From the blog post Introducing


The tag description for the tag is:

Design in programming is the act of making particular choices about how best to structure a program, to achieve goals of reliability, maintainability, correctness or ease of use.

As far as I can see, everything in this description falls into the category of 'higher level conceptual programming issues', and nothing falls into the category of 'code issues'.

While I don't rule out the possibility of writing a question which is about design and which is appropriate for this site, I think that almost all questions tagged with [design] are better suited to Programmers.SE. Is it time to remove that tag?

Possible feature request: notify a user who posts a question with the [design] tag that such a question is probably better suited to Programmers.SE. Math.SE already notifies users when a question is likely to be too subjective for the site (based on some strange computer interpretation of its title), so this could be something similar (and more likely to be correct).

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As to your feature request, there have already been multiple requests for some sort of messaging for users if they use particular tags. –  Al E. Sep 19 '13 at 15:38
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1 Answer

This isn't really an answer to your question - it's partially a discussion.

I like the general idea of removing(banning) the design tag. Its definition is a bit misleading in the concept of SO.

I have a good example myself:

I remember asking my first ever question on SO which was closed as Primarily Opinion Based which had the in it. As a new user, back then, I didn't really go through the StackOverflow question checklist and did not understand how this site works. As probably most people I was just excited about posting a question and getting some cool answer. Obviously, I thought it was OK to ask a question about database design since the existed and was suggested to me. I wouldn't ask that same question now, but this definitely proves my agreement with your original idea of removing it.

I will have to disagree with your statement


While I think some of the question may be well suited for Programmers I know that definitely not most of them.

In fact, the programmers Help Centre lists Design Patterns lots of people may not understanding the actual definition of it.

My fear is that people would be asking Primarily Opinion Based question with no research shown.

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