Currently, the durability tag has 3 questions and on JohnB's answer, it is to be merged or renamed to durable. Personally, I don't like either of these tags. Before I take action against them, I thought I would ask the community for it's opinion. So, what should we do with the [durability] tag?
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6 Answers
Throwing my two cents in here too:
- durable (or durability, whichever we go with) should be kept.
- reliable should be removed.
Reliable is implied in every question, but durable is not. For example, I am a programmer. I don't really do anything physical such that I might accidentally drop my phone in a bucket of grease, or off a three-story building, or fight bears with it, or whatever else people do with their phones.
I just use my phone like the vast majority of programmers: gently, in non-dangerous situations.
Now, I don't need a durable phone. I need a reliable phone. The guy who fights bears with his phone? He needs a durable phone, and a reliable phone.
Everyone needs reliability, not everyone needs durability. I personally would much rather have a high end (spec-wise) phone than a "durable" phone. That's different for some people, and our tagging should reflect that.
I think this is an important tag. The three questions that contain this tag indicate the durability is one of the most important criteria for the product they are seeking.
A portable workstation for 3D rendering : The replacement is being compared to a 7 year old, 11,000€+ piece of equipment. A standard build machine is not being requested here. A high end machine is not being requested. At 11,000€, this is an ultra high end machine and the user is making durability an important part of the requirements for such a machine.
What's a good life-proof Android phone? : The durability of a phone to withstand above average clumsiness is important. The first line of the question indicates that it's important. A standard cell phone isn't enough.
What is a durable laptop targeting a 10 year lifetime? : This user wants a machine that will last 10 years. A cheap laptop isn't going to stand the test of time. This user wants a machine they can take into the middle of the next decade. It has to be durable.
When durability is an important part of the question, it deserves a tag. Durability is NOT implied. Of course users want something that isn't going to break in a month, but many users don't expect a computer to last 7-10 years either. Or expect a cell phone to take repeated drops and continue to work. These users do and as such have an appropriate tag for this type of equipment.
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As I have stated in the question, I think we should get rid of these tags altogether. This is on the same level as the comfort tags that we had. To me, this is implied. People are not going to be asking for products that are not durable, but if they do, they can state that in the question. These tags, and others like them, do not offer anything else to the question.
Other similar tags that have been deleted: comfort, comfortability, reliable, reliability.
durability is a meta tag. Specifically, from that entry:
The reason meta-tags are a problem is that they do not describe the content of the question.
The durability tag tells us about the ideal product the OP is looking for; it doesn't tell us about what product, or anything about the question itself.
A good rule for this, again from the blog post:
If the tag can't work as the only tag on a question, it's probably a meta-tag.
If we had a question tagged solely with durability, it would get tag-edited very quickly - because that tag alone isn't enough to describe the question. Meta-tagging is a bad practice, and one we should curtail when it comes up. Thus: remove the tag.
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Thank you. Meta-tag is what I was looking for in my question, but I couldn't remember what they were called.– CfinleyOct 8, 2015 at 16:05
If we decide to keep the tag, lets rename it to durable. Why, as they are both the same? A product can have great durability or horrible durability, but if a product is durable, then it has good durability.
After being persuaded by Cfinley's magical arguing abilities, I think the durability tag should be removed because it's too broad and can be used for pretty much everything.
There are special cases such as questions asking for (bulky) laptops that are built specifically for constant travel/movement, but these don't provide enough of a basis for keeping the tag around in my opinion. As Cfinley stated, this information can just be explained in the question without confusion.
Update: Now I agree with Andy, but my arguments above still hold for their side of the discussion.
