First off, thanks Discourse team for making an AMAZING product. We’ve been on Discourse now for over a year and really, really love the platform you’ve built. Thank you!!
Forgive me if this is a feature I’ve missed but would love to see the option to have suggested tags when someone posts a discussion.
Our members often don’t know all of the tags we have. And, even if they do, they often won’t take the time to tag their discussion appropriately.
It’d be pretty great if somewhere in the posting flow (perhaps in between clicking the “Create Topic” button and posting the discussion) there was a pop-up that said: “Do you want to add any of these tags?”
It could simply do a basic search in the new discussion text to see if it matches any of the tags we have. If so, give the user the option to easily add them. Our tags are specific enough that while there would be some matches that wouldn’t be relevant most would be.
Allowing people to quickly choose from a pre-selected list of tags with 1-click per tag would be amazing and would likely help us be able to keep our discussions well tagged with much less admin work.
If the tags are identical to the words in the body of the posts, why not use search? Why would the tags be necessary, wouldn’t they be redundant at that point?
There’s a reason we never did this at Stack Overflow… and it’s basically the same reason we wouldn’t really want to do it at Discourse.
But if someone is browsing the “freight” tag it is beneficial to have all of the the applicable discussions tagged. Most of the time users don’t do this on their own. Having the auto-suggest would benefit those browsing tags with a much broader variety of relevant topics given they actually were tagged.
Wanted to add a + to this one as well.
I could see this as a plugin too, where you could define keywords in a post that would have a modal or something that’d suggest adding relevant tags.
The keyword scraper is unable to distinguish between a post that mentions a particular GPU driver (or display manager, or what have you) because it’s one of the topics for their post, vs. when it’s merely an irrelevant line in some pasted log output. Or (worse) when they’re mentioning something because it’s explicitly not relevant to their post. (e.g. “This bug only occurs under X11, with Wayland it works fine.” And the post gets tagged #wayland. Not Helping.)
Having the “auto”-tagger instead make suggestions for relevant tags, but still leave the final decisions up to a human with a brain, would lead to far more useful and accurate tagging. (Well… either that, or the users would all ignore the suggestions and there’d be no tagging. Still not really worse than the current situation.)
It would make a lot of sense in a social media environment, which is what me and a few other users are trying to accomplish.
Google Currents already had a feature like that, but it was recently removed. Although the platform is shutting down in 2023, it still serves as a great guideline.
