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At the moment, when you try to enter tag into a question you receive a message containing the text:

The 'homework' tag is not allowed.

Please do not use the 'homework' tag, it's currently deprecated and will be removed entirely within the week. For more information, please see the related meta discussion.

enter image description here

This was added there during the last cleanup before the removal of the blacklisted tag.

In my opinion, the sentence that it will be removed entirely within the week should be omitted. It made sense at the time when it was added, but now it is completely unnecessary.

enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ This was also mentioned in a comment to a related question about possibility of customizing warnings for blacklisted tags. $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Sep 14, 2014 at 13:09
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    $\begingroup$ I almost think we could simply ask that the second paragraph be removed. On SO the message simply says "The 'homework' tag is not allowed." when you try to use it. Not much else really needs to be said, IMHO. $\endgroup$
    – user642796
    Sep 14, 2014 at 15:47
  • $\begingroup$ @ArthurFischer I think that a very probable explanation why there is only such short message on SO is that the possibility to make customized messages was not available at the time, it seems to be relatively recent feature. But I agree that there are blacklisted tags where an explanation would probably be more useful than here. (This is the reason why I bumped the other thread. We will see whether we get some input from other users on that.) $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Sep 14, 2014 at 18:42
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    $\begingroup$ Just a minor comment: I think words like "deprecated" should be avoided in messages like these. I had to go to my thesaurus (who am I kidding, I googled of course) to see what it means. I'm not a native English speaker, but I think there are users with less knowledge of the language on this site than I have. $\endgroup$
    – Daniel R
    Sep 15, 2014 at 7:34
  • $\begingroup$ @DanielR: I agree. However, I want to point out that the percentage of people with a computer science background who understand that word is a bit higher than of the general populace ("deprecated" is used a lot in API documentations). So given the origin story of StackExchange, your comment has a chance of being the first time someone complained about it. $\endgroup$
    – Willie Wong
    Sep 15, 2014 at 10:35
  • $\begingroup$ @WillieWong Is this the time I should be man enough to admit that I do have a computer science background...? :) $\endgroup$
    – Daniel R
    Sep 15, 2014 at 10:44
  • $\begingroup$ Let me see how easily I can get this fixed up. $\endgroup$
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Sep 16, 2014 at 12:42

1 Answer 1

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$\begingroup$

I derped.

This was supposed to be changed after we outright blacklisted (it originally warned folks, then ultimately blocked). The updated text is:

Please do not use the 'homework' tag, it's not necessary. For more information, please see the related meta discussion.

I planned to update it when I changed the behavior from warn to outright block, but somehow managed to overlook it. Sorry about that, it's set now.

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    $\begingroup$ I'm not certain if I like the phrase "it's not necessary". This could be interpreted as "All questions here are homework, so why would you bother telling us?!" I can't think of an alternative right now, however. (Also, perhaps the link should go to Thursday's meta post where the issue was discussed, rather the aftermath post.) $\endgroup$
    – user642796
    Sep 16, 2014 at 14:44
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    $\begingroup$ I agree with @ArthurFischer in that the meta link to discussion of what to do after vote is not that helpful. But I think my post is not the one to link to, either. We have a FAQ item on homework questions: link there instead. The text could be: "The homework tag is not allowed. For more information on asking homework questions, see the FAQ". $\endgroup$
    – user147263
    Sep 16, 2014 at 16:19

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