This recent meta question about the burnination of a company-name tag brought up , another tag that's just a company name.

In Borland's case, however, it doesn't look like a straight burnination is appropriate; it looks like it's being misapplied by people who don't know that tags can't have whitespace in them, so what should have been got tagged , questions just get , etc.

For questions that are specific to a product with Borland in the name, the company tag should be removed, and an appropriate specific tag should be added instead, creating it if necessary.

No we don't need borland-delphi, delphi on its own exists and is adequate. –  Johan May 15 at 15:01
borland-pascal is better known as turbo-pascal (except for borland-pascal-7 and 7.5) –  Johan May 15 at 15:02
and borland-c is known as turbo-c. So all the tags are already provided for. –  Johan May 15 at 15:02
We have "oracle" which is a company tag. –  abhi May 15 at 19:27
@abhi I think you can assume that people tagging questions with oracle usually refer to the database product with that name. –  Mark Rotteveel May 15 at 19:45
@Johan, "Turbo C" was discontinued in the early 90s , nobody refers to Borland C 5.5 as "Turbo C"; that'd be even more confusing. (CodeGear briefly trotted out the name "Turbo C++" in 2006 but stopped using it again very quickly) –  Matt McNabb May 15 at 21:01

1 Answer 1

Burnination of company tags is difficult, because they are usually used instead of product tags and not additional to them.
Simply removing them eliminates an important hint about which actual product is implied.

What would be very useful is if the system would flag you that company tags are not allowed and direct you to use specific tags instead.

SO actually does this when you're trying to tag a question SilkPerformer. It will display: enter image description here

It would be helpful if something like this where done for company tags instead.

Seeing the potential for advertising that SO would be missing by doing this I doubt this will happen.
(Companies still don't get that we don't care about them, we only care about their products).


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