Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Thread tags?

Someone discussed something that, like on my forums, you can put in a subtext to a thread; I've got a different idea, unless someone suggested this. That when launching a thread, there's a tag(s) section, like on journal/blog posts, so people could search for something. I might search for \"gods\", \"norse\", \"egyptian\", or whatever because of my interests. Then pull up threads that got tagged with that idea?

It's definitely an interesting idea. I'm working on building a tagging system for characters and groups. We might be able to expand it to forums as well, though I feel like the time might be better spent making the text of forum posts directly searchable.

It has potential, if the users are willing to tag. I don't care much for tagging myself and there will always be others who won't use it. Perhaps a combination of making text searchable, but if someone tagged their post then the tags take priority? Or something along those lines? Or specifically search for tags and then display non-tagged results that are a close match?

There's a small downside in an entire post being searchable. I mean, what if I wanted a storyline involving gods, so I searched tag "gods"? Then I'm looking through tags. But if the entire thread is searchable, any time someone says "Oh my gods!" I'm pulling up a thread. Or I want an egyptian themed RP, but someone uses the descriptor "egyptian" on some random trinket they encounter once, I'm skimming the entire thread to find where it comes up and how, and end up disappointed.

That's just a vague idea. There's other complications that come from entire threads being searched. Not that I'm downing the capability--it's better than nothing, but tags might make it easier to find what you want. Don't want to bother tagging? That's OK, I mean, nobody holds a gun to your head to do it on journals. It's a matter of how easily found you want it.

You're totally right. There's also complications that come from them NOT being searchable. Like often I won't remember the title of a thread, but I'll remember a piece of dialogue that was particularly memorable and want to search based on that. So it seems what we really need to accommodate both out concerns is a smarter search system that does a better job of guessing priorities and searching based on importance, rather than dumbly serving up a list of word matches.