18

Just when we thought we finally got rid of them all they appear to have been resurrected.

x 200 — about 100 software and service products, PDF, Flash, Flex, graphics and video editing, web design, marketing tools
x 9 — desktop and laptop computers, keyboard, mouse, headset
x 136 – desktop and server CPUs, graphics cards/GPUs, chipsets
x 29 – a lot
x 8 – home, server, and industrial motherboards, mini PCs/HTPCs, laptops
x 28 – desktop and laptop computers, graphics cards, screens, tablets, a phone, sound cards, main boards, external hard drives, mice, servers, DVD writers, ...
x 170 - should be merged into AMD
x 39 – wired and wireless networking equipment, cables and converters, USB hubs, accessories
x 15 "We offer products and services with our experience in a wide range of fields such as "printing equipment" and "home sewing machines", "industrial sewing machines / machine tools"." – Still, printers, scanners, faxes and multifunction devices are on topic.
x 13 – NAS, cloud storage, external HDDs, optical drives, wireless routers, wireless adapters, internal PCI cards for USB etc.,
x 54 – cameras and DLSRs, camcorders, printers, scanners, networking equipment, and industrial products that looks really expensive
x 430 – laptop and desktop computers, servers, displays, TVs, printers, keyboards, mice, projectors
x 95 (it even has synonyms!) – routers, switches, wireless APs, USB hubs, KVM switches, print servers, IP cameras, NAS, media players (Boxee)
x 22 – printers, projectors, scanners
x 9 – tablets, laptops, desktops, scanners, video encoders, enterprise servers and storage, middleware, development tools, telecom, microelectronics
x 44 (possibly ambiguous?) – main boards, graphics cards, chassis, cooling, PSUs, optical drives, TV tuners, keyboards, mice, speakers, storage enclosures, notebooks, tablets
x 365 - laptops, desktops, workstations and thin clients, servers, storage, printers, monitors, networking equipment
x 343 – CPUs, networking equipment, main boards, chipsets, cable modems, micro controllers, server cases, RAID controllers
x 4 – printers and all-in-one devices, photo equipment
x 189 – laptop and desktop computers, workstations, servers, accessories like mice and keyboards (and great DisplayLink adapters!)
x 17 printers, multifunction devices
x 19 cellphones, smartphones, TVs, blu ray players, projectors, home theater systems, refrigerators, ovens, washers, vacuums, monitors, NAS, modem, scanner, optical drives
x 176 (a Cisco brand) – network devices
x 77 keyboards, mice, laptop accessories, speakers, webcams and cameras, headsets, remotes
x 6 graphics cards, graphics accessories, video editing devices, h.264 encoding accelerators
x 5 - should be merged into Seagate
x 55 (possibly ambiguous?) – notebook and desktop computers, main boards, tablet computers, graphics cards
x 12 – is there something they don't have a division for?
x 89 – home theater media players, wireless networking hardware, routers, switches, cables, storage devices, video monitoring equipment
x 410 - graphics cards, chipsets, HPC hardware, graphics workstation hardware
x 4 printers, telecom
x 3 blu ray and DVD players, TVs, headphones, home theater equipment, cameras, camcorders, phones, printers, scanners, fax machines, microwave ovens, kitchen appliances, shaving equipment, ventilation, heating and air conditioning, ...**
x 13 mice , mouse pads, laptops, keyboard, speakers, headsets, earphones, gamepads, accessories (cable boxes etc.)
x 18 – SSDs, optical drives, printers, faxes, multifunction devices, notebooks, displays, projectors, tablet computers, phones, TVs, home theater equipment, blu ray and DVD players, audio systems
x 38 - hard drives, SSDs, NAS, media players
x 83 - laptop and desktop computers, tablet computers, TVs, blu ray and DVD players, camcorders, copiers, printers, faxes, scanners, HDDs, telecom, UPS, LCD/LED products, industrial products
x 74 – hard drives, routers, switches, media players
x 9 – printers, copiers, scanners
x 8 – routers, switches, VoIP, media servers/players, modems, other networking stuff

And these are just the classic company tags that aren't strongly coupled to a single product, like or are.

