Follow your friend's tags

That makes more sense than tagging my own .

How do I tag another thread?

Right now it's in the left column under the tabs.

Okay, I am getting the hang of it - my initial disappointment is at a turning
point.

I have a comment and two questions:

Comment: Currently, the major benefit I see in tagging is that I can now combine tags. So if I asked a question about a particular statute in the old "Legal" forum, I can now tag it both "legal" and "reference", whereas I couldn't cross-post them on the old site. So that's good. And it leads me to --

Question 1: Sites that allow cross-posting usually have a problem with abuse -- pervasive cross posting is basically a form of spam. Is there an analogous problem with tagging? And if there is, what is the limit to the number of tags you can add to a thread.

Question 2: Although I like the ability to simulate cross-posting by combining tags, what I'm lacking at the moment is an intuition for new tags that are useful, but didn't exist as forums on the old site. Perhaps you can give us a few examples so we get the hang of new tags we may add?

That's where using aggregate info can help. And the tags rely on the wisdom of the crowd. So even if someone abuses it to give it irrelevant tags the more the people use it the less visible that abuse is.

So for a specific example, let's say someone tags this topic "ass". Only the top 5 or so tags are displayed for each topic, so all it takes is for 5 better tags to push that off the list. Eventually, we'll do things like make a minimum for it to even appear there (again, we need scale for something like this).

On the tag pages, the topics most tagged something appear more prominently. So again, the more it's used right the less prominent the abuse will be.


Sure. A great example would be our science and mathematics forum. Right now everything imported from there is tagged "science and mathematics" but often it would more appropriately be "science" or "mathematics" or even "biology" and other examples of sub-topics to these more inclusive tags.

So for example, Sozobe's huge obama thread was imported tagged "politics" and I tagged it "obama" and if enough others do it will be at the top of the "obama" tag on this site as the most relevant obama topic.

So to use your own threads as examples, you have a thread about Iselin, New Jersey that is currently only tagged "north america". You can tag it more specifically to "new jersey" and better focus its categorization. There are a lot of ways you can give it more specific labels, just let me know if you want more examples of what I'd tag your topics.

http://able2know.org/tag/iraq/

That's an example of iraq topics I tagged from the old politics forum. Now "iraq" is one of the top related tags to "politics" and it's like the functional equivalent of having created an Iraq subforum to the politics one.

I already see what appears to be intentional miscategorization happening. So as more users start tagging it will fix it.

Look at this nice collection of south ossetia topics someone else put together:

http://able2know.org/tag/south_ossetia/

Thanks, Craven! Sub-categories make a lot of sense for tagging.

Hey, I'm having a problem with tagging, maybe this is an okay place to ask about it...

I'm noticing that when I want to make a tag more specific--like a topic is tagged "pets and garden" and I want to add "dogs" to narrow it down-- I click "edit tags", & I type in the edit I'd like to make, but the message I get is something like "tags removed" or "tags deleted" (can't remember the message for sure). I wanted to add "humor" as a tag to a thread of mine that was tagged only as a relationships thread, and every time I try to add the "humor" tag, it just says that it removed the existing tag. Am I doing sumpin' wrong (likely)?

We have some issues with non-intuitive messages when you tag. Nick's or I will change it within a few days.

Oh, oookay...so by "non-intuitive message" you mean it telling me that it deleted my tags when it really added them? Boy, that IS non-intuitive!

fb's fantasy olympics thread offers these tags: olympics, fantasy, olympics, olympics, teams

Something like that. I'm not sure what happened in your case but it says the same thing for anything other than your first tags. We knew about that one pre launch but it slipped through.

How do I un-tag a thread? By accident I tagged a thread I rather don't
have in my tags.

Didn't know that. I should only tag stuff that I like?

Ten. (I tried )

Actually, at first it was much less, something like five words or xx characters (meaning that sometimes it was less than five), and if you go over the limit it seemed to add a selection of the tags you typed in randomly. But that's all fixed now -- thanks Team A2K!

This option was messed up too at first, but now it seems to work fine: just click "Edit tags", and the tags you had added before will be there. You can then delete some, and add some, as you see fit, click "tag topic" again and there you go.

What I dont know is ... like, can you browse tags and "my tags" separately? So far I thought that if you clicked the tag "south-ossetia", you got all the threads anyone tagged south-ossetia, with the threads that most people gave that tag to on top. Is there a way to just see the threads you yourself have tagged south-ossetia?

(Not that I'd want to, but replace "south-ossetia" by "favourite" or "video to watch", and it would becomes useful.)

Thank you, nimh, I'll try that!