Our forum is 2 years old and its doing well. Engagement increased over time and we have started to get some organic traffic from search engines.
Our tags are not blocked in robots.txt file and most of our organic traffic comes to tag pages. But here the problem arises, the titles and meta descriptions of tags are like this “Topics tagged coffee-beans” and we want it to be something like this “Coffee Beans: Latest Discussions”, it fulfills the user intention in search keyword and they are more likely to visit our forum.
So, is there is any plan of the discourse team to add functionality to edit tags titles and description.
It’s not planned, as that would make tags overlap with categories. Tags are meant to be rather lightweight, and adding a bunch of metadata makes them … less lightweight.
@Vikas_Dangi On our forum we are using the Discourse Tag Sidebars theme component to good effect. With this theme component, you can create a topic describing your tag and it will appear in the sidebar when browsing that tag in the navigation.
We’re revisiting this – I now think we should have a description for tags here, but I have mixed feelings if we need both a “short” and “long” description. What do you think @neil@sam@eviltrout ?
The description could be managed from the Info button on the tag page, along with the existing controls for renaming, synonyms, and deletion.
I think it’s in line with the intention of tags being lightweight while acknowledging the fact that in order to keep a forum organized, people need to have the same definition of what a tag means and when to use it.
I think having a hidden long description could still be helpful to do things like explaining the criteria for how to use a tag. Who can add this tag? Does a parent tag need to be added as well to use this tag? Perhaps this would be particularly helpful for staff.
I use various sites from Stack Overflow and their tags have a short excerpt for display in locations where just some context is needed what the tag means, and a longer description for display on overview pages listing all topics on a tag. This works great IMHO for both usability and SEO.
A short description (max 255 chars) would be very helpful.
So you can provide a description for the tag and place a link to e. g. the tags homepage.
For Nextcloud we currently have 100 categories to apps for Nextcloud. Some of them have few entries and category list is huge. Therefor we like to use tags and use the description field to point users to the apps GitHub repo.
Awesome news, looking forward to having it so we won’t need to hack that functionality using theme components IMHO as a user, short description would be enough.
Agree. It is currently not displayed to the user, nor seems it to be crawled correctly. I would expect the description to display above the topics, just like on StackOverflow tags.
The descriptions are available by clicking the info button on the top right of the tag page (this appears as a wrench to edit the tag for admins)… for example, on official
We do have a theme component that showcases the tag descriptions in banners: Tag Banners
I’m not sure if this is something we will want to do for performance reasons… though @tgxworld or @kris.kotlarek might have a better idea of whether or not it’s possible.
The difference is that categories are much smaller in number and admin-created… we do not expect a site to have 1000 categories, and if one did they’d hit performance issues because of how much data is serialized for each category (descriptions, colors, a bunch of settings, etc). Tags on the other hand may be user created, and we expect the possibility of thousands on a site… so we’re usually only including their name and ID in most places.
IMHO as a user, short description would be enough.
