The future of tags on the forum

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When we migrated to our forum software to Discourse around eight years ago, I made the decision to enable tags on this forum after @JoseMoreno mentioned he found them useful the way they were used in the Natron forum.[1] Back then I said I was going to see how it works out but then never followed up on it, let’s rectify that :)

Right now, tags are not well-utilised on the forum. Many of the most recent topics are not tagged at all, and among those that are most seem to only use some combination of the same three items:

That sort of barebones tagging hardly gives us much value like we were hoping when we enabled them. In case we want to try and improve that situation, aside from mods stepping up to manage the tagging, Discourse does provide some settings to encourage users to use tags more actively. It is possible to require a minimum number of tags per topic or to bundle tags into groups and require users to specify at least one tag from certain groups. I’ve set up the latter for the OS tags on the Bug Reports category for demonstration purposes. (Note for my fellow moderators, it looks like Discourse doesn’t enforce these restrictions on @staff.)

On the other hand, it might simply be time to draw the curtain on this experiment and disable tags altogether. It’s been eight years and so far the current sorry state of affairs doesn’t really seem to have particularly bothered anyone. This forum is mostly user-focused, we still have the GitHub issue tracker for more developer-oriented (and extensively tagged/labelled aside from more recent reports, welp) bug and feature request tracking on top of that. Removing tags would also simplify the interface of the forum a little. Personally, I’m inclined to go with this course of action, but if anyone has a different opinion let’s discuss it!

  1. At the time, Natron had a dedicated forum at https://forum.natron.fr/. However that forum has since been shut down. ↩︎

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I had actually forgotten this feature even existed, which maybe isn’t that surprising when you consider that I rarely make new posts. Given the way these forums are typically used (either by one-time support seekers or serial showcase posters), I don’t see this feature being particularly valuable and would not be opposed to removing it.

I think adding tag requirements would probably end up being unnecessary friction for users, and wouldn’t necessarily result in high quality tags. I can imagine many people choosing the first n tags if we make n tags required. I don’t think that us moderators doing more work to manage the tags better would be the best way use of our time.

I have struggled in the past to find specific posts in this forum, but I don’t think tags are the solution or even a meaningful improvement for any navigation woes.

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I agree with you. The tag wasn’t particularly useful.

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@j5lx Hey Jakob. Thank you as always for sparking great discussion topics. I’ve been thinking about this for the past week.

To be honest, yes, I personally find them useful because I think of them as subcategories, without the hassle of creating actual sub-forum levels, that and handling bookmarks is not as easy :face_with_tongue:

If we plan to keep them, you mentioned we could rely on Discourse to encourage users to tag their topics. That could be a realistic solution, but of course it will take more time to motivate them to use them, so it might not be ideal. And as Scribble mentioned enforcing them could create resistance to their adoption.

On the other hand, if there are more demerits than merits to use them, and if it’s taking away computing resources, ui/ux real state or maintenance effort /time we could simply get rid of them.

If tags are taken out I suppose users can still use the search function (do we have analytics on usage?) Maybe we could have a beginner guide on how to use this functionality as part of the eclipsing procedure. What do you guys think?

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Thank you both for your thoughts, scribble and Jose.

Good point!

Do you mind going into more detail, i.e. what in particular do you find them useful for? Since you brought up bookmarks, do you find yourself referencing older posts regularly or something like that? Are there any particular tags that usually use for filtering (or would use if we had them)? I’m trying to get a better idea of your perspective so I can understand what the usecases are. Also, when you say “subcategories, without the hassle of creating actual sub-forum levels”, are you thinking of something like the post flairs on Reddit?

There are some search logs in the admin area, though there are a lot of strange-looking entries starting last november filtering for posts from specific users. If you filter for header searches you get more authentic looking results: camera, dark mode, rotate, install, madness combat, etc. (okay, one of those is not like the others, but I think it mostly comes down to this one specific topic that’s somehow one of the top search results on Google for “madness combat animation maker”).

What do you mean by eclipsing procedure? :sweat_smile:

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I thought it was already agreed that we would be removing the tags, and since Scribble mentioned he sometimes had struggled to find specific posts, I thought we could instead promote the search function and have a simple guide on how to find specific topics. Of course this is just an idea.

Good to know, I was asking mostly to understand how people were using the search to support the guide idea. (A bit odd to learn about that ‘combat animation maker’ :sweat_smile: )

I used them to browse quickly between certain topics that were freshly opened so I wouldn’t forget to come back (which Is why I ended up tagging most of them myself)

I generally have bookmarked most of the guides or “solutions” to recurring issues, which I used back then to reply to other users with similar problems, however sometimes I would use the tags to browse reported bugs or windows specific issues.

This might sound dumb but I could tags useful to filter because I could open different tabs with each tag. Using the search to emulate that would take me a bit more clicks and more time if I didn’t set-up beforehand.

My original idea for tags was to use them as “hash tags” in social media. At that time I still used tumblr which worked like that, self-made categories to filter your own posts on the blog, or other’s posts assigned to the same “tag”.

In a nutshell they are custom groups or filters that can be community contributed / created, but to be honest it’s not necessarily a useful thing if the community does not use it :laughing:

Even if we were to issue “official” tags, ppl might not use them or simply forget about them since it’s not a prominently suggested feature when you create a new post, and there’s no incentive to use it either.

Regarding sub categories, while I’m not a reddit person I’ve seen the flairs. I think you’re absolutely right, it’s similar to that. Like a post can be self-categorized with a certain flair, and even though it’s part of the “sub-reddit” as a whole and can be read in a continuous stream, it gives you a one-click filter to find posts in the same category, if you want to inspect more of that. And it’s different from searching a particular topic.

So using a “meme” or “Pencil2D” flair, is different than using the search to find “camera" tutorial” :thinking:

I won’t be opposed if tags were to be removed, but perhaps having the reddit flair comparison does make me think it can make sense to have them but instead of enforcing them moderators might need to point users in the right direction.

Additionally, we could incentivize tag use tweaking the “gamified” system the forum has, so like if you add a tag you can have +1 extra point to trust rep level instead of the regular point you’d get for a post, and we’d need to scale down the point contribution to trust level while fleshing it out a bit more (right now we only have 4 levels, but could add more intermediate ones so member feels special, and leader really tells you something about the person.

Also badges would make more sense if we showcase how trust is important for the Pencil2D community as a whole. Again just ideas. Let me know what you think.

Thank you for setting up this discussion and for all your help with this :folded_hands: