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The tag wiki for clearly states it should be for compatibility issues with no-longer-supported games, and I think that's a useful tag to have; unfortunately the tag name itself is not very informative, and a lot of questions and even other questions about relatively old games get tagged with it.

I think the tag should either be altogether removed or at least be renamed to more explicitly represent its purpose, for example or something like that.

EDIT: bump. The tag is still being abused. With 6 upvotes on Matthew's answer and no counter opinions, can we kill it now?

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    I don't think it's useful. compatibility (existing) should be sufficient. Is anyone really filtering for old-games so that they can say "Use DOSBox" or "Use an XP virtual machine" or whatever else all the time when it comes up?
    – Matthew Read
    Jun 20, 2011 at 20:46
  • @Matthew fair point, I think you should put it in a vote-able answer. At the very least, even if both old-games and compatibility are kept alive, we need to make a good distinction between them to justify it.
    – Oak
    Jun 20, 2011 at 20:49

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I don't think is useful. should be sufficient. Is anyone really filtering for old-games so that they can say "Use DOSBox" or "Use an XP virtual machine" or whatever else all the time when it comes up? I would doubt it; and if they are, it probably wouldn't hurt anything to get them looking at a few other issues!

RE: Making a distinction if we keep it anyways — Definitely. compatibility is a substring of old-games-compatibility, meaning that searching for [compatibility] will show old-game-issues as well, but searching [old-games-compatibility] will not show non-old-game-issues. That's good, but doesn't quite solve the problem of people wanting to use both tags. And limiting compatibility to only non-old-game-issues would be weird/confusing.

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    If we're wanting it only for compatibility points, I'm far more in favor of just using [compatibility] alone than bothering specifically with old-games compatibility. Trying to maintain it for old games specifically has the reverse issue that [upcoming-games] had - instead of having to clear out the tag every so often, this time we'd have to troll [compatibility] every so often to add the corresponding old games tag. Also, old-games has otherwise proved about as useless as retro-games has.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Jun 21, 2011 at 13:39
  • @Grace Good points, I agree.
    – Matthew Read
    Jun 21, 2011 at 15:00
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    I think it's not only not useful, its current use is counterintuitive: people keep adding it to ITG questions because they think it means "questions about old games" when what they really want is something like 80s or old-platforms or something-you've-never-heard-of.
    – Dave DuPlantis
    Aug 3, 2011 at 18:32
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Aha!

See our new tag completion, which, crucially, shows the relevant tag wiki excerpt at the time of tag selection!

new tag completion support

So, make sure those tag wiki excerpts explain what the tag is for, and hopefully this can help guide new users toward seleting the correct tag.

(additional guidance on editing tag wikis and excerpts is available on the blog, too.)

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    I still think this specific tag is problematic, but in general I really like the tagging autocompletion change, and I definitely agree it can help with these sort of problems!
    – Oak
    Aug 6, 2011 at 10:35

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