A roadmap for Tags?

What kind of improvements do you plan for tags?

I would love to see:

  • Custom Colors for individual tags
    Targeting individual tags via CSS works, but it feels like a hack which can easily be broken after an update a tag name change (see the current CSS below).
    a.tag-[tag name].discourse-tag.box {background: #[color code];}
    We can already choose colors for categories, so it would be great to have the same option for tags.

  • Personal and Public Tags
    How about letting everybody create a personal tag, visible only to this single member?
    “Settings/min trust to create tag” would apply to public tags only.
    Personal tags would effectively act as a more elaborate bookmarking system. Directly available from any topic list.

  • Auto Tags for [hot topic], [wiki], [solved], [poll], [closed], [bookmarked] etc.
    These would be tags applied automatically to posts meeting certain conditions, like a topic with over 100 replies in 10 days, or a topic with a wiki. Auto tags could be a faster way to search for specific types of topic, rather than building an advanced search query. Each auto tag would need an option to be turned off. Auto tags could reduce the use or eliminate topic icons.

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For 2.0 the roadmap (which is in the releases category, so you can read it any time you like) for tags was:

  • allow tagging PMs
  • add a setting to make tags mandatory per category

Both of those are done.

It really depends heavily on what our paying customers are asking us for. If you’d like weight in those decisions, you know what to do :wink:

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Fair enough @codinghorror. Anyway, I hope you don’t mind self-hosted members posting feature ideas?

Minor addendum.

We now have private tag support thanks to @neil

Also we are going to move the “staff only” tag setting into tag groups to clean stuff up.

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What is the ‘private’ tag Sam?


I think tags could be huge, and a way to set Discourse apart from other forum platforms :slight_smile: as far as I know, tags have not been done ‘right’ on any other platform yet.

Not sure how keen you are on tags (I thought quite a bit since it’s become part of core) but if it’s something you want to explore more, could you perhaps create a category, tag or thread for suggestions and discussions around them? I’ve posted quite a few already but I have loads of other ideas which I think could make tags amazing on DC :smiley:

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Definitely not. We’re open to ideas from everyone, especially if they’ll improve Discourse for everyone – we just prioritise those from customers.

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I can attest to that - the Discourse team are smart enough to recognise a good idea when they see one - all you need is for your suggestion and argument to be highly compelling …so that they simply cannot refuse :smile:

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What I meant was a personal tag, visible only to a single user – which would allow a more elaborate bookmarking system. (I edited my original post to make it clear)

Yeah this has been discussed before, not on any roadmap, plenty of other fish to fry.

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There’s a very straight forward plugin proposal for this that you can follow here:

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I was trying to make a larger point, that Discourse has two competing markup systems on the topic level: tags and icons (:lock: :white_check_mark: etc.). Both are similar in what they do and one could easily be replaced by the other.
IMO, it would be cleaner if icons were restricted to marking individual posts, while tags, anything related to topics. It would provide a clear functional distinction. I’m not sure this is something a plugin could address.

That’s a separate discussion from what you started here, so please go ahead and start a new ux discussion complete with mockups if you’d like to take this further.

@sam,
This is great and would be very helpful to ‘non-staff’ groups if it could be extended to allow use/visibility by either a specific group (such as a hidden/secret) or by TL?
This would be very useful within external support groups (volunteers etc) when wishing to add quantification to user discussions, without having it being visible except to Staff and users within that specified group
Thanks,
Ben