This one was flagged in a random tag wiki editing I was doing:    I totally agree it's a useless tag. If anyone is curious as to what anti-golf supposedly is, before putting on my burninate useless tags cap, I'd come up with this:     Anti-golf is a hypothetical programming game, with the objective being   opposite to that of code golf.      The real and popular code golf programming game, involves finding   solutions in code to problems using the minimal amount of characters.      Anti-golf is a suggested counter model to the common game, by   implementing rules such as requiring longer code and ensuring the   program will fail if any single character is removed.      First evidenced proposal of the game was in 2002, by Peter Makholm on   the Perl Programming lists.
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During the re-tagging of questions, tags sometimes become orphaned from existing questions.  Are these zombie tags ever removed from the ?  What if a tag is misspelled and needs to be removed? How do we get rid of it?
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Motivation: I once had one surplus card on my hand, and knew the robbers would come soon. So I gave it to someone for free, to avoid losing more cards when they hit. I was surprised by how badly this was received. Two of the three other players (the hosts of the game) acted upset, like I had tried to cheat. I had to take the card back, get robbed the next turn and 'giving cards away for free' was banned immediately. (Oh, how I hate mid-game additions to the rules. But that's beside the point.)  So now the question: Is this really illegal in Settlers of Catan? Is it generally considered underhanded in any way? If so, why?   My reasoning was like this:        Consider players A and B.   A wants to give B a sheep.   A trades a sheep and one rock to B, in exchange for wheat.   A trades the received wheat for the (formerly his) rock.   A and B now both have the same resources they had in the beginning, only the sheep has moved from A to B.
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As a programmer, I often hear "writing a program" and "writing code" used interchangeably. The way I understand it, a program is a file which contains code written to perform a task or a series of tasks. Those who write computer programs (like myself) are typically referred to as programmers. However, the slogan of the popular website CodeProject is "For those who code," not "For those who program." Is there any difference in meaning between "I code for a living" and "I program for a living"?
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I just found  , and I must say I found it very useful; however, it was closed as "Off topic". Now, it hasn't generated all that many page views, but I would have loved it if it was open, in case something new came up in the past year it was closed.   The "Off topic" specification doesn't exactly explain what the problem is with the question; I see the point for Stack Overflow, given there is no actual coding problem discussed - but a user in that post points out:     (That aside, prepare for your question to be closed, it's a bit too close to "please provide me a list of", which isn't muchly appreciated)   Now, the thing is, a lot of times I actually would appreciate greatly a "provide me a list of" question, like in this case - however, I can see the point in this posting in particular not being on-topic for Stack Overflow.   My question then is - is there a place where such "listing" questions about computer software in general can be asked? I don't think it would fit in programmers.SE, and one may think superuser.com would be appropriate - but then again, its purpose could be understood as specific questions about how to do more advanced stuff with existing software, thereby excluding again listing questions.   If that is so, then where do such question belong? If Super User on the other hand is appropriate, wouldn't the referred post be better off moved to Super User, and opened for contributions there - instead of sitting on Stack Overflow closed?
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The  tag is a synonym of , and has the description     A program to generate tags for a large project. These tags are usable by the Emacs text editor.   This is inconsistent: tags in that sense are always plural, i.e. etags, never etag.  evidently refers to another concept, .  Should  remain a synonym of , and be about HTTP Etags, and should Emacs etags be tagged +? Or should the synonym be unmade, with HTTP Etags on  and etags on ?
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I was composing a question about Postgres on Stack Overflow, and had tagged the question with "postgres". The tag suggester, seeing that my question was about PostgreSQL, dutifully informed me that I ought to add "postgresql" as a tag as well.    But Postgres and PostgreSQL are the same thing! And the tag suggestion engine should know that, because "postgres" and "postgresql" are synonyms.   This seems like a (very minor) bug, or at least undesirable behavior - the tag suggester shouldn't suggest synonyms of tags you've already used.
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On , this is my tag blacklist:        Note well that I have them set to hidden, because I would prefer not to see questions on this topic. Bridge players, don't take offence &mdash; I don't have problem with the game itself. I don't understand the game's mechanics, though, so I find questions about it incomprehensible, and I'd rather stick to just seeing questions I can understand.  I still see [bridge] questions galore on the Android app though. Could it be updated to pay attention to whether I have certain tags ignored and set to be hidden?
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I understand that naming conventions for code have an element of personal preference, and can be subjective and argumentative, which isn't the goal of these sites.  But, I'm really looking for feedback on demonstrating that some current naming conventions I'm forced to use hurt readability and do more harm than good.  Where should I ask this question? Stack Overflow? Or does this belong on the  site?
