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Proposal: Consumer Issues and Protection

It seems like all the example questions are about shopping by some interpretation. Can we specify and say "no shopping questions about getting the best price, but just avoiding rip offs and scams"?

Also, should the site define rip-offs vs scams?

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  • I've posted an example question of "is it worth it to buy this warranty" because a) someone is going to post it b) it sounds related to warranty interpretation c) some warranties are related to scams/ripoffs. It's been dinged as "buying advice". I can respect that; now how do we differentiate between warranty/scam/ripoff questions and "buying advice"?
    – user10948
    May 22, 2012 at 17:04

2 Answers 2

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The "no shopping" tag is there to ward off recommendations. That is, asking about which product is better than another and so forth.

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The concept of "shopping questions" (and the problems with it) are described in this blog post: Q&A is Hard, Let's Go Shopping!.

In a nutshell, the issue isn't "questions which somehow relate to the skill of shopping wisely," but rather to questions whose formula is, "I want to do X, what product should I buy?", or "What's better - product A or product B?". These are generally seen as poor questions, because even a good answer is only good for a very specific situation, and often becomes obsolete very quickly as new products come out.

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  • What if the reason product A quickly becomes obsolete is because product A.2 is designed by the same developer/company. Isn't that something to be considered when buying product A or B? Is this a bad thing? Should consumers be aware of this?
    – E1Suave
    May 23, 2012 at 22:01
  • @E1Suave: That's still difficult to incorporate into an answer, because it's tough to tell (at the moment) whether A.2 will be better than B.2 (or as cost-efficient, or as well-designed, or whatever). Effort and thoroughness are always appreciated, but the effort needed to keep a shopping question current doesn't seem justified by the question's value.
    – Ziv
    May 24, 2012 at 3:29

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