"Are Tags Feasible on TMP?" Topic

I see a lot of members requesting new boards, but I don't know how much further it can go. I suspect that the casual user has difficulty navigating the boards, resulting in much duplication of effort, posting in wrong forums, etc. So, my question is, can topic tags be readily implemented on TMP? Would they help streamline navigation, or just provide a quicker way to get lost? Would implementation be straightforward, or a major technical headache?

Thank you for listening,

Ron

What would the tags be for? I'm having a hard time visualizing it :)

What's a tag?

Need more information

In my vision you would have significantly fewer boards with individual messages tagged with keywords.

Example:

Science Fiction Board
Post on some aspects of Eldar
Tags: [40K] [Eldar]

18th Century Conflicts Board
Post on Battle of Almansa
Tags: [WSS] [Spain] [Almansa]

The problem with tags is that you either have to have a controlled vocabulary i.e. official tags. or you allow free form tagging which leads to variations on the same tag, e.g. Almansa, Almanza.

Ideally you can use keyword searching with Boolean connectors in the body of the text. This version of TMP allows you to try but my experience is that it breaks every time you try anything more than a single word in the search.
Welcome to the world of librianship in the 21st century.

I thought the cross post idea was better then tags. I post something in scifi discussion and cross post it to 15mm because its about 15mm. The restrictions placed on cross posting kinda break that down…

Tags = the labels you can put into e.g. blogger, jive clearspace, wiipedia etc which put particular posts into categories a.k.a. metadata.

So, rather than having to file things in one particular 'board', you tag a post with none, one or many labels and seach/group on that.

In wikipedia syntax:

[[TMP talk]]
[[About TMP]]
[[General Discussion]]
[[Computer Stuff]]
[[My made up label]]

so this single post will magically appear in all the labelled categories above, which can be browsed or searched.

All a bit twenty first century.

You can still file stuff into a hierarchical system if you want, but tags can lay over the top and create their own virtual groupings. In many social media systems they are also user configurable so you can create your own categories/labels.

And what value does this provide the casual user? Besides breaking a decade's worth of posts?

1) no, they would not streamline navigation.

2) yes, implementation would most likely be a major technical headache.

So I'd have to learn all the keywords, just to find an older message? Meh.

Another way to look at it is user generated indexing that sits alongside the forum structure. We use them extensively at my work, when journos file stories they get placed in their section, but they also get tagged with words specific to the story that can also be added to by the readers.

An example here may be someone makes a post about Khurasan figures in the 15mm Sci Fi section, but would also add the tags "Khurasan". Folks could then do searches for specific tags to get only those posts, and google loves them to boot.TGN tags their stories if you want to see it on a minis site, not that they do much minis these days.

Seargant Paper, I used to dubious of them but they actually do work, and the work is straight forward (but there's a fair bit of it). It would be painful if you tried to retag the older posts, but you could leave it open for the readership to do and you'd be surprised at how quickly that will happen.

Tag?

I see my rants about making more work for Bill have been forgotten. Don't do it!

Re: Security Minister Critter, et al.

Please, notice that I used the word "feasible" in the subject line. I realize that many things are possible that aren't necessarily feasible. However, if TMP ever gets some kind of massive overhaul, it might be worthy of consideration at that time. My motive here isn't generating arbitrarily large amounts of work for The Editor.

Ron

As long as they don't break the established structure, I'm not opposed, so long as it doesn't send Bill off the deep end…

"I used to dubious of them but they actually do work"

Yes, very flexible and powerful, and they can co-exist with existing structures.

Effectively they just tag posts with sensible search terms.