Upon review of the current favorite tags: I want Pizza.

If it is over 18" in diameter then I shall be happy to share.

Or is this abuse of the proposed system????

If pizza is a tag that you believe will help you find a post of interest, then pizza it is.

Seriously though, tags are a way for you to find posts or threads of interest easily and a way for you to help others. Tagging something "asus" and "answer" will tell someone that an answer is possibly available for their asus problem. And that will help everyone.

Presumably, no two tags can have the same name, so if I want/elect to allow others to share my pizza tag in true FOSS spirit, then I shall have to retire my tag?

Furthermore, I presume that once I release my pizza tag either I or someone else can pick it for their selection of threads/posts? On a more serious note, if I search for a combo of keywords, such as Suse+AMD+xen, and tag all the results, can I later add another thread post using the same suse+AMD+xen tag? Can someone else add the same tag to another thread/post? Or does that become my right exclusively?

Cheers
Richard

***I think the tag of answer should be under the control of moderators to insure that the answers are validated. An individual shouldn't be able to mark their answer as "answer" or the answer tag will become meaningless.***

The LQ tagging system looks the same as del.icio.us, you can tag whatever URL you want with whatever tag you want in whatever language you want... *freely*.

It's up to you. I think it should stay that way.

minrich, there is no exclusivity. The shared social aspect where multiple members tag using the same words is what we're after.
mimithebrain, correct!

--jeremy

In general I like tagging. It is truly the new and much improved way to categorize things. I think that using tagging in things like bookmarks (del.icio.us) and even file systems (Openomy) is a great idea. But I think there are some issues with the way it was implemented in LQ.

- I think it makes much more sense to be able to tag threads rather than posts. If we assume each thread contains a question and the replies contain answers or other discussion, all about the same topic, then why tag different posts different things?
- To demonstrate, let's look at some of the tags that our dear members have used on this thread. Remember, this thread is a thread about tagging. It may also be tagged feedback since that's what Jeremy wants. And now let's look at the tags some of the posts on this forum have: pizza, soda, orange, milk, cows, honey, cheese, web, 20, bbq, honey. Do these really describe the posts they were assigned to? Will these terms help me find the thread later?
- Now imagine that we took the current 'social intelligence,' multiplied it by 95 (approx. the number of posts in this thread) and these people saw a little box at the top of the page that says, "Tag this thread -- one-word descriptions of what this thread discusses" and people would then post highly relevant tags like 'tagging, feedback...' etc. etc!
- As well, the 'tags' section in each post are a bit in the way. Much less so than before, when it was a huge button and text box... but still. I propose removing the border around the Tags section, and perhaps showing it only on MouseOver (hover).

I hope this turns into a highly useful feature, and we'll all say that we all tagged forum threads before it became the norm in every forum, and we saw it first on LQ!

You're seeing some odd tags now, as members are testing things out and getting used to it. Once they are comfortable with the system, I'm confident that tag relevance will go up considerably. If you think there's a way for us to phrase the help section better, we're certainly open to that. As to why we tag posts instead of threads (which was actually the original idea), once you think about how LQ works a little bit - tagging posts really does make more sense. It allows you, for instance, to tag the post that answered your question "answer samba". A thread is really just a series of posts, so we can stitch the thread tags together automatically from the post tags and get the best of both. Right now, it's more of an education issue getting members to properly use tags though. One additional thing to keep in mind in that tags are starting to gain traction all over the web (although I think LQ is the very first forum for *any* topic to integrate tagging to the level we have). That means with every passing day, the odds that a member will be comfortable with the tagging concept is greater.

--jeremy

Thinking on the issue a little more, as the beta draws to an end we may even prune some of the obviously "testing" tags, such as bbq and cow.

--jeremy

You might "tag" the thread from a post, but when you link to it from LQ Tags it only references the thread, not an individual post -- at least atm it's that way.

I got a big laugh when I went to that link, and found "answers" to produce -> There are 22 threads tagged "answer". And some confusion, when the LQ Tags link had "answer (27)."

