We are using Discourse internally to facilitate communication between developers, QA and project managers. We use categories to separate out discussions into the respective large projects or teams we have. We use tags to signify which JIRA ticket the topic/question is related to. It’s super useful, for us at least, to go to /tags/{tag_name} to see all the discussion happening on a particular issue. But, we’ve found that tags that don’t exist show a view “This page does not exist…” We think it would be a useful feature to show a “Be the first to post…” type view instead so that tags URL can be more portable to those who want to just focus on discussion in a particular tag.
AI-generated summary
A user, cdrobison, has requested a feature where empty tag pages display a “Be the first to post…” message instead of “This page does not exist…” to make tag URLs more portable. However, HAWK and codinghorror raised concerns about potential issues with misspellings and infinite pages in Google’s index. cdrobison noted that this isn’t a concern for their internal use behind a firewall. ChrisBeach suggested a compromise: showing an empty tag page with an HTTP status 404, which cdrobison agreed could accomplish their goal while preventing the issues raised.
1 curtida
I’d be a bit concerned that you’d end up with a whole lot of posts against tags that were simple misspellings…
4 curtidas
This would also create infinite pages in Google’s index, which is also a big problem. Every single combination of characters that could be imagined already “exists” as a tag page.
1 curtida
That’s understandable. We don’t care because we are behind a firewall.
Could we show an empty tag page with HTTP status 404?
1 curtida
Seems like that could accomplish what we are looking for while preventing the issue Jeff brought up.