Should [pf] and [little-snitch] be synonyms of [firewall]?

Question

I've recently created the little snitch tag and I observed that it has been made synonym with firewall. Probably to be consistent with the already existing synonym relationship between pf and firewall. Searching for little-snitch is:question returns 117 results. Some of these results are questions about little snitch such as :

• Little snitch and different network profiles

and some other questions are not directly about Little Snitch but mention it in the question such as :

• What is gs-loc.apple.com?

I think it would be nice to have a Little Snitch tag in order to regroup all questions directly about Little Snitch. The same reasoning can be done about pf.

Now both the Little Snitch tag and the pf tag are synonyms to the firewall tag. I think this situation is not ideal because:

1) pf and Little Snitch are not really synonyms of firewall but rather "instance of" firewall.

2) Little Snitch is an application firewall and has a different usage than firewalls such as pf.

3) better precision could be gained by having stand alone tags for pf and Little Snitch.

I propose to remove the synonym relationship between Little Snitch and firewall and between pf and firewall and let the tags Little Snitch and pf be stand-alone tags.

Answer 1

IMHO having less but broad tags is better than getting too fine granular (because the more granular tags get the bigger the risk that people will use the wrong tag or no tag at all). Also the more tags we have the more effort there is to keep usage in line with the tag description (otherwise having the tag will not be of any use).

In the specific case, questions about "pf" and "Little Snitch" should also have the firewall tag anyway, so the synonym kind of ensures that they get categorized correctly even if that part gets forgotten. And if the question really is about something specific to "Little Snitch" it will be mentioned in the question text and can easily be found (as shown in the query used in the question above).

Answer 2

Let's look at the questions you cited (and thanks for putting specific examples in the question).

1. Little snitch and different network profiles - This question isn't even getting the correct network / firewall tag. Adding flavors of firewall seem very low hanging fruit when the basic tags that will let people follow things they choose to answer aren't even being used.

2. What is gs-loc.apple.com? - this is tagged well and also shows that additional tags of pf or little-snitch would not make any improvement in search-ability that I can see.

Having too many tags is harmful to the site. Until there's a large volume of potential posts and it helps people know how to ask - I'm generally for merging down (with synonyms where it's really needed) as opposed to making tags for specific titles. Keep in mind - we don't have a microsoft-word or microsoft-excel tag in favor of collecting them under the office umbrella. Please let us know in the comments if there some case where a tag will improve asking or finding questions to answer. I'm open to revisiting the general thinking I've shared here on when to make a synonym or merge vs when to let a tag exist as a stand alone tag.