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Do the SO admins have any plans to release the underlying code for SO at all? I appreciate that the code may be part of their competitive advantage, but it strikes me that the underlying system would work for any topic, not just programming.  I am not advocating this, just curious really, but figured it might be under consideration as most of the value in SO is in the questions and answers, which have been released under a relatively open CC license.
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It's an additional unnecessary burden to the honest stacker during suggested edit duty. A question presents some code then the minor editor adds a tag like 'for-loop' or 'forms'.  These tags are so general that they only have a handful of followers. They serve no useful purpose and are the cause of many too minor edits. Why not permit culling of generic tags?
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One thing that irks me is redundant controls. For example, there was a game I used to play that had a "disable IP check" option, but if you enabled it without Game Operator permission then you would be permanently banned. I have no idea why they couldn't just give the GO that option instead of giving people a "ban me now" button...  Anyway, back to SO. Since a user cannot vote on their own questions or answers, what is the point of the arrows being there? It seems wasteful to have buttons that I cannot use (and it's annoying when I accidentally click them when trying to expand my vote score, but that's probably just me), and I think they should be removed.
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Isaac Moses, the patriarch of Mi Yodeya, :  [...] the general Stack Exchange directive, expressed in the uneditable part of that section of the About page, to &quot;Focus on questions about an actual problem you have faced. Include details about what you have tried and exactly what you are trying to do.&quot; In fact, while this directive is perfect for the behemoth programming site that Stack Exchange grew out of, it doesn't fit very well for any of the more intellectually-oriented, rather than practically-oriented sites. [...]  This is something that's bugged me for a while, and ended up prompting a discussion between Anna, Aarthi and me. The gist of it: is there any simple test that can be used to identify answerable questions asked in good faith when the &quot;problem to be solved&quot; is... simple curiosity? Obviously, this is something that sites like  and  have had to contend with for some time, but now and then such questions pop up even on sites where folks are generally trying to solve real problems. While a potentially interesting thought experiment, . Strictly-speaking, problems like that fail the  test. And yet, I would keep that question simply because I learned something useful from the answers − not necessarily something I would ever apply to socks mind you, but certainly something I might apply to similar problems. I don't believe the question was asked in bad faith or for mindless social fun; yet, I have a bit of trouble stretching the definition of &quot;based on actual problems&quot; to contain it. Obviously, the fact that we're hosting a growing number of sites dedicated mostly or entirely to intellectual curiosity makes this something of a rhetorical question. The &quot;actual problems&quot; part of the FAQ was added specifically to draw a line between good and bad  − heading off  and their ilk. But it's a pretty damn good litmus test, and if it's ok to ignore it for some questions − or particularly for  − then what should stand in its place?
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has several discussion comments going back and forth about whether the question belongs on SO or Meta.  The question is asking about how a specific feature of the site is implemented from a coding perspective (so that the OP might duplicate it in their own implementation), which can make it a legitimate programming question.  According to the Meta FAQ: "If your "question is about ... Stack Overflow / The core Stack Exchange engine", it should be asked here.  Here are some similar example questions on Meta:         Where do these questions belong?
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I have , and so went to flag it as such, but after clicking "it doesn't belong here, or it is a duplicate" and "off topic," I get the following.    I think the question is more suited to Code-Review than any of the sites listed, but there doesn't seem to be an option to flag the question as "belongs on CodeReview." I am sure there is a good reason for this, and am curious to know what it is.
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I just tried to add a tag for "implementation-defined-behavior" on SO but I couldn't because of the 25 char limit. I had to resort to an abbreviation (), which is rather ugly and to some extent thwarts the purpose of tags, i.e. easy indexing.   Although I acknowledge that too long tag names could be unwieldy, sometimes there are technical terms that cannot be abbreviated in any useful way (especially when there is no widespread acronym).    Could an increase of that limit be considered?     EDIT  This is to respond to all the comments addressed at me that were triggered by the recent news brought up by @Shog9 in .  Shog9 announced that the limit was raised to 35 chars network-wide, thus some people asked me to accept his answer instead of .  TL;DR:  Sorry but, no, I won't accept Shog9's answer. Although I find the change very welcome, I think it is still somehow a sort of a patch for the SE network as it has evolved. A complex system such as SE network is now could well afford another mechanism vetted by high rep users/mods on per-site basis.  More explanation:  I really welcome the change, but this solution would have satisfied me at the time I originally posted my question. After all, 35 chars is probably a reasonable limit for a site like SO, or  where I'm currently active and committed.   At that time, IRRC, the SE network was still very young and there were very few sites on the network that rivaled SO in quality and traffic.  But time has changed since then, and there are sites that have greatly improved and that have the potential of outperforming SO in traffic (after all, there are more people watching TV or practicing mountain walking than programmers out there!).  Given how SE network has evolved, I still think that the right, long term, solution is option #5 in hildred's answer: in short, allow much longer names under the supervision of mods and as a new privilege for high rep users.   Abuse is always a possibility, even with shorter tag names or for other facilities of the sites. I don't see why, apart from some technical reason related to the structure of the system, hildred's solution (or kind of) could not be implemented with the same level of safety/security as other facilities.   There are sites, as it was shown by others, that desperately need a much higher tag length limit, if tags are to be useful for them.   As the name of something increases in length, meaningful abbreviations start to become unintuitive and not unique, hence you cannot expect people to gain any convenience when searching for an abbreviation they don't know about or that they must guess.   In the end, as on of those sites grows, the problem becomes ever worse, because funny abbreviations, with lots of still funnier synonyms, increase, rendering the tag system unreliable and inconvenient.
