Who is responsible for editing the "Tags" ?

Life would be so easy for programmers if they didn't have to deal with other people using their software. They could write whatever the hell they wanted and wouldn't have to deal with users with needs and desires different from what they want to program.

I went looking for a thread the other day and never did find it. Politics covers a lot, as does Bush and other generic tags. I wasn't going to hunt through 40+ pages. The other tags that appeared were mainly useless.

I was hoping the tags would be more Google-ish. Maybe have them pick up on words within a thread automatically rather than allowing us goofballs to do it... That's probably asking too much.

If I ever find it I'm gonna tag it.

A powerful search engine is the feature I miss the most.

Right now it's like a library with no index..

New buildings but a bit messy...

Yup. The search function is not what it was. I love the joint, but I miss a decent search function (and google doesn't work as well on the new formulation).

Tried the Google custom search, top R hand of page?

That's of very little help, when searching for precise matters..

It's hopeless/unhelpful.

parados I don't think that's a fair insinuation. This isn't a case where we are seeing unexpected use of tags that conflict with our intentions. We expect people to have fun with them but it's part of the developers job to explain how things work, and in this case I think the software is not as clear as it needs to be as to the purpose of tags.

I do expect people to put all sorts of silly tags there, and no it's not the programmer versus the users. If the majority of the users here want a collection of forums like "tiny penis" all over our home page that is what will happen.

However I believe that many people don't really think about the tags beyond the fact that it makes their words appear on the topic page and that most would agree that at some level those tags wouldn't be very useful. I certainly don't expect everyone to provide useful tags but the majority do, and I'm just trying to make the case for more useful tags to those who do care, and I certainly don't expect everyone to.

This has less to do with tags than the fact that the Google search sucks for finding anything specific.

The key difference is that google just indexes pages, and has no post-level search. So, searching for a general subject works ok, but searching for a specific thing a specific member said (or anything that drills down under page-level) really is hopeless right now.

We don't have a good search feature right now because the old software's way of doing things just won't work with the number of posts we have. A significant number of posts weren't in the old search index either because the database table holding the word matches was crashing due to size and load. So we are going to have to either spend some serious money on Google servers that can connect to our database or make our own search engine that scales using lucene (an open-source software for searching).

The bottom line is that keyword search over millions of posts is not an easy technical challenge, phpBB hadn't solved it either and large forums on phpBB had to hack at their search or disable it. So it's not going to be very easy for us to solve, and it's going to take us some time.

Is it, Francis, if one is able to remember an exact phrase from such a topic/posting? Why wouldn't a Google "exact phrase" search work?