tag. Seems like << 1% of people read the tag descriptions. People just splatter whatever tags they think get a response and leave it at that. As to incurring bad luck, I'm reminded of the homing missile in 'Babylon AD'
    – smci
    Commented Dec 1, 2017 at 23:15
  • As of July 2019, it was recreated again...
    – gparyani
    Commented Jul 7, 2019 at 21:54
  • @gparyani, dealing with [google] and [microsoft] is a game of Whac-A-Mole. For some reason, the mods don't want to blacklist those tags. The latest post used the tag because it was recreated on a previous question that got migrated. When that happens, the question remains hidden here for 30 days, keeping the tag alive with no way to remove it. I removed it from the active question in the hopes that it will disappear from the system before another user finds it again and uses it.
    – fixer1234
    Commented Jul 7, 2019 at 22:20
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    @fixer1234 And I flagged the other one (the migration stub) for early deletion. It's worth noting that mods can't blacklist tags; an SE employee is needed for that. Your best bet is to get a moderator to escalate this request to the CMs; see this MSE answer for more info.
    – gparyani
    Commented Jul 7, 2019 at 22:36

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Yes, please blacklist the tag.

I've often seen newer users constantly recreate the tag, unaware of the previous discussions that generic company tags are not allowed. Overall, the tag has been removed and recreated at least five times. (The query can only see non-deleted posts, so it may be possible it was recreated even more times if the last posts to contain it were deleted.) Also, on the last two recreations, the tag was recreated on questions that were subsequently migrated to other sites, which meant a moderator was needed to remove the tag again.

I've often found it to be the case that when the tag gets recreated, no one seems to notice or care, so it takes a long time for someone to eventually decide to check the list of tags in the company tag list for recreations and notice that it's been recreated. During this time, the tag becomes available for use by others, incrementally increasing the effort (and home page impact) required.

Can we please add this to the blacklist? This has gone on for far too long, and blacklisting should be as simple as an SE team member adding it to the blacklist entries for this site.

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