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Seven years ago, I asked whether PCB review questions were on-topic. I think they're generally acceptable when they fit certain guidelines. However, I noticed that we don't seem to have good tags to assign to such questions.

We do have a that that's not used much (18 times). I think its purpose would be similar to the tag. Therefore, I am checking with the community:

Would a tag would be useful to add for questions seeking a review of the design, whether schematic or PCB?

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    \$\begingroup\$ The large part of the current review questions are indeed design reviews. So why have a new, different design-review tag, since it will be used to refer to the same kind of questions? I can't see any benefit of having two tags for the same thing, so it isn't quite clear. Do you suggest both these tag be synonyms? Do you suggest to rename review to design-review? Or are you actually suggesting to have two completely different tags? In the latter case, can you point out how this will be beneficial to the site? \$\endgroup\$
    – dim
    Feb 15, 2019 at 21:47
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    \$\begingroup\$ @dim I was under the impression that the review tag was being under-utilized, and thinking that having design-review (either separate or renamed) would help make it more obvious for users to tag questions with. Perhaps an alias/synonym is warranted. \$\endgroup\$
    – JYelton
    Feb 15, 2019 at 22:35
  • \$\begingroup\$ Design review questions are not that great anyway. What purpose do they serve? "Here, review my design", but this brings up many answers, a title to a question that only serves the OP. In almost all cases design review questions be made more specific to ask a question of where the OP has a problem. Instead of "here is my design" something like "I'm having trouble with the layout of this board, I don't understand if the trace size is acceptable" OR "My ground is split, is this OK?" \$\endgroup\$
    – Voltage Spike Mod
    Mar 4, 2019 at 21:36
  • \$\begingroup\$ @laptop2d I agree, but at the time I posted this question, I was thinking of looking at such review questions to see if there were any I could respond to. I thought it might be useful to tag them consistently, but after reading the posted answer below, I basically changed my mind. \$\endgroup\$
    – JYelton
    Mar 5, 2019 at 1:56

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This is a meta tag . Searching on it is useless, and it's frowned upon in the stack exchange network

Just look at the results of a search for "design review" https://electronics.stackexchange.com/search?q=design+review The hits fall into a few categories.

The most common, to me at least, is just plain mediocre questions. There's also a class of good questions that are undertagged, which decreases their value. Many are good questions that have some very good tags, and adding a design review tag probably won't make them better.

For example, let's say I'm interested in constructing an rf circuit as a pcb, and I scan for design review questions.

Search on "rf" : https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rf Search on "rf design review": https://electronics.stackexchange.com/search?q=rf+design+review Search on "rf PCB": https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rf+pcb

The last looks to be the most useful search to me.

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    \$\begingroup\$ I'm not sure I agree - sometimes looking for questions specifically asking for design review may be a user's intent (thus searching on it has some utility). Second point, are you saying that review questions are frowned upon or that meta-tagging is frowned upon? \$\endgroup\$
    – JYelton
    Feb 20, 2019 at 17:06
  • \$\begingroup\$ meta-tagging is certainly frowned on -- that's what I was referring to. GOOD review questions are not frowned upon, but they tend to be rare. Most are "Here's what I did, please offer suggestions" instead of "I'm concerned with how I dealt with these bypass capacitors, what do you think?" The former is bad, the latter, much better. You can, in fact, legitimately put a review tag every time somebody asks "why isn't this circuit working", but it doesn't help anyone to do so. I'd suggest that there's ALWAYS a more descriptive tag to be had, if it's a good question. \$\endgroup\$
    – Scott Seidman
    Feb 20, 2019 at 18:59
  • \$\begingroup\$ Fair points, thanks for the input. \$\endgroup\$
    – JYelton
    Feb 20, 2019 at 20:11

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