Guess Whose Tags?

I live in WA and I am not really a fan of football. Yep, they aren't doing so good this year.
Where in WA did you grow up? (if you don't mind me asking)

Ah, don't worry yourself about it. It's a rite of passage to be holier than thou and insulting around these parts.

Ilwaco, WA.....tiny, tiny, tiny town in most southwest part of the state you can get. Moved to Phoenix for college, and moved to Chicago to advance with my employer.

I do miss the PNW, I'm hoping to retire there (with season tickets to the Seachickens of course).

I can't speak for him, but I care because tags were designed to be a way to save topics and to categorize them. So if the topic is crap, tagging the topic makes it more prominent throughout the site. Instead of burying the trolling it makes it more prominent when those topics are tagged. If you consider that when you use tags you are making forums it might make more sense. If the home page were full of these tags I don't think it would be very useful, and the more the tags are used the more prominent they will be and the more prominent the topics themselves would be.

That being said, I don't expect you guys to stop and there are always going to be people who won't use a feature the way it was intended, and we'll just have to put the work in to minimize the effect of this kind of tag use on the site. But if any of you guys want to help us out we'd appreciate more semantic tags that describe the subject of the topic instead of the quality of the topic.

My thoughts exactly....but you own the site, so no one will call you a hall monitor.

I might, but with great respect...

(ok. i'm gone, )

I know where Ilwaco is. I have been there a couple of times years ago.

btw one of my classmates was a Seahawk player for 8 seasons.

Well the tags aren't going away, so why not help out instead? If you see tags you want to remove just provide as many relevant tags as you can. With the energy you spent complaining about them you could have removed more than 25% of them.

In the future it will be even easier for the relevant tags to win. We'll do things like increase the weight of tags that are represented in the text (e.g. if the topic title says "Obama wins election" the tags "election" and "Obama" can be given more weight than "tiny penis" which is not in the topic text), filter tags from users who don't tend to add relevant ones, weight the topic author's tags more heavily than others etc.

But we aren't getting rid of tags, tagging allows the users to have more say, and to help out more with the site's categorization. A lot of different kinds of topics are being posted that we had no forums for before, and this all will grow naturally with the site instead of require administrators and moderators to do it all.

In the past, some users didn't like the way forums were categorized, where their topics were moved, or that there were no forums for a bunch of things they wanted to talk about. There are a lot of downsides that are solved by this kind of categorization, but most of all we need the users to help out and do some of the work. We can't rely on a handful of volunteers to do it all for us and we need ways that the categorization process can scale with the use of the site.

So if you don't like any tags please help out and give more good ones. You won't get far trying to change what others do, but you can neutralize it by your own positive tagging and we'll keep tweaking the feature to emphasize positive uses.

Nah, people call me variants of that all the time, but I'm not going to waste too much time trying to be a hall monitor. The only way it can work is with draconian control over the site and I don't have the desire or time for that kind of thing.

I get their point of view pretty well, and I see how it can be fun to use tags that way and they are adults, they aren't going to listen to me play hall monitor any more than they will with you.

I spend a lot of time providing tags to improve the site's categorization instead. When mean or irrelevant tags show up on good threads I always fill the topic with relevant tags, and get a buddy or two to help out and they are gone.

I don't tend to bother with some of the flamefests because I don't want to tag those topics (remember, tagging is meant to be a recommendation) but if I see them becoming too prominent I try to do my part.

Instead of arguing with them, just overwrite the tags you want, and encourage others to use tags positively. If more people are using them positively their use will prevail, and we'll keep tweaking the feature to make that happen more often. But you can't control this any more than you can herd cats, and you shouldn't let it bother you so much. You have a much more powerful say in your ability to add your own tags.

I just tagged this thread 10 times and that is the limit. Someone else needs to tag this thread appropriately to over-write the original tags. At least that is what appears to be needed.

btw I went off-topic on purpose, tired of the bickering.

Did the same.



I know...thanks.

I kinda liked dainbread...

oh bother.