Could someone please kill them with fire? I hear the undead are vulnerable to it.

The discussion happened in the linked thread. I don't want it repeated here.

13
  • well, the discussion said that some of them are useful and others aren't. I agree that most are not, but it's still worth looking before painting them all with the same brush.
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Dec 27, 2011 at 9:35
  • 1
    @jeff which ones are useful in your opinion? As I wrote, we could skip the ones tightly related to a single product or product line. But my previous answer to remove all of them was received very well when I explained why they (or at least the ones not also a product line like VMware) don't make sense. Toms topic, also anti-tag iirc, was also received well. None of the tags I listed is more helpful than the apple tag I argued against.
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented Dec 27, 2011 at 9:38
  • well, fex, the razer tag is IMO pretty useful since it applies to their keyboards and mice -- and a Razer owner probably is interested in and has knowledge about the shared Razer drivers, etc. But that's partially because the company only makes a limited set of fairly related products. I agree that a giant company making hundreds of totally different products would not be a useful tag because it's absurdly broad.
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Dec 27, 2011 at 9:41
  • @jeff makes sense. Since all they apparently sell is input peripherals, we could exempt them and reopen their discussion specifically for those tags. Do you see any others with a similar focus? I just didn't want to reopen a discussion that was only resolved three months ago because it was incompletely resolved. Was unfortunate that tom only listed a few companies explicitly...
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented Dec 27, 2011 at 9:46
  • 1
    Regarding Razer, they produce mice, mouse pads, laptops, keyboard, speakers, headsets, earphones, gamepads, accessories (cable boxes etc.) — they're no single product line company as I originally thought. Same argument as with Apple, just on a smaller scale.
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented Dec 27, 2011 at 21:47
  • what about nvidia? What "other products" do they create? Advice stands, pick the worst 10.
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Feb 1, 2012 at 8:59
  • @jeff good example, but we have their entire product range covered with more specific tags, similar to intel. Tesla maybe not, but we can create it once necessary. We could synonymize it to nvidia-GeForce. I'll revise the list, and ping you when done.
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented Feb 1, 2012 at 9:20
  • I think a better approach to this, would be to post another meta question, with some of the worst company tags as answer, and then have the community vote on which ones they believe should be removed.
    – James Mertz
    Commented Sep 26, 2012 at 22:13
  • @KronoS Only when knowing what products they each offer will we be able to determine the worst company tags. I'm still convinced that, given the apple precedent, most of these tags are equally or more useless.
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented Sep 27, 2012 at 5:14
  • @DanielBeck Are we going to do something about these? I'm sure everyone will support mass removing these tags (at least the useless ones for now - Google, Microsoft, Apple, HP, LG, etc).
    – tempy
    Commented Jan 4, 2013 at 23:25
  • @tempy My answer below trying to get a subset burned has largely been ignored. Recently there was some response from the team though iirc, I'll have to look that up.
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented Jan 5, 2013 at 0:16
  • @DanielBeck Will there be any progress about that? I know it's a lot of work, but if we will just decide what we do about that and set the goals then we can finish this easily with the help of the community, through the main tag cleanup thread.
    – tempy
    Commented Jun 10, 2013 at 10:48
  • possible duplicate of Manufacturer & Company tags are back. Again
    – gparyani
    Commented Sep 29, 2014 at 1:55

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
4

If the community decides how they want to handle these, ping me and I can burninate or merge as necessary.

After a bit more thought, I am not sure I agree with this request.

The previous question referred to large multinational conglomerates with an enormous range of products

microsoft, apple, acer, samsung, sony, asus, ...

Whereas, many of these on your list are far, far smaller in scope. I still feel very strongly that is a useful grouping, for example -- look for yourself at the questions in that tag. And certainly when talking about CPUs, and are totally relevant.

I just don't agree that all these need to go. We should pick the "worst 10" and get rid of those.

