Frag the "lag" tag

Question

The lag tag (on 30 questions) seems awful. In common parlance "lag" is a catch-all term for poor performance; attributable to myriad things. Many of the questions it's on have a network bent, but several seem to be just about a local slowdown (graphics card/CPU overload, slow input)

(Right now ping is a synonym of lag, which in retrospect is probably a bad/fruitless idea)

Should we axe the tag and retag some of the questions with perhaps networking (or similar) or technical-issues/graphics-card/performance (look, more catch-all tags :\)

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Incorporating badp's suggestion:

1. remove synonym from ping to lag
2. create synonym from ping to latency
3. rename lag to latency
4. create synonym from lag to technical-issues (the new dumpster)
   • Maybe add to the technical-issues tag wiki summary something like:

     If this is about a network related problem, consider using latency or networking, or for poor machine performance, performance

5. manually go through latency questions and retag the non-network related ones (8-10 of 30) to performance or technical-issues as appropriate.

Answer 1

I would think that most networking issues should probably go to Super User, but I'm all for replacing the lag tag with it when it's definitely a networking issue. I agree that ping and lag aren't helpful — a high ping is a symptom, not a problem, and not helpful as a tag.

technical-issues seems too broad. I suppose the question is whether people often use [game-name] [technical-issues] to search for problems they have. performance is the same.

graphics-card has about 30% questions closed, not a good indicator, and I don't think it's a useful tag. Shopping questions and comparisons are two common question types in that tag. Some need more specific tags, like vsync or something. We have far too many "What should I consider?" questions that should be closed in favor of a single, canonical one. I've voted to close a bunch.

Answer 2

Yes, lagis misused. No, I don't think lagshould go away. Questions likes this or this or this are fine and their tagging is just right.

So here's a counterproposal:

1. I mass-retag lag to the more technical and less-known term latency without creating an automatic redirection from lag to latency. This kills lag and prevents automatic misuse of latency. I also kill the synonym from ping to lag.
2. We go through all of these questions and remove latency from questions that just ask about performance issues in general.

I'm open to creating, after the fact, a synonym from pingand lag to technical-issues or performance, given that 'lag' is just that generic. Lag's not necessarily about networking: there's input lag and display lag and whatnot. My hard drive makes me lag all the time in TF2. >:(

Answer 3

lag has long-since been removed, and today I removed the ping synonym which was still in place. Moving forward:

• For general questions about Networks, use networking
• For performance related questions, use performance