Thread Tagging?

davee123

So, I mentioned this in the "close the general discussion threads" thread-- how about thread tagging?

Essentially, without creating NEW discussion areas, you could tag a particular thread as being about a certain topic.  That way, you (as a user) could keep track of all the Technic discussions if you wanted to (for instance).  And if you like it the way it is, then you can ignore the tags completely.  And it wouldn't require making 52 kazillion new discussion areas, most of which would lay dormant and create clutter.

It looks like Vanilla Forums supports this in the form of hashtags, although I haven't read up much on what sorts of features there are around this particularly.  Might it be possible to create a list of acceptable tags, like say, #technic or #castle?  That way nobody starts a trend of hash-tagging things like #bobisajerk or other non-LEGO topics?  Would tags show up on a particular post only, or the entire thread? (I hope the thread). Could admins tag threads retroactively?

Lots I don't know, but throwing it out there.

DaveE

Bumblepants

Good idea, would be really helpful finding older stuff.

That said, Bob IS a jerk and we shouldn't dismiss that hashtag so quickly.

Paperballpark

Erm, given that all the hashtags link to is a search for that word, couldn't you just do a search for whatever you wanted - for example Technic or Castle?

plasmodium

Unless the hashtag is in front of a number - in which case it looks for the set with that number on the main site. I don't think it's the hashtagging that is being asked for here, so much as it is the ability to tag. In theory, it's a brilliant idea, because it allows a thread to have more than one category - for example, a thread could easily belong in "Buying and Selling" and "collecting". It would also allow someone to tag threads with a theme, and then have an easy filter to see all the threads with that theme (and thus get around the thorny issue of general threads...). Tags would allow that, but I have no idea how much work would have to be done to implement it...

One of the downsides as I see it would be that in order to make the feature very useful, sometime would have to retroactively go through and tag old threads.

There is also the argument that we have the search feature, which is all very well and good, but I've never found it very easy to use. It returns so many results in such a jumbled way that I find it quite difficult to use. It may just be that I need to put in the time to learn how to use it better, but then the argument could be made for a system that doesn't need someone to put in time to learn it well before they can use it. Again, I don't know too what extent the search function is built into the Vanilla forum engine and what kind of access Huw has to change it.

catwrangler

I've also found the search difficult to use - often there are threads that I know exist, but which don't come up in results, and I'm not using particularly esoteric or unlikely search terms. I've seen a few other people make similar comments. 

ricecake

If there's a specific thread you're searching for, maybe try doing a Google search and adding the phrase "site:bricksetforum.com" to your search query.