5
  • 87.5% agreement on this more thorough topic, 94% on my response in the older topic. In both cases only a single down vote. How much consensus do you want, exactly?
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented Jan 23, 2012 at 9:01
  • see my edit for clarification
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Feb 1, 2012 at 6:28
  • 1
    Apple is just as associated as razer with very few of their product lines. Macs and iOS stuff vs. mice and keyboard. But that aside, do you have examples from the list other than the previously discussed razer? Amd and intel are only somewhat useful because the company names are synonymous with their line of CPUs. And we have tons of more specific tags for both manufacturers. We could make those into actual synonyms for amd-CPU/intel-CPU or intel-architecture tags, which is likely how they're used. Then they would be actually useful.
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented Feb 1, 2012 at 8:56
  • By the way, when you deleted the tags mentioned in the other topic, did you deliberately not blacklist the tags?
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented Feb 1, 2012 at 10:10
  • I agree here that there are some tags that should be kept and are still relevant and useful (like the intel, amd tags). A top ten that the community votes on and agrees to remove is a good suggestion IMO.
    – James Mertz
    Commented Sep 26, 2012 at 22:11
4

The following is an attempt to group company/brand tags based on how useful (or not) they are. The distinction I use is the following:

Is the brand/company strongly associated with a single on-topic kind of device or product line? Or, in other words, if someone tells you on Super User: "I have a [brand].", or "It's about this [brand] thing I have,…", do you know roughly what it is?

For an overview of products, see the question above.

possibly useful:

  • ATI (except it's outdated)
  • Brother
  • D-Link
  • Epson
  • Kodak
  • Lexmark
  • Linksys
  • Matrox
  • Maxtor (except it's outdated, but Seagate is fine as well)
  • Nvidia
  • OKI
  • Seagate

undecided:

  • Belkin
  • Buffalo
  • Canon
  • Netgear
  • Xerox
  • Zyxel

useless and should be burninated:

  • Adobe
  • Alienware
  • AMD
  • Apple
  • Asus
  • Dell
  • Fujitsu
  • Gigabyte
  • HP
  • Intel
  • Lenovo
  • LG
  • Logitech
  • MSI
  • Microsoft
  • Panasonic
  • Razer
  • Samsung
  • Toshiba
  • Western Digital

Trogdor!

As usual, vote up for yea, vote down for nay. Comment to point out where I'm wrong.

3
  • I disagree with your amd and intel listings, since they're useful in questions about CPUs (especially ones which are CPU-specific).
    – AStopher
    Commented Aug 22, 2014 at 14:32
  • @zyboxenterprises: There is likely never a question that shouldn't rather be tagged cpu, x86, x86-64, i7, pentium, celeron, ... or whatever other product (line) specific tags there are. See the question for a list of the diverse product lines both companies offer and which make the tags useless.
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented Aug 22, 2014 at 14:41
  • A known bug with AMD processors is that they have trouble executing Intel bytecode, and I actually posted a question with this issue over at Stack Overflow. Usage of the amd and intel tags in this situation would be merited.
    – AStopher
    Commented Aug 22, 2014 at 14:47
2

Note: I call them "company name tags" here, and use "company tags" to refer to the bad ones.

It's simple, we can just follow the rules from

The Death of Meta Tags

to decide which company name tags we keep and which company name tags we get rid off.

The rules of the above blog post are simple:

  1. If the tag can’t work as the only tag on a question, it’s probably a meta-tag.

  2. If the tag commonly means different things to different people, it’s probably a meta-tag.

Although these rules are specifically tailored to tags like we can tailor them to be rules about company name tags. Here's my take on it:

  1. If the tag can't work as the only tag on a question, it's probably a company tag.

  2. If the tag covers different products, it's probably a company tag.

Tags that are just about the company, are company tags, and aren't welcome.

We have two kind of company name tags, those that surely cover multiple products (eg. ) and those that almost cover single products (eg. ) in the computers field.

The former are deemed company tags, simply because you can't ask a question about just Apple (rule 1) on Super User as it would be off-topic, the tag also covers a lot of products so it's more kind of a "group tag" than it is an "useful tag", similarly as to how grouped tips. Hence, this company tag is of no use and should go; if you don't believe me, read Daniel Beck's detailed answer...

