Is the maximum tags for all SE sites (and those in the future) 5?
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1It would seem like this is the case.– Nathan OsmanCommented Oct 9, 2010 at 17:23
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So it's not something that can be changed per site– Jonathan.Commented Oct 9, 2010 at 19:28
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@rchern: As this would have a direct relationship to the SE engine itself, I can with confidence say that it is unlikely this will be changed on a per-site basis.– Nathan OsmanCommented Oct 10, 2010 at 1:28
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This question belongs on Meta Stack Exchange; it applies to the whole SE architecture in general.– Brock AdamsCommented May 31, 2019 at 14:42
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@BrockAdams it was relevant as I was consuming the API. Also this is 9 years ago..– Jonathan.Commented Jun 2, 2019 at 21:17
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Jeesh, @Jonathan. Next you'll say that Meta Stack Exchange wasn't even a thing when you asked this question. ;) It doesn't change the fact that MSE is the best place for this kind of core-architecture question now.– Brock AdamsCommented Jun 2, 2019 at 21:52
1 Answer
At the moment the number of tags allowed on a question is 5. Both client side and server side this limit is now1 enforced at the time of posting.
There is no direct limitation to allow 6 or even 7 tags. As a matter of fact, this query shows 1038 questions at the time of posting that have 6 tags. The revision for one occurrence reveals what caused that 6th tag being added, a CM and their fancy scripts, bypassing all business rules.
However, allowing more tags might run into the length limitation of the field tags
in the Posts
table. That single field hold the concatenated tagnames, enclosed in <
and >
. It allows for 250 characters at the moment. As the tagname length has been increased to 35 characters, the technical limit is barely seven tags if those tags all have 35 characters.
1. in the early days of SO this check was broken, as evidenced by this example
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1
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1Looks like Stack Overflow is the only site where this has occurred. Commented May 31, 2019 at 17:22
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@BrockAdams yeah, I recall Shog9 mentioned once that a question had 7 tags. Can't find the source.– rene ♦Commented May 31, 2019 at 17:31
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1found it and example 2 and example 3 but these all seem early days mishaps / cc @BrockAdams (and the query for posthistory: data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1059223)– rene ♦Commented May 31, 2019 at 18:00
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1Sweet! And there is a slight chance that one might be able to hack the rollback mechanism to get > 5 tags. But I'll leave that for Jeremy to try to exploit... Commented May 31, 2019 at 18:21