This meta post is being made as per David Fullerton's suggestion.
Hey, Jeff, can we talk?
We know you're very busy doing stuff, but I think many of us folks here on Gaming would appreciate some dialog from your end.
The moderators and regular gaming users noticed a couple of changes that you made last week, and we're... less than satisfied with what happened.
As far as I'm aware, this started when we had David Fullerton ask the core team to improve the way Gaming.stackexchange handled tags. This is not something new - we've been struggling with adapting SE's tag system to work with gaming (and requesting features to change it) for quite some time.
In response, it looks like you decided to take things into your own hands.
Last Wednesday (11/16/11) it first came to attention that you were performing some... radical changes to the site.
Some of these changes, like the tag synonymizing and removal of the [tag:murder] tag, was warranted (and probably long overdue). So, thanks for the help!
Except... you continued going, and went beyond what some of us consider helpful. There were a couple of tags in particular that many of us were, frankly, completely surprised to see vanished in the night.
These are things like bug (which was not even synonymized with technical-issues like several other of your merges), and even the story tag, which was created in response to a meta discussion in the first place!
We can understand a desire for more concise, clearer tags, but the result of this across the board removal left more than a few questions tagged with nothing more than the name of the game itself. (And if the games themselves are the only worthwhile tags, what's the point of using a tag system at all?)
Finally, you changed the way Gaming displays tags in the titles of questions. This action was startling enough to spawn its own meta thread and brings along issues of its own. (And why go out of the way to change one subsystem on Gaming and nowhere else? Isn't that the reason we weren't upgrading tags?)
As a community, we have two major problems with this series of events.
All of this was unannounced. Just like the last time you stepped in, the site got altered first, and explanation came later (hopefully, in this very thread!). Some of these were pretty far-reaching changes, and there was a good deal of confusion about what exactly had happened. There is no record of tag deletion (well, not to us mods, anyway), which only exacerbated matters.
You did this without consulting with anyone else about it. At the very least, why not open a meta thread to the extent of, "These tags don't deserve to live. Argue their case if you don't want them to die". Gaming bills itself as "free, community driven Q&A" - so why on earth did we leave the community out of major decision making entirely?
We want this community to succeed even more than you do! If you think there's a problem with tags, answer rates, or any other number of things, let us know! We're never going to be able to get the site to a satisfactory position if you won't let us know what you think is wrong.
So pull up a chair. Stay awhile and listen. And then let us know what we need to do better ♪.
murder
, after all :)