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I just received a notification of a suggested edit https://space.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/16868 which would change my question from the tag to an actual tag.

I'm just curious how SE works;

  1. how did my question become untagged?
  2. when whatever-it-is that caused this happened, was the instigator offered information letting them know that they'd left questions in an untagged state?
  3. If one of my question becomes untagged, is there a notification sent to me, or does this happen silently>

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2 Answers 2

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Tags which are only used once and have no tag wiki are automatically deleted after six months. I have a script which regularly checks untagged questions across the network and this edit was made 6.5 months after the question was posted. The Wayback Machine only has snapshots of your question from 2019 and later, so we can't be 100% sure, but given the timeframe I'm pretty confident that you created a new tag when posting the question but it wasn't used again.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks, this certainly seems like the likely explanation. The Wayback Machine links were a surprise, but like it was said, "the internet is written in ink." $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Feb 13, 2021 at 1:01
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There are two typical ways that posts become untagged:

  1. They are migrated from another site and a tag on the original site doesn't exist on the new one
  2. A tag was removed from the site by a ♦ moderator (because it was wrong, or inappropriate or any of the other reasons tags are wiped)

My assumption here is that the original tag must have been removed from Space Exploration for some reason, as you asked the question here — there was no migration involved.

@Glorfindel is good at spotting untagged posts and suggesting good tags, all across SE. I'm assuming he has a search script for this purpose.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks! Those are the likely possibilities for item 1 in the question; any ideas on items 2 and 3? I'm just curious how SE works, and when a question ends up in an untagged state, I would have thought that the owner and the causer would both be notified. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Nov 4, 2018 at 23:41

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