Should this site have region tags to help region specific reccomendations

Question

Following this comment and related question.

Since a lot of recommendation questions are region specific , both in terms of suppliers availability, as well as price and currency , should some kind of a region-base tag system should be implemented ? and If yes, than how ?

I do know that a region-specific tag system might be strange, but on the other hand , it will help a lot in filtering specific regions or countries to see the best fit hardware that is available in your location and from a local distributor .

On the other hand - Nowadays where everything can be purchased online, and shipped virtually everywhere , does local-only recommendations still have the same value ?

Answer 1

I do not think region specific tags are necessary. The idea of the site isn't to put a user in contact with a retailer. It's to recommend a hardware product that meets their requirements. It is helpful to link to a retailer, but not necessary.

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Both parties in a post should take care to provide relevant details about where they are located. My default assumption about a user's location is generally based on the currency they provide for their budget. If they provide a budget in dollars, I assume they are in the United States. If they provide Euros, I assume they are in Europe. If they provide another currency, then I assume they are in a location that uses that currency. If someone is asking a question and provides a currency and a location that don't match (ie. dollars and they are traveling to Europe), then I assume the explicitly mentioned location.

While a link to a retailer is not necessary, it does make an answer "better". Along the same line of reasoning, a link to a local retailer (or localized online merchant) is probably better than a link to a global merchant, simply due to pricing.

Tags for regions, though, are not useful. They are too broad (ie. "United States", "Europe", "Asia"), because of the huge geographic differences, tax laws, supply in specific regions, or even different countries in the region. Alternatively, they can become to focused (ie. "Chicago", "London", "Seoul"), in which case they are useless because a product available in Chicago is probably available in Detroit. The same is true with London and Paris or Seoul and Tokyo.

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As someone who wants to provide recommendations, you simply need to provide a recommendation that is helpful. If you know a product is hard to get in a certain region, make a note of that.

Answer 2

I would argue that we aren't here to provide recommendations on where to buy a product, but on what product to buy. If a requirement is that the hardware be available for purchase locally in the North Pole, then the question should state that.

However, you have to remember, the asker is just one person who will profit from the recommendation they receive. If a question asks for something available in the North Pole for eight hundred north-pole-dollars, I wouldn't hesitate to provide a recommendation for something not available locally in the North Pole.

This would include proper warning about it not being available locally, but otherwise be a normal answer. Two reasons for this:

1. That answer might not be of particular use to the asker, who might be under time constraints and need the hardware now. However, the vast majority of our audience comes from Google - who probably aren't under the same constraints.
2. Most people in countries that don't have hardware available locally have figured out how to get around it - have someone in the EU/US buy it and ship it to them, Bitcoin, etc. My answer could still be helpful, if slightly more inconvenient.

Note that I would only post this if it matched all the other requirements - and I still might expect downvotes. That's a tradeoff everyone has to make: sometimes something doesn't match every requirement: how far are we willing to compromise?

In light of that (and I know I swerved off topic a little bit), I'd argue that country tags would be meta tags: tags that describe the question, not the hardware the person is seeking.