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@Velocio
After deleting over 2,000 tags in trying to manage them, I gave up and disabled them.
The problem being, tags were only ever designed to be a feature that would enhance search and finding stuff. It was a way of adding keywords to topics such that even without those keywords being in the thread title or content, the thread or topic could be found.
With that in mind, the technical implementation was such that it was designed with very few keywords in mind.
There have always been a few threads on which there were many tags, but today it appears that many threads suddenly had hundreds and hundreds of tags.
I tried to manually identify them and delete them, but after deleting pages of tags within the SQL database I had to concede that I've no idea how big the problem is, where all the junk tags are, nor how to resolve it.
If I leave the tags then every page includes an enormous amount of cruft, and the database has way more queries... and they serve almost no purpose anymore since the cruft made the searchability near useless.
So I reasoned that the only constructive thing I could do, and to spare myself a weekend of manually working through them... was just to disable them. Very clearly, no-one found value in using them for the reason they were there.