should questions on SU have a tag prerequisite for being either hardware or software, as all questions in theory should fall into at least one or other of those categories?
quite a few Q's are missing what is probably one of the most important tags on the site...
just a thought. (and as i've just discovered, the mechanism is there as meta forces one of 4 - bug, feature-request, discussion and support
I'm not sure that all questions should fall into one of these categories. For instance, a question which asks the best way of achieving some goal may be answered with a hardware solution or a software solution.
At other times it could be unknown (e.g. "I don't know why X doesn't work" when it could be drivers or the hardware). In other cases it could be both ("Why is Safari on the iPhone slow?".)
More importantly, what value would it really add? Is anyone going to search for only software questions or only hardware questions? In most hardware situations there'll be some overlap anyway - if you're asking about recommended graphics cards, then the driver quality (software) will be relevant to that decision anyway.
I'm afraid I just don't see a problem there to be solved.
I was just wondering whether there should be mandatory tags on the other sites too, but couldn't even come close to a list of possibilities. Not sure hardware and software are necessarily the way to go.
But they are a good starting point for the discussion though.
I think the hardware and software tags can be important in giving a broad view of the scope of a question, but I certainly don't think they should be prereq. For one, the fact that they are that broad makes them not the most helpful tag for people to subscribe to (unless you want to get a huge list of interesting questions). I also think that if you have a question which ends up needing a lot of tags to scope out, using a very broad tag might take up one of your allowed tags that would have been better used on something with more specificity.
