How do you avoid having your mods create multiple tags?

Community
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Hi,

I’d love your advice as site owners:

For those who have lots of mods on their site - how do you avoid from having many duplicated tags, created by your mods, for different categories?

We thought about managing them through a sheet, having a default prefix for the name.
Any other advice?

Thanks!

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Duplicated tags… what do you mean by this?

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I think @Anat_Srulovitch means something similar to what we suffer.

  • dji-mini-3
  • dji-mini3
  • djimini3
  • dji-mini-3-pro
  • dji-m3p
  • dji-m3pro

These are all duplicate tags :pensive:

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Oh, I see now. I took that too literally.

At my circles we fix those everytime (in the meaning… really often) when such happends and my moderators know power of synonyms. It helps a bit, but… basically it is matter of rules.

My solution as an admin is give slack and fixing manually afterward if/when it is needed. It is better they are using tags than not at all.

But that is a bit difficult situation if a forum is massive and active too.

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Exactly :slight_smile:

We will soon be onboarding new mods and plan to ask them to create tags for their topics.
I just know we’ll get lots of these kind of very similar, duplicated tags and am trying to create clear guidelines to avoid it, so thought I’d hear from people who have already experienced this.

I don’t love the option of tracking these through an external sheet - asking mods to first review the sheet to make sure there isn’t an existing tag for what they’re looking for is very inconvenient.

Does anyone here have a more streamlined solution?

Thanks!

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Id probably go for a basic approach first of just asking them to check if a similar tag exists before creating a new one. Although this can be a bit impractical if there are many many tags.

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FWIW, to keep an eye on them/tidy them up you can use the /tags page and sort by name. From there you can then zip to the topics with the similar tags and use the bulk tool to append the proper one, and then delete the extra tag from the tag wrench options to remove it.

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I think that separating creating tags and adding them to a topic is what is required. This might also help solve the problem of not forcing admins/mods to follow site-imposed category-tag rules.

But don’t they see the existing tags when they go to enter them? The UX does attempt to recommend them, but it also allows you to create them willy-nilly.

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Thank you for the helpful tips!
These are exactly what I hoped to learn from you :slight_smile:

I’ll probably add the following to our guidelines for mods:

  1. Always create new tags from the Tags management page, rather than from the Topic’s tag creator:
  2. Search through the Tags page (CMD+F) to see if the tag you’d like to create already exists
  3. Use a prefix for your domain [example here]
  • Note that staff runs a monthly cleanup where we merge duplicate tags

THANKS FOR YOUR HELP :slight_smile:

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It can also be good to use your staff category or a dedicated private category for site setup.

You could have a topic detailing categories and tags for each category listed. This also gives your staff a place for feedback on setup regarding tags etc…

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