Some people don't have very large vocabularies, English isn't their first language, or they're just not very creative. Which will produce Tags just as bad as their threads -- but there's not much anyone can do about that in a forum as loose as LQ. It sure beats what I've read in alt.os.linux.slackware --

I don't really see any difference in that box below the post from it's original state? It's still something that IMO takes away from the post. Just a button is slightly obtrusive, but the box and text inside it is quite obtrusive.

This tagging can be just like anything else, a good feature if people use it wisely. As for the "pizza, soda, orange, milk, cows, honey, cheese, web, 20, bbq, honey" -- I personally wouldn't ever enter one of those for info at LQ, so it wouldn't effect my tag searches. Probably not yours, either.

But in one sense this is good -- goobers and script kiddies might find tags that interest them -- while people trying to learn more about Linux can find tags that interest them. Jeremy has done a good job of keeping diversity in LQ without letting stuff get out of hand. Quite amazing, when you see all the junk on the internet these days.

I see a difference still with tagging.

Lets say I have a problem with samba. Samba will make a big load of linuxquestions if I use conventional search. However...

If I search for "samba user workgroup auth answer", the LQ server will look for all posts with the tag samba, and return the threads associated. Inside those threads, it'll look for those who contain "user", and discard those who don't. Then workgroup, then auth, then answer. It will only return those tagged with what I want.

This is not keyword in the way that if I search for "samba root" as keywords, it won't return a bunch of junk. All threads may contain the keyword "answer" as in "I'd like an answer urgently please", but not nessescarly being answered. If it's tagged with answer, it has a better chance of being discovered. More times it's tagged, more it carries weight, as more users stamped it with answer, giving a level of certainty that the post is really an answer, or does talk about "cow" or "bbq".

Of course, the search process I described is flawed, if "auth" doesn't exist as a tag, or is very few (since authentication is prone to typos), it might look for associated tags, or completly discard it, or reorganize the tag order for more hits. Not a google algorithm, but something like that.

I still think that tag is a good feature. Tag spam may become existant, but you won't get that spam unless you explicitely search for it. and I don't think that past the testing stage there will be tag spam, the LQ community is well behaved.

There is a lot of potential.

That would be when people search for specific words, and the tags get searched as well as the thread titles..

This increases the power of the search.

eg How many threads start with "Help Please, NOW!" rather than something useful..
Tags provide a way of fine tuning the thread content so searching picks it up..
Many threads are going to cover several subjects a the same time, and you can't dump all those items in a thread title, eh!

(And you can kinda guess we're promoting searching a whole heap)
Another advance can be including these in a more specific list of searches at the bottom of the thread page.. It's gonna depend on how you browse &/or search the forums..

As for the Wiki, imagine creating wiki content from forum posts with very specific tag searches. You can't get that from just titles or included words in a thread. Especially if we tag posts as complete solutions..

As for abuse, the tags listed link back to searches for those tag words.
I can't see an offsite or long term problem. Mods & members are pretty quick at resolving those..

jeremy - is there any way that, for instance, my example 'pizza' tag can be made to take me to the post in/on/to which I actually created it? At present it just links to page 1 of 3 of this thread, and to a new posters (first post) concerning ftp software.

I would just like to point out, if indeed it is possible (possibly in Phase II) it would, from my perspective, be more/most useful if the post (containing the answer) tagged 'answer' in a real question/answer thread, is the post that appears on my screen.

Cheers
Richard

Okay, I'm game. Some more suggestions:

1. When the "Tags" button is clicked, focus should immediately be given to the text box. (i.e. so that the user can immediately type tags)

2. When the Enter key is pressed it should submit the form, so that the user does not have to reach for the mouse again and click "Save Tags."

I'm still unclear how we are expected to find the tags again later on ?

This page only shows the top 15 or so tags (including misspellings) :
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/lqtags.php

Find tags by clicking on the tag word or using the "Search" facility.
It will produce search results from that tag.
If you look at the link a tag produces, you can search for tags by making a link http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/tags/ and adding a tag word to the end.

A good place to start is to decide which words someone would be searching for to find your comments..