Tagging vs. Categories

My big issue with free-form tagging is that it doesn't encourage the re-use of common tags. I have to flip back to the index page to see what the "major" tags are or else I run the likelihood of marooning it in some tag I made up by accident. E.g.: Was that "feature-requests", "feature-request" or "requested-features"?

If you rely on memory, it's going to make the system fragment fast.

Then, of course, you have the guys who will tag all their discussions "boner" which puts them at that level of annoying just below what's ban-worthy. I had to turn off tagging after 2 weeks on my site after I got tired of deleting tags every night, and I probably have one of the best-behaved forums on the Internet.

Mark

I put autocomplete in there in the hopes that it would encourage choosing of existing tags - I also put the help in there for the same reason.

I also considered putting quick-links to popular (or "recommended") tags below the tag box.

I think it's going to take some administration, for sure. But I think over the long-haul it will prove to be a winner. Either way, I want to guinea-pig all of our plugins on this forum before wide release. This is one of the first ones :)

Lincoln

Autocomplete won't cut it from my perspective. People don't make good tags left to their own devices. Even my staff (who've been writing for us for years) make bad / redundant tags frequently, and Wordpress has auto-complete too. It requires a mental model of what makes sense in the context of the site that most casual users lack.

Already we have redundancies:
- themes, theme, template
- performance, speedup
- locales, language, translation

And uselessly ambiguous ones like "quote" and "field." No one will ever say "You know, I'd like to read all the post about 'quote' today." :)

Tagging is an interesting way of collecting meta data, but leaving it completely open to users AND using it as primary nav is a bad mix.

Lincoln

Also, If I go to edit a discussion, it doesn't say what tags it currently has. Not only can't I tell if it's tagged correctly, I can't remove a bad one.

Lincoln

PS: I don't mean to sound like a jerk. I like your experiments even when I don't. :)

TiGR

Please, bring back categories, at least as drop-down menu...

Geert

One thing I'd like to be able to do in the admin is to merge multiple tags into one. Currently changing a tag to an existing one results in an error: "The specified tag name is already in use."

If you took that one step further, you could maybe create some "automerge" functionality. For example, whenever a user enters the tag "locales" or "translation", it automatically gets changed to "languages". Just an idea. I think it would help to take the pain out of tag management.

Dykam

I think @Geert is having two very good ideas, which combined may be a proper solution.

If it will be possible to easily plug in pre-made lists of automerge words, like with/next to the language file, everything would be cool.

Todd

@TiGR, categories still exists. Tagging is just a plugin. We will also be removing the restrictions on tag names and allowing unicode characters. It will take a bit of a delicate touch is all.

@Geert, @Dykam. Certainly having better tag admin options is a good idea. I would like to be able to specify that one tag is an alias for another tag so when I consolidate things they will always remain consolidated, even with new tags.

TiGR

@Todd, good to hear. I meant that I asked to bring back categories to VF.org. It was handy to jump to any category from sidebar. But now popular tags are being displayed only on main dicussions page. So, if I want to go somewhere, I have to visit one unnecessary page.

That's why I asked you to birng back categories. And yes, I do understand that tags are just plugin.

Lincoln

Really cool post about how Stack Overflow is compensating for tag synonyms: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/tag-folksonomy-and-tag-synonyms/

melatonin

Tagging should not necessarily adhere to a strict model anyway. It kind of defeats the point, IMHO.