I don’t know if this can be counted as a real bug, but…
When I click Edit Synonyms I’ll get this:
What is that broken image next to trashcan icon, and should it do something else than deleting that synonym/redirection? Or is it just a glitch related to trashcan?
That’s not a missing image. It’s to unlink the synonym and convert it to a normal tag that won’t be associated with any topics until someone uses it again.
That sounds much more logical than breaked icon without any purpose 
Thanks!
Yeah something about this UX can certainly be improved @Designers
Unlinking and trashing are really smart functions. Those helped my work big time — actually I’ve never seen such solution anywhere earlier. Of course trashcan is familiar, but what it does in that context was new to me. Because those were new I tried understand things thrue another world, and that didn’t lead anywhere. Classical end user error we could say 
And that was the issue: there is no inbuild short helps (and I didn’t use right search terms here).
That ”missing image” came from oneboxes that can’t create preview and images. For me that icon has always been sign of missing image and I never connected that to links. And we are back to end users and theirs behaviour.
But there is one UI you could improve when all more important things have been done. Using those two icons with mouse it just trivial, but iPad (and all others than desktops) — there could be a little bit more empty space. It is really easy miss unlink and hit trashcan instead.
The whole mechanics here are wildly confusing.
Essentially we have 2 options here:
I think this is just too complicated to explain to people. No harm really just leaving “remove synonym” and junking the other function which is super hard to explain.
People can still create tags again after they delete the synonym, so nothing really lost? Am I missing something here @neil ?
A synonym is already a tag. Where would promoting happend, or am I just confused now?
I actually like style of Discourse. It was just something new to me, but it was really easy to understand — after someone told me what is what. Plus editing tags is job of moderators/admin so things can be a little bit… confusing, as long things are logical too
I don’t know if this is matter of language, because in finnish synonyms are much more widely used than in english. So for me understanding basic idea of synomys is quite native aspect. Or something.
I made huge mistake in the beginning. My tagging system was way too complicated and the main error didn’t come from tags per se and not because of synonyms but I didn’t used advanced search.
My forum is really general one, but its backround lies on dog related topics, mostly food, nutrition etc. But we are doing horses, cat etc too. And humans — every day things, and nutrition too, plus more demanding topics — training, racing, sickness…
Firstly I did same as everyone. I had a category and sub-categories for everything. That was too limiting because topics where never that spesific. Now I’m using only half dozen main categories, and no subs. And I started to use tags. I had… a lot of tags.
Let’s talk about e.g. proteins. Using, benefits, risk factors and so on depends individually need, spiecies etc. So I had tags like
You know what direction that leads to: a big forum of confusion. But I was so sure I need all those, bacause if you are a human who is training hard you will need different topics than a dog owner who’s pet is eating high protein dryfood.
Well, advanced search solved out that (I have to do a feature request… we need some && and || logic there but at least possibility to limit search to more than one category).
But I had still plenty of tags in use. And now we are in the low level use of tag synonyms and deletion.
I made a tag named protein. Every other :protein tags were synonyms for thar. Bum! All topics got *:protein tags replaced by plain protein tag. But old tags were showing in search results, so only I did was trashing all synonyms. That’s it.
Not as sexy as doing things usein CSV, API or what ever, but because I had to review all tags anyway manual labor wasn’t issue for me.
Now I have only relevant tags in use. But… synonyms. Loosing weight — we had at least three different words for that and must be in use when doing searches even those aren’t used in text. Well, this is 101 use of tags and easily done using tag synonyms.
All I’m hoping is to get easy way to create tags when doing synonyms.
I’m repeating myself — but as an adminlevel end user the most important missing thing was documentation, manuals.
I’m totally sure you guys can imagine more efficient and creative way to manage and use tags, but now I’m quite satisfied.
And supraisly — my users who still think composer and markdown are eches from ancien times learned right away using tags and advanced searches.
(Disclaimer: I have awful summer flu — ordinary, not the big C — so it is guarenteed there is more bad english and typos as usually…)
