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Given the preponderance of Stack Overflow, I expect this site to have a lot of questions about software. However, software is just one of many things one may want to reverse engineer. The inclusion of other fields in the scope is a critical argument for the very existence of the site — otherwise, the reverse-engineering tag on Stack Overflow would be sufficient.

So far all 7 questions are about software, but that's not a statistically significant sample.

Should all questions involving software be tagged , on the basis that they are the questions generally interesting to programmers and other people whose fields of expertise is software? Or should there be only finer-grained tags?

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  • I think software may be too wide a tag; SO's war against the homework tag is quite similar IMO. I could foresee more specific tags perhaps serving the same purpose though (e.g x86, mips, arm).
    – Mathew Hall
    Commented Mar 19, 2013 at 22:24
  • 1
    @MathewHall But most software RE techniques are architecture-agnostic (at least to some extent)! The homework tag is a completely different case: it doesn't convey any information about the topic of the question (and it's ambiguous, to boot).
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Commented Mar 19, 2013 at 22:25
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    In those cases would a more specific tag suffice (e.g. vine, daikon, hol)? For providing accessibility with broad categories, what other top-level tags might crop up? I can only think of "hardware" to complement a software tag.
    – Mathew Hall
    Commented Mar 19, 2013 at 22:55
  • @MathewHall chemistry, mechanical-engineering, business-methods, …
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Commented Mar 19, 2013 at 23:04

2 Answers 2

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I'd rather ask for tagging by OS and architecture/CPU type. I expect we'll have a vast majority of questions about software so tagging all of them would be somewhat redundant IMO.

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I agree with Igor. Most of the questions are software related so that tag is somewhat redundant. However, is something that should probably be made necessary for non-software questions to distinguish them.

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  • Hardware might be a bit broad if you ask me. The following would fit that tag but are quite different: physical reverse engineering (at silicon level), software and hardware features (hw signature checkers, RAM scramblers etc) that are embedded device related or digital/analog components (like figuring out what the purpose of an unmarked chip is)
    – ixje
    Commented Mar 28, 2013 at 14:03
  • @justsome I do understand that, but the site's community has users who are mostly software related. So, hardware questions are (at the moment) very few. If more questions (>10) do come up, then sure we should create more specific tags.
    – asheeshr
    Commented Mar 28, 2013 at 14:11

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