Burn [computer-buying] tag

Question

computer-buying has about 24 questions, almost all of which are closed for shopping recommendations. Can this tag be burned since questions about shopping are clearly off-topic?

Answer 1

Maybe we shouldn't burn them.

It's true that these tags clearly attract the kinds of questions we consider off-topic on this site. In that regard it's just like software-rec, but that's another story.

This question could also easily be tagged computer-buying — it even has buy in its title! This question is along the same lines: It's people looking to understand relevant metrics of the underlying technology to be able to make the choice of a product themselves, instead of just getting a product name.

A few other questions that might be good candidates for this tag:

• Buying more RAM
• Which have better performance Two 2GB RAM sticks or One 4GB RAM stick?
• What factors are relevant when buying thermal paste?

Maybe it would even be a good idea to systematically search the site for good, on topic "How do I determine what to get" / "How do I best research the bullet points in this product description" and similar questions and tag them computer-buying or something similar.

This way, we build a resource of questions useful to prospective computer buyers. It is not a meta tag, not really. It's more of an umbrella term for a general situation or use case, like troubleshooting (but arguably more useful as a browsable category). And even if it were, it'd be of the rare, useful sort, just like community-faq.

With that tag, and active use of it, we'd actually have something substantial we can link to and offer as an alternative to users posting the umpteenth "Which of these two components would you buy" questions.