Print

[Selroth]

If you're not familiar with organizing information by tags, it's a great non-linear and non-tree way of organizing information.  The concept is simple: you "tag", or categorize, a thread or post using some keywords.  Like, I can see a lot of our forum's posts being tagged with "Otherkin" word, and this thread tagged with "Draconity.org" because it's talking about the site.  There can be multiple tags on content, so "otherkin" and "spirituality" can be tagged into a thread, or "politics" and "humor" in another.

This would make it easier for members to see what topics/threads interest them depending on what they talk about, because sometimes a single-line subject isn't enough.  Another shortfall of using a subject line alone is you can't really get use of sorting threads by subject lines or organize them, but with tags it becomes very easy to find all the topics that talk about "dragons," for example. 

Interested?

[Selroth]

Here's a mod I can easily install that does this:

http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=579

[Aazarah]

I wouldn't have thought the site was active enough to use tags (seen as though a new thread is created every.. 2-4 days and not every 3 minutes ?)  :dragon_confused:

But I'd like to use a tag system anywho  :dragon_bouncy:

[Aurelia]

Isn't that the point of having seperate forums though?  They do the job of tags, just in a broaded sense :)

It's not something I'd use and, as with the thread ratings idea, I think this will mean a lot of posts don't get looked at enough and people could miss out on something that they might not know interests them until they read it.  I know I would stear away from religious and political discussions and not bother reading anything tagged as such, but from the discussions I've looked in on randomly there have been a couple I've found interested and have joined in on :)

Plus a starting post here can get turned into all sorts of discussions, making the initial tags irrelevant and wrong for the whole thread and again that would mean people will miss out on seeing something they could be part of.

We don't need more segregation of the site, in my opinion, people can tell what a thread is about from skimming the first topic.  Tags will mean some don't even get looked at and that would be a great shame.

You did a great job with the forum sections - tags aren't needed at all.

[Selroth]

Tags form a generic net structure ontop of the existing forum tree structure.  And I'd like the system to be dynamic so that anyone can add or remove tags from a thread at any time (not just the thread creator). 

I don't think it'd really have any effect on new threads because they probably wont be very tagged yet.  But as time goes by and the thread gets buried in history, it could still be very useful for someone searching keywords to find the thread by the tag and revive it.  It's more for searching than anything else, i think.

[Tysha]

I love tags, I use them on LJ, Etsy and my offline photo albums. So I wouldn't object to them used here too.

[Selroth]

I've been thinking about this a lot more.  And even researched it.  The concept itself is called "Folksonomy" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy , derived from social networking sites.  But, the concept can be applied to any kind of bit of information. 

There are two major advantages I could see this bringing to a forum:

1) No need to worry about what board topics belong in.  Why?  Well, consider the site to be an array of topics not categorized yet into forums/boards.  If each topic was tagged, and there were tags in common, the topics can be grouped together based on relevant subject.  A search of a tag keyword will return results of all topics which have that tag.  If you think about it, the forum structure now could be simulated by this method if each topic's one-and-only-tag were the forum it's in.    However, what can't be done currently, is the same thread existing in 2 different forums, since tagging is all about being able to tag a topic with as many tags as you want.  This allows you to make a new thread without browsing into any forums, then as you make the thread just pick a few relevant tags and post - the website will figure out where it goes from there.  Think about it.  If I confused you, lemme know :)

2) Customizable display of pages.  Does the "recent posts" list not work well for you because you're only interested in otherkin topics and not the chit-chat?  Or maybe you're new here and just want to read up on certain subjects for knowledge?  Maybe you wanna see if something's been talked about before a lot easier?  Tags can easily do this.  It's a very searchable mechanism.  Search engines basically return a list of results that contain the words you search for.  Tags are just words too, but there's a lot more words than there's usually tags.  If there's a fewer number of tags, then it becomes a lot easier to search and the results are much more accurate and organized.  You can have multiple "blocks" on the site containing posts that match a customized search function.

[Aurelia]

I still think this is being added for no real reason.  Noone is sitting there thinking "Damn, I wish there were tags here to make threads easier to find!" because we don't have 1000s of threads posted each day (not even 1000s of posts each day) the way that those networking or blogging sites do.

If we got to a time where that hapened then I wouldn't be so down about the whole idea, but right now its a really un-needed add.  You know the old saying - if it ain't broke, don't fix it!

[Selroth]

Yeah, but my saying is: "If it ain't broke, fix it till it is."

[Tags:]

Tags: