Can Tags Be Useful?

Getting used to new software can be a headache, but by and large I like the new forums better than the old ones. One thing I really like about them is that we have the the ability to use tags. The starter of a thread can add five, while other users can add two each. If you click on the word "tags" at the bottom of the thread page you are viewing, you'll see a Word Cloud, showing the 70 most used tags, weighted by usage.

Ok, I'm sort of a forums geek and find this to be severly nifty. But can it actually be useful? Right now, according to the cloud, "i like pie" is the most used tag. I know that I'll never, ever be one of the cool kids, and I am cool with that, but this tag doesn't mean much of anything to me. Others make more sense to me. For example, I can see why someone might what to see all the "cheese with your whine?" or "fire/kin" threads.

So, what do you all think? Are any of you using the tags feature when you're looking for threads on a particular topic? Do you think that a few tags will be used consistently enough to be useful to the community in general? I've started adding tags to posts to help catagorize them, but I wondering if I'm really doing anyone a service or not by doing so.

Tags feature is pretty useless. People are making up idiotic tags, and adding tags that have no bearing on the thread at hand.

It's good for a giggle and that's pretty much it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Tags are great. If there's a central person giving them out. As soon as you toss it open to the general public an expect them to do the cataloging for you, the system quickly breaks down.

So yeah, they're better off ignored unless you're going for a joke-y type thing.

I've begun posting "answered" on PQ threads where the question gets effectively answered. Other than that I haven't come up with any good ideas for them.

Oh, I have no doubt that the majority of tags are useless, and thus will it will always be. But while right now this post has gathered some silly ones already, it has "forums" (which I added), and "tag utility", which I didn't. If someone is reading this thread and wants to find more like it, they can probably figure out pretty quickly which ones might be useful to them to that end.

Maybe I'm an optimist. But I do think that if even a few people make a real effort to add tags in such a way that it will help people find posts that relate to the one they are reading, they will overall be helpful. But, I've been known to be overly optimistic before.

I'm starting to fool around with them now, though I did notice some that seemed a little bit funny. I think it's going to be a what you make of it thing.

My favorite tag so far is "Wittgenstein's banana"

Tags are new. I notice that the tagging system will provide a list of tags as you type so if someone else already used aebabies for instance, it will display as a drop down so you can choose it.

I've been trying to mark threads with more generic terms like "new player" or "tanker" in the Players Help forum and tags like "game", "movie", "tv", "comic", "anime" over on the Comic and Hero/Villain Culture forum.

I'm not sure, personally. Sure, the quick tagging of threads can be useful for subsequent searches, but can you search by tags?

An open letter to NCsoft

If you want tags to be useful, use them wisely. When posting in AT forums, for example, I make tags of the powersets I'm asking info on. In Comics Culture, you can tag the name of the show, movie, game or whatever that the thread is about.

In General Discussion, they're mainly there for amusement purposes.

While the tag cloud linked at the bottom of each thread is the most used tags, the tag cloud at the bottom of the search page is the most searched for tags. So that's something

It's comforting that "weiner lol" isn't one of the most searched for tags...

I didn't even know that the search page also had a word cloud, and that it was different from the one I knew about. Pretty cool, at least by my rather relaxed standards.

I'm starting a mission to tag threads with as helpful as I can think of tags. If enough of us start doing it, maybe they will become very useful. If not, well, we gave it a try

I mostly write silly tags - but I think I'd properly tag a really important thread, like one with new game info in it, for example.

Nope, I save the Banana Hammocks tags for threads about spines scrappers

I don't know if the "Dev Digest" tags are accurate, but if so they'd be useful until we have, y'know, a Dev Digest again.

Temporary off-forum dev digest

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

I'm with you, AnotherDeadHero! Together, we will make a difference!

*Charges off into the sunset*

I'm up to page 3 in my tagging. My pesky boss keeps expecting me to do something called "work" curse him.