A discussion has started about the need for tag aliases in Discourse, similar to those found on Stack Exchange. Flow expressed the desire for a feature to define a set of aliases for a given tag, pointing out that tags seem to be a second-class citizen in the platform. erlend_sh acknowledged the feature request but noted that tags are not as crucial in Discourse due to the presence of categories.
However, icaria36 highlighted a specific use case where tag aliases would be beneficial, particularly for multilingual communities, allowing translations of tags to be created as aliases. Fortunately, Flow discovered that support for tag aliases, also known as tag synonyms, is being worked on and is scheduled for the 2.4 release. Additionally, xuhdev shared the instructions for adding tag synonyms, which can be found on the Discourse meta forum.
I was surprised that discourse 1.8.7 apparently has no support for tag aliases (akin to stackexchange). I first though that I could achieve something similar with tag groups, but that is not the case. I would really like a way to define a set of aliases for a given tag.
Tags seem to be a second class citizen currently, e.g. there is no ‘Tag’ in the top menu (Unread, Top, Categories). I wonder why? Tags are an excellent addition besides categories to get order into a forum. But only if tag aliases are supported.
It’s a valid feature request, it just hasn’t been requested much. Tags are not as important in Discourse as they are in SO because we have categories. The majority of forum communities don’t need tags.
Tag aliases would be nice, but it’s probably not gonna happen unless someone from the community develops it or one of our customers require it.
For what is worth, tags aliases would be useful for multilingual communities, where you could define a tag in the default language and then create translations as aliases to the main tag.
