Should it be more obvious that tags are tags?

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It’s a fine line between relying on graphics vs explicitly labeling things. In general Discourse needs to provide some more help in my opinion in making on-ramps for early and non-technical users. Perhaps this isn’t that place, but I think it is.

I really couldn’t tell you without looking what the visual distinctive of a tag was. In fact, it appears to be the lack of any distinctive that is the one distinctive of tags. In a context like this, that reasoning by a process of elimination is expecting quite a lot of users.

Edited to add: regardless this is a nice change to search.

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Moving this to a new topic because it’s a slight tangent…

I don’t disagree with that when it comes to tags. Everything else has some sort of indication of what it is.

I’m a fan of the hashtag structure, which I think just about every social network now uses, and think that would be an obvious way to handle them… (plus we can already #theme in posts)

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Hashtags are a little noisy in a list… but maybe it would be enough to just put it on the first one?

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The problem is that @sam, wrongly IMO, insisted that there be dividers between every single section.

  • Tags and categories are strongly related and should be visually grouped together.

  • Users and groups are strongly related and should be visually grouped together.

As for the concern in the first post, I do not feel it is warranted at all.

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One reason for the separation at the moment is that if you click more... for users groups won’t be there. We don’t have a consolidated search for groups and users outside of this dropdown yet.

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Isn’t this a “defaults” discussion, asking to shift to tag bullet or box per site setting?

Personally I am super on the fence here, torn between too much noise, and not obvious enough.

@awesomerobot maybe add another tag style to the salad that captures the balance better, not sure if this is solvable to be honest

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I like the suggestion of hashtags — simple, and pretty universal meaning.

May be slightly confusing that in the composer # works as convention for referencing both tags and categories. One thing that might mitigate that would be keeping the # shortcut to search/select both categories and tags in the composer, but styling categories differently in the preview and post…

But yeah I think seeing the # in search results makes it a bit clear those are tags w/o having to label them. Also for short ones on the same line, makes it somewhat more clear they’re separate entities vs. e.g. a single two word phrase.

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One other tiny thing, looks like the font size in search results is currently slightly larger for tags vs. categories? Categories feel like they should be bigger/more important, generally, idk if that balance could be tweaked a bit. In general this looks great though.

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I did add the hashtags to tags in one of my previous instances, it’s pretty easy using CSS before with content. People like it.

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I totally forgot that we had those tag styles… I wonder how often they’re changed…

I’ve done this at least once in a theme too… I think I’ll add it as an optional built-in style, it’s fairly simple.

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That has definitely confused me and I don’t think it’s intuitive to use the # for both. Controversial idea: in the composer / should be used to refer to categories. Too nerdy?

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We use @ for both groups and individuals, as long as no collision can occur between tags and categories it’s probably good that they share the #. It would be worse to need to remember whether something was a tag or a category, when in many cases they’re almost interchangeable.

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