The discussion revolves around whether tags should be more visually distinct in Discourse. jtbayly suggests that tags lack a clear visual distinctive and proposes that hashtags could be used to make them more obvious. awesomerobot agrees and provides examples of how hashtags could be implemented. However, codinghorror believes that the current design is sufficient and that tags and categories should be visually grouped together.
bts likes the hashtag suggestion and proposes that categories could be styled differently in the preview and post. They also note that the font size in search results is currently larger for tags than categories, which could be tweaked.
Falco mentions that they have added hashtags to tags in one of their previous instances using CSS, and awesomerobot considers adding it as an optional built-in style.
The discussion also touches on the use of the # symbol for both tags and categories in the composer. tomtjes suggests using / to refer to categories to avoid confusion, but Stephen argues that sharing the # symbol between tags and categories is not a problem as long as there is no collision between the two.
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.
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 Customization > Theme in posts)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