The latter are rather useful, a question about Western Digital is most likely going to be a question about their hard disks or something closely related (RMA, firmware, ...) and it covers just a bit more than a single line of products, but nothing close as to the very wide branch of products Apple covers.

Western Digital hard-drive users surely will love a tag for that matter; however, I don't see how an incomplete Apple tag is going to be helpful in any way, as there's always a more specific and more complete tag to follow like , and so on...

The Death of Company Tags

So, can we get rid of these company tags that just group other product (group) tags together?

For some tag it might be of a benifit to split them up into more specific tags, like , ... instead of .

-7

Get rid of them all!

You cannot have one manufacture without having the rest of them. either all the branded names will have to be removed, or none of them.

The actual branded item can still exist in the title of a question, and in the question without tagging the item itself with a brand, or clogging the site with commertialism.

It does not matter what brand the item is, All answers for the items will all be the same, no matter whos brand exists on the item. All experts are as affluent in one brand as the others.

Anyone who can Answer a question related to an Intel processor and motherboard, can just as easily answer a question for a AMD processor and motherboard , they are the same things.

Anyone who can answer a question about an ATI/amd products can just as easily answer a question about a Nvida product, they all use the same software, they are just generic video card items.

Anyone who can answer Mac Questions, should just as easily be able to answer Windows questions. Tag them all as systems or OS, leave off the branding

Having Favorited tags or Ignored tags for specific Branded items that a person knows nothing about, or a lot about , does not improve the site , or the ability for anyone to answer questions.

While your at it remove Photoshop and put it under graphic editors, and remove OSX and linux and put it under OSes and Remove Mac and windows and put it under PCs , take out Excell and replace it with spreadsheet. Remove synergy , SQLserver , remove the 6 branded IM messinger items, and put it all under IM. Remove all specific browsers, and put them under the browser headings, and all specific e-mail programs , and leave only 1 e-mail tag.

all media players under one tag, all text editing under one tag, all word processing under one tag. All branded software should be replaced with generic terms. All experts can easily answer questions about all software items reguardless of brand.

Add these to the list Cisco Oracle Verizon Aspire Synaptic Radeon AspireOne Gforce Nokia-e5 UltraBook Shuttle Sigmatel N900 Ipad Ipod Iphone Mother Zebra gigayte Airport-Extreeme Airport-Express AppleTV ati-mobility-radeon ati-radeon buffalo canon-lide canon-pixma commodore

and that is just some 10-15% of the Branded Hardware. The list for Branded software is endless. What I see is SU being overrun with zombies, and monsters, vampires, werewolfs, with goofy wrong and unnessisary tags being added every 15 minutes, dead tags galore, misspelled repeat tags, and hundreds of repeats for the same items.

Side Notes: I did a search for some specific branded items, and nothing came up for many companies involved in computers. If we dont remove the brands and companies that are there now, then we will have to add a few more so there is no favoritism.

Would there be a solution in having new tags be approved ?? or did all that get approved?

