As of January of this year, new sites installing Discourse will find the trust level required to create tags is defaulted to Trust Level 4 (Regular+). Our forum’s list of tags is exactly the kind of reason the restriction on creating tags was put into effect. We have a widely-used and super redundant Development tag for Development Discussion, and only 7% of over 600 tags have been used more than once. It would be great if our forum followed suit and locked the creation of tags to Regular+, and deleted the existing unused and/or irky tags, so that tags could be useful.
The site setting to control this is: trust to create tag
I can already imagine someone posting “Why so serious bro? Tags don’t even matter!”, so let me clarify: Tags are not a big deal. This is not something that is super important, and it’s not the end of the world if this doesn’t happen. That being said, it’s still a change, even though small, that would have a positive impact on the forum.
Maybe we shouldn’t even have tags. Maybe, like badges, they are unnecessary for this forum. I personally don’t see the point. I don’t even know where the tag searching feature is (I think that’s what tags are for).
You may be right – on a forum as small as this, tags don’t really help much. We do have tags for “desktop-game”, “tablet-game”, “phone-game” though, which have uses. The staff moved away from the category-per-platform approach we had on Kunena because you may want to nominate a game for multiple platforms, which is cleaner with one topic and multiple tags as opposed to multiple topics. At the very least, those should stay, so I wouldn’t suggest removing tags entirely. The next best thing would deleting unneeded tags and restricting tag creation to Leader+.
I don’t even know where the tag searching feature is
I don’t think anyone actually looks for threads through the Tags page. I really don’t see the point of them, there’s not really any added value (at least in the threads I’ve seen so far that have tags) because we already have enough forum categories and the search feature is pretty good at finding the posts you’re looking for.
Not really any harm done in keeping them either, though.
buildthomas: I really don’t see the point of them, there’s not really any added value because we already have enough forum categories and the search feature is pretty good at finding the posts you’re looking for.
EchoReaper: We do have tags for “desktop-game”, “tablet-game”, “phone-game” though, which have uses. The staff moved away from the category-per-platform approach we had on Kunena because you may want to nominate a game for multiple platforms, which is cleaner with one topic and multiple tags as opposed to multiple topics.
>buildthomas: I don't think anyone actually looks for threads through the Tags page.
dun dun DUN
EchoReaper: I can already imagine someone posting “Why so serious bro? Tags don’t even matter!”, so let me clarify: Tags are not a big deal. This is not something that is super important, and it’s not the end of the world if this doesn’t happen. That being said, it’s still a change, even though small, that would have a positive impact on the forum.
