Should we get the increase in the tag length limit?

Question

Ok so if you're not aware on Literature.SE's Meta there was a question posted about the age old problem regarding the 25 character limit to tags

Is there any way we can increase the maximum tag length to something bigger than 25 characters?

Right now, our site tags questions by book titles. Unfortunately, many book titles are longer than twenty-five characters. This has lead to some awkward abbreviations, such as zen-and-art-of-mc-maint

Is there any way to increase the maximum tag length?

as you can see it got status-completed and this reply from Shog9 ♦

This can be increased, but only up to a maximum of 35 characters. This means zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance is right out.

I increased the allowed length to 32, thus allowing zen-and-art-of-motorcycle-maint, which should be a little bit easier to recognize. This sort of compromise is likely to be common... Thus, whenever possible, try to work the name of a publication into the title or first paragraph of a question.

however this change isn't network wide

It's not network-wide, @Cahir; let's try it here for a little bit & make sure nothing breaks unexpectedly. The only other place this has been changed from the default is the Russian-language Stack Overflow, and there are a lot of other differences there too - so this is the first time it's been changed on an otherwise-standard English-language site. Also, 32 is a nice round number.

almost 2 years ago senshin pointed out Anime and Manga's problem with the 25 character limit and since Lit's character limit on tags have been increase Arqade, Movies and TV and SciFi has posted up their own requests to have their Tag Character Limited increased.

So i ask the question, Should we get the increase in the tag length limit aswell?

Answer 1

status-completed

The maximum tag length was increased to 35 characters for the entire Stack Exchange network on August 8, 2017.

Answer 2

Absolutely.

The fact that most of the top users of the site know that the limit is 25 characters is evidence enough that it comes up a great deal. For comparison, the fact that the body character limit is 30000 characters is mostly just an odd piece of trivia, but something that very few users have ever encountered. The point of character limits like this is supposed to be to eliminate extreme cases where it's very unlikely there's a legitimate reason, not to have to develop a toolbox of techniques for circumventing them, which is what we've been forced to do time after time.

35 characters will still not be enough for everything. We can't fit, for example, ore-no-nounai-sentakushi-ga-gakuen-love-comedy-wo-zenryoku-de-jama-shiteiru unless we have a full 75 characters, and there are still far longer titles than that even (see here for several longer ones, the longest of which would be over 180 characters by my count). Even ghost-in-the-shell-stand-alone-complex is too long at 38.

But 35 characters would allow the-irregular-at-magic-high-school (34), fullmetal-alchemist-brotherhood (31), the-girl-who-leapt-through-time (31), chuunibyou-demo-koi-ga-shitai (29) or love-chunibyo-and-other-delusions (33), ouran-highschool-host-club (26), legend-of-the-galactic-heroes (29), blood-blockade-battlefront (26), my-teen-romantic-comedy-snafu (29), soredemo-sekai-wa-utsukushii (28), shouwa-genroku-rakugo-shinjuu (29), and I stopped listing them not because it was remotely difficult to find more but because I got bored of doing so many character counts. The list on the Arqade meta post had a very large number of examples, but factoring in the relative site sizes I'm sure this is just as big a problem here. Most works with titles longer than that have some generally accepted abbreviation, but quite a few in the 26-35 range can not be abbreviated canonically.

One might also worry that these long tags would be harmful for SEO purposes, because the tag comes first in the page title seen by Google and is thus given large weight, displacing other content. But I don't know if that is actually true. It seems more likely to me that an abbreviated title would have a bigger effect than pushing the question text 10 characters later. That said, I'm far from an SEO expert. But it's just as, if not more, important that tags can be discovered by users here as that Google can identify them, and for that this is a clear improvement.

As such I strongly support increasing the character count for tags on this site. Of course, longer tag names have to be used responsibly; if a better tag name exists you shouldn't use a long one just for the sake of using the feature. But it seems very unlikely this would actually become an issue in practice, in contrast to short tag names, which have been a problem since day one on this site.