So this is very possible to most silly question…but I cannot figure out how to “tag” a post. I see where you would flag a post and where you would bookmark a post, but I don’t see where/how you would go about tagging a certain post to a certain subject.
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Are you asking for your own site or here on Meta?
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Sorry, yes, for our own site. Since my posts, I figured out that I need
“activate” this feature in settings. So that much is now clear. Now my
question is about keeping “similar” tags straight and best practices around
how to associate with categories. Anything along these lines will be
helpful.
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No worries. What you are asking is a very open-ended question. Tags are used for different purposes on different sites, so more details would be useful. On my primary site (Stonehearth), tag use is restricted to staff only, and we use them to help track bug reports. For example, if a bug is reported from the alpha 12 develop 3456 build regarding the pathfinder, we apply the a12dev3456 tag and the pathfinding tag. The tags are really only useful for site staff in our case, so this isn’t perhaps the best example. I know other sites use tags as a “second” sub-category level. I believe there is a car forum hosted by Discourse, and I think they have categories by car type, with sub-categories for the manufacturer. Then they use tags for specific care models.
If you can share some details about what your site is and what you are looking to use tags to accomplish I can try and answer much more specifically.
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Very helpful. YES, we would be the second. We are looking to use tags
instead of sub-categories. In fact, we are a forum of electric vehicles. So
keeping track of brands would be helpful by using tags. We would also like
to consider using tags to sort content by “sector” or “product”…say a
tag for “charging systems” and another for “batteries”…other tag names
might be “leaf” as in the Nissan Leaf…
So would I go in and set these up somewhere so that our users can select
these from a drop down menu whenever they are posting new content?
You could, or you could let your trusted users do so. Tags are completely dynamic. They only exist when they are in use somewhere. Delete all the topics with a specific tag, that tag ceases to exist. There are two important tag settings (besides turning it on 
): minimum trust to min trust to create tag and min trust level to tag topics. You have 2 (primary) ways to go about this. One way would be to create a bunch of topics (either starter topics or hidden topics) and use all the tags you want. Then, users with a sufficient trust level can see those tags in a dropdown when creating a topic. Alternatively, if you have enough trusted users, let them create tags as they see fit. Once created, others (with sufficient trust) can use them.
Whichever method you choose, you can easily rename tags later if needed from the your.site/tags page. If you end up with 2 similar tags (like battery and batteries) you can rename one to the other and they will be “merged”.
Hope this is helpful, let me know if you have more questions!
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VERY HELPFUL. I am in. thank you .
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I have the same question and this discussion doesn’t answer it. I know how to tag a topic, now how do I tag a post?
If that’s not possible, is there another mechanism that works at the post level? Bookmarks work at the topic level. Flags work at the post level, but serve a special purpose.
My application is that I would like staff to tag posts of interest, then I would find those posts using the API and include them as highlights in an group email.
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It is not possible to “tag” posts, at least in the Discourse usage of the word tag. Bookmarks work at the post level, assuming your staff don’t use bookmarks for other purposes, that’d be a good way to mark posts.
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We’re thinking about developing a plugin that would make this possible. Being able to tag posts would greatly improve two very different applications of Discourse that I’m working on.
- Do you know if someone else has done this already?
- Do you see any obstacles that would make such a feature difficult to implement?
I do not.
I’m not an engineer, so I’m not the best person to ask this. In my mind how many obstacles you hit are related to how “full-featured” you make this plugin.
For example, will these posts tags be searchable? That’s another system you need to integrate into.
Will they be visible on the /tags page? Another system.
How will users be able to see all posts with a tag? Currently the tag view is a topic list, not a post list (https://meta.discourse.org/tags/faq-material).
etc.
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Got it. We’d need to think about that.
These things are less importance to the implementations we’re thinking about. As long as we could set a tag for a post through the API, and return a list of posts with one or more tags through the API, that would be enough.
We might just go ahead and do this then. But if anyone reads this who has a reason for why this would be a bad idea, I’d love to know.
This would be a great feature to allow users to find certain kinds of posts within a topic (e…g, a post containing a link to an external resource)
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Wouldn’t work for these applications. In both cases we are using tags as secondary metadata, added automatically or manually by administrators.
Sure it would. Edit the posts, add the “magic words”, then search for them.
That would however mean adding a mysterious tag like “SKK-17363” or “Ethno-Cat2-ResearchQuestion” to every post we want to tag, confusing both the authors of the post and the users reading it. And since we read post content from the Discourse API and display it in other contexts based on those tags, having obscure text tags show up is even less appealing.
The idea of hashtags has been raised a few times before:
I think the earliest instance was:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/proposal-for-a-hash-tagging-feature/6304
There are a few others like:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/trigger-search-onclick-hashtags/75666
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There has been recent discussion about having “the word” in a comment
https://meta.discourse.org/t/set-post-custom-field-when-composing/78642
The post_custom_fields table is there. If a JSON string was needed I think a plugin could be worked up.
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/app/models/post_custom_field.rb
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@hugi did you end up developing this plugin? I’m also looking to tag posts (for metadata purposes through the API)