It's no conspiracy. I do a bit of tag maintenance around once a week or so. When one is suddenly huge in the cloud, I take a look at it to make sure it's legit. Every now and then a rabid fan of some sort will search the board for mention of their favorite character/show/actor and tag every thread in which they're mentioned. Presumably, it's to make their favorite topic into the largest tag in the cloud.
I don't know what the allure of that is, but that's not what tags are
for. They're topic tags, not gang tags.
That's exactly what happened here. One day, the "janeway" tag was roughly the size of the "batman" tag, and the next, it was enormous. I looked, and it was clear that someone had run a search on her name and tagged every thread that came up.
Ironically, this kind of thing renders the tag useless. If someone wants to look for topics about Janeway specifically, and they click on that tag in the cloud, they get a bunch of random Voyager threads where people tagged her because she's in the episode. Compare that to the "
batman" tag, which leads you to discussion of the character.
I deleted the whole tag because this person or people had tagged so many that it wasn't worth sorting the legit ones from crap ones. Otherwise, I would have had to open each thread and delete the tags individually. It's easier to just start over. It'll show up in the cloud again after fewer than ten threads.
If people want to re-tag and make it huge in the cloud, fine, but they have to do it right. Tag threads that where the topic is Janeway specifically, not ones where she's simply mentioned. You can even include it in topics about Mulgrew, as those would be relevant to anyone searching by the tag.
