I am firmly in the 'meh' category right now. I'm not opposed to a name change, but I don't think it's going to solve the problem completely.
Before going down the route of changing names (been there), are there other features that could be utilized to combat some of these problems? I think we should try something, at least for a while, before taking the step of changing the name.
To me, that seems like an over reaction. I think that's especially true because "Hardware Recommendations" describes the site and what we are here to help with. We aren't having an identity crisis because of our name.
I know there are warnings and blacklists that can be applied to posts (and titles too?). Can we find a few key phrases that will hit a decent percentage of our technical support questions? This doesn't seem viable. See my update below with reasoning. I still think this is a good guidance tool, but we don't seem to have enough common phrases for the close reason.
There are disclaimer boxes on Health and Law. Must this box be used for a disclaimer, or can we co-opt it for an educational blurb about our question requirements?
Can we edit our side bar in the ask page? There isn't anything mentioning technical support, quality guidelines or "broad" topics.
I realize that my questions revolve around making the users read a bit more (especially on the "ask" page), but it's a start.
Update with data!
Undo provided me with a list of questions that have been closed since the start of the year.
I went through and pulled out the close reason for each of those (chat link):
technical 28
too broad 26
off topic 7
isunclear 5
isopinion 2
migrated 2
duplicate 1
The first thing I noticed is that our two "too broad" reasons are almost as common as the "technical" close reason, at least since the start of the year.
Second, there aren't many common phrases over 3 words in length between all of the technical closes. The only three we have are
- "enter image description here" - Obviously not related to being a technical question
- "a second hand laptop" - Only occurred twice.
- "I would like to" - Only occurred twice. Also, fairly common, so it's to noisy.
If I checked for 3 word phrases that occurred more than once, I get things like:
- "is running at" - twice
- "Are there any" - twice
- "buy a new" - twice
Due to the infrequent overlap between phrases in these questions or the commonality with unclosed questions, I don't think the warning/blacklist will work at this point.