Ranking suggested tags by popularity or forcing one tag to always be first?

We use tags for marking status (i.e. solved, duplicate, etc.) in support PMs. But, the most popular tag doesn’t show up in the suggested list, even though every other tag does. We have to start typing the tag to get it to show up.

I can’t figure out how it decides what to list, since it’s definitely not popularity (this one is by far the most popular tag)…I even deleted several tags to try to make it more likely to show up, and it’s still never in the list.

So, is there some way to make tag suggestions show up in the order of most popular? Or is there some way I can make this one tag always show up first?

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My understanding is that the default is for tags to be sorted by popularity, unless the " tags sort alphabetically" setting is enabled. You can check that in your Discourse settings, but it’s disabled by default AFAIK. If the setting is disabled and you’re still not seeing most popular tag first, that’s interesting, and might be a bug I suppose.

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Thanks for the response, but no. I wasn’t aware of that setting, but I’ve confirmed is it left unchecked and it has never been changed from the default.

Now that I’m looking at it with the knowledge there is a mode for sorting alphabetically, I see that it does appear to be sorted alphabetically, and the tag I want to be first is “solved” which is after all the other tags alphabetically.

So, I guess it is a bug where it always chooses to sort alphabetically?

Edit: Changing this option in settings has no effect. It remains sorted alphabetically (seemingly) in either case.

I believe the alphabetical setting does work on one of my production forums (haven’t checked the others). Can you check out the /tags page and see if it has any effect there?

On /tags, the sort setting does have an effect. It sorts by popularity when unchecked, and alphabetically when checked. So, that setting is just not working correctly on the tag suggestions dropdown.

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Interesting. So now we need to know what the intended effect is. I thought it did (or at least should) affect both, now I’m not so sure. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: So either it’s a bug, or a feature request…

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:man_shrugging:

I would think it’d be most intuitive/predictable to have it always sort the same way. I prefer popularity for both, but couldn’t see an easy way to make it behave the way I want (I did find the commit that added the alphabetical sorting option, but I couldn’t figure out how to make popularity apply to suggested tags, thus far). So, for now, I just increased the number of tags to show from five to six, which allows the last tag to show up…but, as soon as anybody adds more tags in my forum, it’ll stop being a workaround (but I’ll probably just delete the new tags, because it’s really important that solved always show up!).

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