Create tag(s) for questions that cover very narrow or specific problems

Question

This is a suggestion to create one tag (or more if need be) for questions that are about very specific problems or techniques. It would allow to distinguish them from questions that cover more generic blender topics, ones that would benefit broader situations and user base.

For example:

• How do I create a Drag Strip Material? or
• How to do a seatbelt as part of my scene

Though one could learn many things from good answers, it would pretty much only help these guys specific problems.

On the contrary, Hair coming through the mesh? is a fairly generic issue, answer to which can benefit many people about how particles and meshes behave in Blender.

I couldn't find any existing tag that would allow that. Maybe selfishly, I'd sometimes rather browse and try to answer broader questions that benefit more people instead of problem specific ones.

Here are a few tag name ideas:

• [problem-specific]
• [how-to-do-this]
• [dis-n-dat]

Here are additional example questions that would qualify for this tag:

• Rigging telescopic pistons
• How to make this petal shape a mesh?
• Spheres colored in models image texture
• Is there any way to rig Tinkercad models in Blender?

Some more example of questions that would NOT qualify for this new tag:

• How To Spiralize Mesh
• Darken a shadow on a shadow catcher without changing the light on the object casting it? (Blender Cycles 2.81)
• Fast way of creating a total union of two objects

What do you think? Any tag name suggestions?

Answer 1

I don't think this is a good idea.

Firstly, these are considered 'meta-tags' because they do not describe the actual content of the question. From the tagging section of the Help Center:

Avoid meta-tags

Do not use meta-tags in questions. Here are some tips to help you determine whether a tag is a meta-tag:

• If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag. Every tag you use should be able to work, more or less, as the only tag on a question. Meta-tags, like [beginner], [subjective], and [best-practices], are not helpful by themselves – they do not communicate anything about the content of the question.
• If the tag commonly means different things to different people, it’s probably a meta-tag. For example, the meaning of the tag [subjective] is, itself, subjective; the same is true for tags like [best-practices] and [beginner]. Best practices to whom? Beginner by what criteria? Use only tags that have a broadly accepted, objective definition.

The important sentence from above is:

If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag.

This is true of the specific tags you have suggested and the general idea behind them. problem-specific doesn't tell us a single thing about what the question is about.

Secondly, as someone who does a lot of re-tagging and has recently been involved in discussions about the prevention of misusing tags I can pretty safely say that, at least from the tags you have suggested, people would use these generic types of tags on nearly every question asked, regardless of relevance.

• "I have a problem, I'll use the problem-specific tag!"
• "I want to know how to do something, I'll use the how-to-do-this tag!"

This would require a lot of work to re-tag questions correctly, which we already do a lot of. Aside from that, I think it could be subjective as to what is a specific problem and what counts as a more general problem.

I appreciate those tags were just suggestions, but I don't think you could come up with something that wouldn't be misused, simply because their intention is to be quite general.

To summarise:

• These are against the Help Center recommendations.
• In my opinion these tags are subjective.
• They would probably be heavily misused.