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I just asked this question about viewing logs in Console. These were the suggested tags:

Suggested tags

These are mostly a fair guess based on the content of the question except for Lion.

iTunes is also not relevant but wasn't suggested in previous questions and struck me that every single question I've ever asked (only 6 admittedly) prompted Lion as a tag.

Is there some reason for this?

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    I’m removing the bug since this is how the code is supposed to work, but perhaps if my answer is wrong we can add bug back.
    – bmike Mod
    Jan 23, 2020 at 18:01
  • @bmike - I'm happy to lose the "bug" tag. It was curiosity really.
    – lx07
    Jan 23, 2020 at 18:13
  • We also could agitate to merge the lion tag onto macos and burn it entirely. The fraction of questions where a lion tag would be needed and the macos one wouldn’t is slim to none at this point, but that would be a separate request here on meta entirely.
    – bmike Mod
    Jan 23, 2020 at 18:23

1 Answer 1

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The code to suggest a tag is an algorithm based on similar words in other questions. Since you can’t change what people asked and tagged in the past, the only thing you can do is select a better tag or change the words in your question to generate new “suggested tags”.

Long term, we can curate tags here which will affect the algorithm, but that takes weeks to effect large tags like lion.

If you need to know about the specifics of this code - asking that on the main meta would be ideal since we share code with all other sites, but our specific tags and site are generated from our existing questions.

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    Thanks - that makes sense and I wasn't suggesting a change. I didn't notice before that "Lion" is the most popular macOS version tag at 3312 with "Yosemite" at next at 3229, "Mavericks" at 2802 etc. Therefore (if I understand you correctly) if a question seems to be about macOS the algorithm will suggest "Lion" unless something overtakes it in popularity.
    – lx07
    Jan 23, 2020 at 18:30
  • Yes, popular like cockroaches apparently @lx07
    – bmike Mod
    Jan 23, 2020 at 23:25

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