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I've seen this convention pretty much everywhere, and, at times, it comes close to driving me nuts:  &lt;?php //The loop ?&gt; &lt;?php while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?&gt;     &lt;?php the_content(); ?&gt; &lt;?php endwhile; // end of the loop. ?&gt;   Where the &lt;?php and closing ?&gt; are on every single line, even if there is no intervening HTML code.    My question is: Why?  Why include all these extra tags?      To me, it seems this convention adds a significant amount of clutter to code, is annoying to follow in the first place, and adds that many more places to accidentally leave out an opening or closing tag.  NOTE  This is code pulled from the Twenty-Twelve theme, the example given by WordPress.
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The title is a reference to . We had the good fortune, to start this experiment with a really positive culture and have managed to hang onto it through vast growth and several fairly bitter internal arguments. But that does not guarantee we'll keep it forever. Lately I've had a unscientific feeling that Stack Overflow has been a bit rougher on newbie mistakes. The actual composition of this question was triggered by the comment thread on  (now with pending delete votes, so it is in danger of being 10k only). The  currently has 3 reputation points and has been a member for all of two days. The question bear the obvious (to me, at least) hallmarks of being written by a non-native English speaker with a shaky grasp of the tongue, and it is a rather simplistic question that could be answered fairly easily by Google. Question body:  Sir, I am mc student, I have knowledge in c,c++,J2EE. I want to ask you should I command in Linux with J2EE. Is it worth?  Instead of trying to improve the question, to discern exactly what the OP meant, or explaining how the question should be improved we get this comment thread instead (without wanting to call out these posters in particular, this was just the thread that got be off my duff):  2 Can you elaborate? – Dave McClelland 21 hours ago 1 Absolutely yes! If it can run on your Blu-Ray player, imagine the possibilities it can do on Linux. – The Elite Gentleman 21 hours ago 1 Basically, it's as worth as running Java on any other platform. – Alexander Gessler 21 hours ago 1 @The Elite Gentleman, You can try run it on your sim-card too) – Stas Kurilin 21 hours ago 1 @STas Kurilin, really? What heapspace size must I give? sarcastic laugh – The Elite Gentleman 21 hours ago 1 @The Elite Gentleman I don't know. But there are some) See for details oracle.com/technetwork/java/javacard/overview/… – Stas Kurilin 21 hours ago @The Elite Gentleman, you're absolutely right given a full fledged desktop machine with Linux, Java would run so fast his program could go back in time and rescue whales from extinction. – Quaternion 21 hours ago @Stas Kurlin, if you have a program that runs on a sim-card isn't it hard to get output? I've always found processorless environments problematic. – Quaternion 21 hours ago @Quaternion - It was a joke) I've newer wrote such programs. But, I think there should be some processor. – Stas Kurilin 20 hours ago @Stas Kurlin, I was joking too, but I have to apologize after reading that page you liked to. You can run Java off a smart card... that's crazy and cool. +1 on account of good learning for the day. – Quaternion 20 hours ago @Quaternion Thanks. I heard about this stuff several weeks ago. Java at a sim card is a really cool argument) – Stas Kurilin 20 hours ago @Quaternion, lol, without having to worry about Segmentation Faults along the way. – The Elite Gentleman 19 hours ago  I've been leaving comments on threads like this from time to time, asking them to be a little more forgiving, but that is a drop in the bucket. Nothing flag-worthy here, but not a &quot;nice&quot; as things once were. There is very little effort to understand what the question may really be, nor why to explain why the question has been closed, what other resources exist, or how that decision could be reversed. With a brand new user who probably has a hard time with English. Ouch. Do we need an official re-iteration of &quot;Be nice.&quot;? Is there something else we can do to encourage our big city to keep the small-town feel we grew up with?