It's Time We Talked About Tags

[HAWK]

Originally published at: It’s Time We Talked About Tags | Blog

Consider the typical sections of a daily newspaper: Arts, Sports, Business, Travel, Local, and World. Any given article belongs to just one of those sections, and the content in each section is quite different, such that some people, for example, may only ever read the Sports or Business sections. These are what we call categories.…

[AstonJ]

Great work! I love tags, and I’d just like to repeat some of my suggestions:

• Ability to require a tag per section (as stated in the blog this is coming!)
• Ability to add info per tag, such as a short description and a link (this would show on mouse over, as well as on the tag view page)

These would be nice to have:

• A redesigned tags homepage (currently very unappealing, would like to see it more useful/informative like the categories homepage)
• Ability to give tags different colours (not as important but could be nice for some communities)

With this in place I can see tags becoming a huge part of how people use Discourse

[scombs (Steve Combs)]

I want to add this feature request to the tag wishlist.

Topic auto tagging

Would like to see option on the Category>Edit>Tags screen for: Default tags for this category below the current options: [image] This would also help for topics posted via mobile since adding tags is not supported. My use case is adding an “events” tag so that topics from different event subcategories across the site can get aggregated to one calendar.

[Flow (Florian Schmaus)]

Great to see that tags now gain more attention. Please also consider adding support for tag aliases.

[alexs (Alex Sherwood)]

• Ability to add info per tag, such as a short description and a link (this would show on mouse over, as well as on the tag view page)

+1 this - the company I work for is a stockbroker and we collect requests from users for stocks that they want us to offer. There’s groups of stocks that we can’t add at the moment, for a particular reason. Tagging would enable us to highlight the fact that a stock is part of that group & explain in a short message / link to a topic explaining why we can’t add the stocks yet.

[ChristopherMcEwan]

@Topic auto tagging feature

This would also help for topics posted via mobile since adding tags is not supported.

Do I understand this to mean that the functionality of tagging as described in the @HAWK post is not available to users accessing via mobile. In particular, how would this resolve in the scenario where we were requiring all posters to assign a tag to the post for the purposes of “categorisation”?

[jomaxro (Joshua Rosenfeld)]

Tagging is fully supported on mobile today. It wasn’t at the time of Steve’s post.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@awesomerobot reminded me of this absolute classic Clay Shirky post on the topic of tagging versus categories

https://web.archive.org/web/20180224153834/http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

If you haven’t read this, and have any interest in the topic whatsoever … please read it now.