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This tag is in phase 4 of the burnination process described here. The question and comments have been cleaned to allow for on-topic discussion about the burnination of this tag. Please keep it that way.

If you want to discuss the process of burnination itself, post a new question on Meta or visit the SOCVR chat room.

The tag keeps popping up. It currently has 3744 questions tagged.

Why suggest to burninate?

  • It is ambiguous -- is it referring to "Amazon Web Services (AWS)", or the "Amazon.com retail" site?
  • It is the name of a company, such as "Microsoft", which doesn't narrow-down the scope of the question
  • It does not add meaning to a Question

Frankly, the tag should probably be blacklisted, but that process starts with this burninate request.

CC BY-SA 4.0
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  • 6
    I agree this is a bad tag, but I'm not quite sold on whether the site would be better off after putting a bunch of work in to remove it. Is it a magnet for bad questions?
    – 4castle
    Mar 20, 2017 at 1:13
  • 58
    @4castle: The biggest problem I see with the tag's continued existence is that users conflate "amazon" as "Amazon Prime", "Alexa", "AWS", and other various services that Amazon happens to provide. Eliminating it will remove at least one frame of ambiguity.
    – Makoto
    Mar 20, 2017 at 2:32
  • 7
    @Makoto Agreed, I don't see any case where a question would refer to Amazon as a whole.
    – Mitch Talmadge
    Mar 20, 2017 at 7:24
  • 59
    Amazon is in the same ballpark as the Microsoft and Apple tags. Let's get rid of it.
    – rene
    Mar 20, 2017 at 11:27
  • 1
    @JohnRotenstein I assume that you mean wrt. this Meta. Why are you moving forward without actually following the burnination process, which explicitly states: "questions should not be edited to facilitate the bunination until the process reaches step 4: Cleanup & BURNINATION"? (re conversation begun here)
    – Makyen Mod
    Jun 6, 2018 at 2:53
  • Hasn't this tag been burned twice now?
    – Braiam
    Jul 4, 2019 at 18:42
  • @Braiam if it was I can't find it. The "cut down the amazon" threads were about sorting out Amazon-Foo vs AWS-Foo tags. Sorted by newest it goes back to '08, so it's about as a old as the site itself which argues against it having been burned before.
    – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight
    Feb 13 at 12:44
  • 15
    I spent half of my mod life just creating synonyms for the different amazon tags. :D
    – Bhargav Rao
    Feb 13 at 16:50
  • 6
    @BhargavRao I noticed. there's hardly a single page in the synonym list without your name on it :p
    – Zoe stands with Ukraine Mod
    Feb 13 at 17:07
  • 2
    Is it sensible to remove the amazon tag from all questions which also already have a tag for a more specific Amazon service? For example, questions with both amazon and amazon-web-services?
    – MC Emperor
    Feb 21 at 10:15
  • Would now be a good time to also remove the association of this tag with the AWS collective or would we just wait for it to be removed?
    – apokryfos
    Feb 22 at 7:07
  • 1
    @apokryfos collective association is only controlled by the company. Nothing we can do about it
    – Zoe stands with Ukraine Mod
    Feb 22 at 7:39

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Observations/Retag Guidance:

  • Questions about scraping amazon.com itself should use , as well as relevant technologies
  • Questions about selling, buying, or doing other user-level stuff on Amazon should be closed, not retagged. There's a solid chunk of non-programming questions in several categories as well.
  • Questions about various services by amazon should use the respective specific tags, such as:

Progress:

The tag is in the process of being burninated. You can help out by reviewing the questions with this tag, and...

  • editing questions to improve the question and remove the tag (retag-only edits are best left to users with full edit privileges; i.e. > 2k reputation),
  • flagging/voting to close questions that are duplicates/off-topic/unclear/too broad/opinion-based (users with < 3k reputation can help quite a bit by flagging questions for closure, which helps keep the Close Vote Review Queue full),
  • filtering for questions with this tag in the Close Vote Queue,
  • voting on questions with this tag,
  • voting to delete the questions with this tag (after they have been closed, and only if the entire Q&A contains nothing of value). However, keep in mind that at the end of the burnination process all closed questions containing this tag will be deleted semi-automatically. Thus, there's rarely a need to vote to delete these questions.

Here are some quick links to get you started:

Track the progress of burnination

Remember that burnination is a clean-up effort!

Salvage whatever possible by editing and re-tagging.

We don't want to destroy value, so salvaging a post should be your first priority. If a question can be saved, please edit it. Your edit should improve all problems with the question and remove the tag, possibly replacing it with another tag, as described above in "Observations/Retag Guidance". (Edits, specially re-tags, are best left to users with full edit privileges)

Unsalvageable questions should just be flagged/voted for closure. They don't need to be retagged.

If the question is not appropriate for this site, then don't worry about removing the tag—just flag/vote to close the question.

At the end of the burnination process, all questions which still have the tag should have been closed. These will be mass-deleted, which will remove the tag from the system automatically, with minimal disruption.

Ask for help if you need it.

If you have any questions about specific questions you come across, or the process in general, please feel free to leave a comment on this post. You can also drop into the SOCVR chat room for real-time advice and discussion.

CC BY-SA 4.0
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  • What about questions closed as duplicate like this one Programmatic access to Amazon Wishlist? (I'm sorry, I should asked before editing. I'm asking in case that more similar cases are found) This question originally had amazon and web-scraping it's from 2010 and the Amazon whish list have changed a lot... It has two answers one that points to a GitHub repo of code that use PHP and JavaScript, the other answer uses Google Apps Script and Google Sheets formulas.
    – Rubén
    Feb 16 at 1:40
  • 1
    @Rubén just web-scraping looks fine to me
    – Zoe stands with Ukraine Mod
    Feb 16 at 1:44
  • Why are we still accepting new answers with the amazon tag? Shouldn't it be blocked?
    – m7913d
    Feb 19 at 17:54
  • 2
    @m7913d Blacklisting tags is primarily reserved for tags that keep popping up after burnination. Also, due to overhead in the process (which mods don't have anything to do aside requesting it; it has to go through CMs, who have a sizable backlog of their own, who then escalate it to devs, who also have a backlog), the process of blacklisting, if we tried, would easily take a couple weeks in an optimistic scenario, or a month at least. As convenient as it would be to not have to deal with new questions, it just isn't feasible to blacklist the tag for a burnination that's this (relatively) small
    – Zoe stands with Ukraine Mod
    Feb 19 at 17:58

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