Admin guide to tags in Discourse

:bookmark: This guide explains how Discourse tags work, how to configure tag settings, and how to manage tags across your site.

:person_raising_hand: Required user level: Administrator

Managing tags in Discourse

Tags in Discourse provide a powerful way to organize and filter content beyond categories. This guide covers everything administrators need to know about configuring and managing tags.

Summary

  • Configure tag settings in your admin panel
  • Create, manage, and bulk modify tags
  • Set up automatic tagging
  • Use tag groups to organize related tags

Configuring tag settings

Tag settings can be found in your admin panel under the “Tags” section of your site settings.

Tagging is enabled by default. To disable tags, uncheck the tagging_enabled setting.

Key tag settings include:

  • Maximum tags per topic
  • Maximum tag length
  • Minimum trust level required to create tags
  • Minimum trust level required to tag topics
  • Maximum tag search results
  • Tag sorting options

Creating and applying tags

Tags are created upon first usage. When composing or editing a topic, a user with tag creation privileges will see a tag chooser next to the category chooser.

Tags can also be adjusted when quick editing a topic title:

:information_source: Categories, depending on their settings, can optionally limit which tags may be applied to topics in that category.

Filtering topics by tags

You can find the full list of tags on the /tags page on your site, along with a count of how often each tag has been used. Selecting a tag will present a list of topics that have had the tag applied.

:information_source: To filter topics by more than one tag at the same time, use the following URL syntax:
https://discourse.example.com/tags/intersection/TAG1/TAG2

Managing individual tags

To manage a specific tag:

  1. Go to the /tags page on your site
  2. Select the tag you would like to manage
  3. Select the wrench icon button to reveal options to rename, delete, and manage synonyms

Bulk managing tags

To modify tags across multiple topics at once:

  1. Visit any topic list filtered by tag
  2. Press the list icon bulk-select button at the top left of the topic list
  3. Manually select topics or use the “Select All” option
  4. Use the wrench icon admin button that appears at the top-right of the topic list to open the Bulk Actions modal
  5. Choose from three tag options:
    • Replace Tags - replace all existing tags with new ones
    • Append Tags - add new tags while keeping existing tags
    • Remove Tags - remove all existing tags

Advanced tag administration

Go to the /tags page and look for the tag admin button in the upper-right corner:

From here you can:

  • Manage tag groups
  • Upload tags in bulk
  • Delete unused tags

Auto-tagging topics with watched words

The watched words feature can automatically tag topics based on specified words appearing in the content.

To set this up:

  1. Navigate to /admin/customize/watched_words/action/tag
  2. Add words or phrases that should trigger specific tags

:warning: This feature will not apply tags retroactively to existing topics.

Important considerations

  • Tags apply to topics, not to individual posts within topics
  • When users type something like #tagname in a post, they are creating a link to that tag, not applying the tag to their post
  • Tag groups can be used to restrict which groups of users can use specific tags

Related Topics

Last edited by @jessii 2025-05-21T22:45:48Z

Check documentPerform check on document:
34 Likes

3 posts were split to a new topic: How do I allow someone to create tags?

What I want to do is have tags that can be used across categories and can be added within a reply under a topic that does not have that tag set as an optional in it.

Is there a way to utilize tags in a reply under a topic that does not have the tag as an optional tag in the header?
So I have a topic with Phoenix as an optional tag and that’s the topic that I created that tag in.
I would like to be able to utilize #Phoenix under other topics in other categories and be able to click on the tag within a reply and have it give the results with all of the other replies and posts that have that tag (#phoenix) in it, without it having to be in every topic header. I would also like to be able to do the same thing with (#issue, #Problem-Solved, etc…)

here is the topic that I created the tag in the header.

here are a couple posts/replies that I have tagged with Phoenix that I would expect to be in the results for that tag. They are not showing up, only the topic with the optional tag Phoenix added to it is showing.



here is the results when I click on the tag in one of the replies from a different topic that has the tag Phoenix in it. It is my expectation that any post either a topic or a reply that has the tag Phoenix in it should show up in this list. But it’s only showing posts that are a topic with the Phoenix as an optional tag within that topic header.

Here are the results when I do a word search for Phoenix on the site.


Support Bug

1 Like

Have you read this post

2 Likes

Tags are for topics, not for posts. I agree it would be nice to tag posts too, but that can lead to awful mess really fast. And increases moderation a lot.

When you do something like tags you are linking that tag, not tagging. Same thing with categories when Feature doesn’t re-categorized, but is linking.

2 Likes

thanks for the link. I will check it out and see if this will solve our issue.
Cheers!

1 Like

To me the labels on the Tag Group restrictions are not really clear.
What means can only ve used by a certain group? Does using means adding removing or also clicking on them to get the list of tagged topics. If that is possible than maybe replacing “used” with “edited” or explicitly “added/removed” would be helpful

1 Like

For the Automatically tag topics if the first post contains a specific word; is it somehow possible to set some words to only check the Title?

If not, could this functionality be added?

1 Like