Q:

Automatic removal of bracketed tags from question titles

I have noticed a trend recently of people inserting tags into the title of their posts. I have edited quite a few to remove those tags, and it occurs to me that it would be a very simple operation to just remove them with a regex when they submit the question. So instead of having a post title like this:

[c#] Here is my question about how to create an object

we just end up with this:

Here is my question about how to create an object

And we could possibly take this one step further and add the (removed) tag to the post as a proper tag if it isn't already present.

A:

Well, there were a ton of these -- around 20-25k -- so I felt it was worth removing them.
Generally any pattern of
^\[[^]]+\]\s
was removed, that is, anything of the "title starts with faux tag" pattern:

[jQuery] Entire page or multiple divs with '.mousemove'
  [Tornado] Invalid OpenID response: HTTP 599: SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK.
  [ios] How enable canGoBack/canGoForward while using UIWebView with anchor(#)?

Remember that we always add the most significant tag to the title of a question in the HTML page title (if it isn't already in the title organically), so nothing is really lost here.
It would be slightly better if these words appeared naturally in the title as appropriate, but duplicating the tags in such a grotesque form in the title is definitely worse.
On second thought, I decided we should also enforce this in questions, since it is so grotesque and the "starts-with" matching is highly unlikely to provide false positives.

A:

I would be hesitant to let a regular expression be responsible for that. What if I want to post a question about foo vs [foo]?  A solution more robust than regex could look in the database for existing tags I suppose but what if somebody makes a tag foo?

