Has anyone thought of any clever ideas on how to use the tags?
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@Erlend-Sogge-Heggen said:
I always thought tags' potential for increasing discovery of new things is severely under-utilised.
The WordPress support forum uses tags to great effect, though there's certainly room for improvement. See this post for the Contact Form 7 plugin for instance.
Thanks to its (hidden) contact-form-7 tag, it spices up the topic with two key additions:
- A prominent plugin title
- A widget with key links:
- Plugin page
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Support Threads
- Reviews
Another example I like is news on IndieDB. Scroll down and you'll see there are boxes for Related Games/Engines/Groups. Tags would be good for this sort of thing.
A plugin idea to utilize the tags would be then to show X related posts, topics using the tags.
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Another thing about tags is that I feel they should either denote something uniquely identifying about the thread they're applied to, or not be used at all. Take this one for instance:
With one exception, all of these tags are better covered by a search. Say you're looking for a plugin with some kind of YouTube functionality. Sure you can get a decent overview with the
youtubetag, but you won't trust that to be an exhaustive list, because you can't trust people to have tagged their threads appropriately (a common issue for WordPress plugins for instance). So you search.As soon as you go past 1-2 tags it's also very noisy (especially in combination with the Topic Badges, which I'll make a separate comment on)
The only tag I find worthwhile is
imgshow, and that's assuming it would be unique to this plugin. This is where hierarchical tags (think Google Code issue tracker) can be very useful, because you could make rules for special tag groups, e.g.:If I create the first instance of the
plugin:imgshowtag, I am now the owner of this tag. I will get a notification of all new threads using this tag, and I will have moderation rights over every thread that uses this tag. -
@Erlend-Sogge-Heggen
That's the way tags work. Some use them a lot, some avoid them like the plague.
There's no correct way to use them. Look at twitter, instagram, facebook.
But you can't deny that they're powerful tool for discussion, when implemented properly in a social platform.
It's not up to the admin to force people to use them in a certain way. Every community should figure out how to use them on their own. -
@Giorgio-Chiodi said:
There's no correct way to use them.
That's where I think forums ought to be more opinionated. With some exceptions in special categories, I wouldn't want to allow more than 2-3 tags per thread.
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@Erlend-Sogge-Heggen depends on the forum. I use 5 and sometimes struggle with that. As my board is music based, I get a lot of mixes posted, so that's [mix], then the genre, so [dnb] then the name of the actual dj, so that's now 3, where they performed, makes it 4, then the last one is an optional one where they can include whatever they like.
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@a_5mith Oh absolutely. Yours is a very good example of explicit use of tags. Used in this manner, it wouldn't be hard to establish a good tagging norm.
I just want to train users to choose their tags very carefully. Especially if you can choose to be notified by certain tags, it'd be important to limit their use. So when a bewildered user stops by the general support forum, they have to carefully choose 2 tags out of pre-existing ones (StackOverflow style) to get the right people's attention.
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The current tags implementation is really barebones, we would probably expand on it post 0.5.0. Stuff like ignore/follow tags restrict tag creation to certain reputation levels/groups etc.
Right now you can only limit number of tags per topic and their length through the ACP.
Eventually I want to add a tags page in the ACP where you can delete or create new tags and customize them(colors and icons)
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@Giorgio-Chiodi said:
@trevor let's trash categories and only use tags.
Also, let's thrash THREADS and only use tags.
Like Twitter.Of course, you would have to introduce a "reply to" system like twitter is doing, so that you are able to follow a conversation.
Lets trash everything and just pass around a notepad.
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@Scuzz said:
I was thinking of an auto-tweet plugin that would tweet newly created topics and use the tags of the topic for hashtags.
That'd be neat. Could also be used on the forums itself as a sort of feed thing in a timeline format. I posted somewhere else about this when talking about user notifications when it comes to following people, could be integrated with this idea for sure.
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