number of tags may be much more than 10-15 in a forum, and I think hiding less irrelevant choices such as staff-tags for users would be a point for users.
at least in our case, we use staff-tags for topics related to staffs. as a result it’s not necessary to show this kind of sorting to users in the tag-page, as well as tag-drop down filter. I’m not sure how others use the staff tags?
isn’t it better, not to show the staff tags in the tag-page as well as tag-filter to non-admins?
What I would like to add is “hidden tags”, tags that are only available to staff and invisible to non-staff.
At that point we will clearly hide “hidden tags” there.
yes, hidden is clear then; and I assume this means no, this feature is not needed, since the existence of both hidden and staff together is too many.
but what’s the use case of staff tag, how do people use it in order to have better sorting system among users and staffs?
Classic use case is the planned tag, this is a tag for stuff we are planning, we do not want the general forum users to be able to tag stuff as planned, but we do want them to know what is planned.
How is this different from what the staff tags SiteSetting does? It claims to be “A list of tags that can only be applied by staff members”.
“A list of tags that can only be applied by staff members” VS
“A list of tags that can only be SEEN by staff members”
Very different.
Now that there is a feature enabling staff to add tags to personal messages, it would be great to see this “hidden tags” feature implemented.
We got to finish up PM tagging first, we tried normalizing the feature so it is reusable with private tags but it is not easy.
that makes sense. thanks! happy to help with testing the PM tagging as it’s something I am super eager to use in my community. these are related - having admin tags ‘leaking’ outside PMs is not great, so providing more ways to limit access to them would be helpful.
Oh that is certainly going to be fixed… the intention here is for all tags on messages to be a staff only thing for now. This means it leaks out nowhere, not on the tags page for anon, not in the tag listing when you add a new tag.
It is not a trivial change but we need it. cc @techAPJ
So do we want PM tags to be showing up in meta.discourse.org/tags at all or should there be a dedicated page for these separate tags?
I’ve been spending some time on tags in the last few days and it seems to me the best solution would be to add a “this is a staff tag group” option to the tag group admin. Then only display staff tags to staff everywhere. That way staff can use all the tags everywhere, but not leak internally used tags to non-staff.
Even more useful would be a “tag group security” tab similar to categories, which would make it possible to have discourse group specific tags. We have a whole section of private categories in our community that is only for staff of my 100+ organization and the managers of that section often want to use tags that make no sense for the public categories but that are very useful for them. We also have team wikis and such that would benefit from having their own tags which also don’t make sense for the world to see. But that would open an even bigger can of worms, I am sure. 
Below are example “admin tag groups” I am considering for my site to use it as a support ticket system. It would be beyond lovely to be able to use them for both topics and messages, but not allow anyone to see them except staff.
To be clear: I do think the tags used in PMs should show up in /tags because that is the interface staff use for managing tags as well as providing access to them all in one place. But I don’t think tagged messages should be included in /tags and there should be a separate way via messages to access tagged messages. The simplest MVP might be a /messages/tags page but maybe someone can think of a better idea to enable staff to use tags to find their way around messages and handle them on a timely basis.
All of that said, I would be most comfortable if I could suppress the /tags page from non-staff altogether until this is sorted out, as I suggested elsewhere.
Adding to the worm can — we’d need to be able to distinguish a private tag from a public tag in the interface because someone could in theory create a public “urgent” tag and a private “urgent” tag. Unless the staff tags are completely banned from public use (but that seems like it could be annoying?).
That’s a good point - thanks. I agree it would be annoying to complete ban staff tags from public use.
This problem could be solved I am sure. Some ideas:
I think we do the easiest thing… if tag count on that page is 0 then don’t show tag, same goes for everywhere, just hide tags with count 0.
Since it is only counting topics there and not messages, the count should be 0.
I don’t think we should support tags that are both public and private, just pick one.
