Is it safe to delete all tags directly from database?

Question

I changed my site's question classification to categories only. But still old spammy, irrelevant and common word tags are there. Moreover these tags are the main cause of showing wrong related posts. So I want to delete all irrelevant tags.
How can I delete all tags together without showing as retagged on activity page? Are there a table in database to delete all these tags?

Comments

Yes, it should be possible. What do you mean by "showing wrong related posts"? Also do you want to delete ALL tags from ALL questions?

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users will make irrelevant or useless tags. So the related posts will show based on these tags. For example if a post about difference between home and house has a tag 'difference' in it and another two posts about 'apple and mango' or 'car and bike' also having the same tag 'difference'. Then, even though these all are from different categories they will show up in related posts. In my opinion a general category q2a should not use tags. Only categories are needed. Even if we set it as only categories in general tab, still those tags are hidden there. how to delete those tags?

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Got it. But still the second question is not answered. You want to delete "those tags" or "all tags"?

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aLL TAGS. I don't want any tags on my site. Where is it located in database?

Answer 1

Run this SQL query:

UPDATE `qa_posts`
SET `tags` = ''
WHERE `type` LIKE 'Q%';

Then navigate to admin/stats and click on the Reindex content button.

Also remember you can always use this plugin: https://github.com/svivian/q2a-tagging-tools for managing tags.

Comments

It's not working. My website's database tables are not starting with qa. I changed it, but still not working. I think it's different version.

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This applies to many Q2A versions.

1. What exactly is not working?
2. What output are you getting when you run the UPDATE?
3. Can you provide a screenshot of the successful UPDATE?
4. Are you aware that if a question has words in the title and in the content, they will be used to match against the related keywords in a similar way as tags?

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Now tags are deleted from the database. Actually i was not selecting the table last day. It's 3:15 am here now :D

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Yes now reindexed and all tags have gone. Thank you

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While checking alexa change in cutestat google backlinks there are showing like  1410,000,000 something like that. a very big number. What does it mean? Is it something related to this huge number of tags ?

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I think I'm not the right person to answer that question. I don't think it is. Anyway, make sure you don't have the Tags page enabled (like this one https://www.question2answer.org/qa/tags) and let's see if the number decrease after a while. If it does, maybe it is related. But that's definitely not my area of knowledge

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let's see if it is changing after a week or not. thank you

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is everything ok? vivian