< Vote there , comment there \|/

29
  • 3
    -1 for removing OS specific tags, really? I for example don't need any Windows tagged question because I don't know anything about it. Your premise is wrong.
    – slhck
    Commented Jan 23, 2012 at 7:19
  • 4
    > All experts can easily answer questions about all software items reguardless of brand. -- Are you serious about this?
    – slhck
    Commented Jan 23, 2012 at 7:22
  • -1 You apparently don't know the difference between companies and products. While the former are just too broad to be useful, the latter are important in organizing questions on our site.
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented Jan 23, 2012 at 8:01
  • It obviously demonstrates that there is no magic cure, in reality it is not even the problem to begin with. There are forums across the web that do seperate out Major brand items and stop. There are forums that will keep breaking down the Brands and adding brands till they run out of seperation space. They create a balance, a balance that has certian companies splattered all over it, and others left out completly.
    – Psycogeek
    Commented Jan 23, 2012 at 8:09
  • These "forums" seperate out these areas of interest using a folder sub folder type of plan. here to maintain an area of interest there is following a specific tag. The tag chosen to follow might indeed include a specific product(s) or just flat out attempt to follow the whole companies products. Products they own , understand and are interested in.
    – Psycogeek
    Commented Jan 23, 2012 at 8:44
  • In other seperations for the purpose of organisation, It might be company, it might be products, it might be company + product, it is not ALWAYS anything. If there was a pattern, it would be what people set as an area of interest. What is followable as an area of interest.
    – Psycogeek
    Commented Jan 23, 2012 at 9:10
  • As to why companies are not a useful separation, please see my answer in the linked topic. They are just too broad to be useful. Kind of like tagging half the topics on this site with software.
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented Jan 23, 2012 at 9:16
  • Person owns a Diaglo laptop it is a phildo model 8757, interest in 8757 1 , interest in phildo 4 interest in Diaglo 67 , interest in Laptop 15,000 . What do they pick? Digalo laptops have many similarities, thier expertice flows across all Digalo laptops, but they do not understand Apple laptops, what do they pick? Diaglo.
    – Psycogeek
    Commented Jan 23, 2012 at 9:18
  • The problem is that Diaglo also runs an online software store and manufactures printers, keyboards, TFT screens and desktop computers. See my other answer, and the comments to this question. Both Razer and Apple (which are unusually focused companies) have a very wide range of products that makes the company tags no more useful than software or hardware would be. Also, since there's likely a Phildo tag for the line of mobile computers, few people actually tag Diaglo, but prefer the more specific tag. Which is exactly what happens with apple, osx, mac, etc.
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented Jan 23, 2012 at 9:24
  • Lets take the Razor line. Person has a razor, we can define for them that Razer is not a definable item, they have the same 500 products made in china as everyone else :-) Do we force a Razer interest to "its just a mouse" , "its just a keyboard" it is just a line of products? Remove the razer tag , and how do they find news questions and answers about Thier interest the razer something? Define all 500 products under a seperate tag? NO. Give them a Razer tag, they can tag it to mouse and key and whatever and happy razer Owners can follow razer .. BUT somewhere it ends.
    – Psycogeek
    Commented Jan 23, 2012 at 9:32
  • No diaglo does not :-) your making that up :-) I just told you there is only 67 interest total in digalo. A diaglo owner might be very happy to follow the entire digalo tag, because that is the only way to follow it. An apple user might follow all of apple or only the specific product they own. Dont put on digalo what exists for apple. The pattern is it ENDs somewhere.
    – Psycogeek
    Commented Jan 23, 2012 at 9:44
  • If I draw a "flow chart" and put main headers at the top, for these "products" it would be company name First, then split mouse products, keyboard products, monitor products , split again , and particular models of those products. If there is a limit to the number of tags , one END would be somewhere at the lower part of this flow chart where it ends up with way to many tags. And nobody being that specific about following it.
    – Psycogeek
    Commented Jan 23, 2012 at 10:39
  • The other end of the usable tags for products, is when a company name has so little interest or following, or even ownership, that even the questioners would not use it to set thier question. They got a Joystick, they dont expect anyone to know what a Mecao Joystick is, and they dont expect or care that a Mecao tag exists. They would be happy to just get answers about Joystick
    – Psycogeek
    Commented Jan 23, 2012 at 10:48
  • 1
    Because specific tags are better than nonspecific tags. They are more descriptive. They can be subscribed to, favorited, and ignored. They aren't meta tags, and provide enough information to stand alone. They aren't (as easily) ambiguous. They work for companies that manage to make multiple, similar products. They can be version specific (e.g. osx-lion for the most recent release of osx). They only take up one of the five possible tag "slots" a question has.
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented Jan 23, 2012 at 12:14
  • 2
    Note that you can only create tags with a certain reputation. Tags that are not used will automatically be pruned. 10k users also have the possibility to review newly created tags and "nuke" them before they're even broadly used.
    – slhck
    Commented Jan 23, 2012 at 13:11

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