Making tags viewable from the front page?

October 8, 2007 12:26 PM

Suggestion: Can we somehow make the tags of a post viewable from the front page. Whether it is just printed out directly on the page, or whether you need to hover or click on something to see them.

I think this neatly solves the hama7 problem, and would probably encourage people to tag better.

posted by empath to Feature Requests at 12:26 PM (38 comments total)

seconded. It's common on other sites that use tagging.
posted by By The Grace of God at 12:34 PM on October 8, 2007

If other websites do it, it must be a good idea.
posted by Plutor at 12:37 PM on October 8, 2007 [1 favorite]

I think a hover or a folding list of tags would work great. Esp. since tags are part of the content.
posted by bigmusic at 12:38 PM on October 8, 2007

Please, no! Keep it clean. (But I think even the number of comments is front page clutter.)
posted by R. Mutt at 12:43 PM on October 8, 2007

Good suggestion, empath. I was just thinking about this the other day (pre hama) when doing some back tagging. My vote is for hoverable but not displayed-by-default tags. I still like the (relative) uncluttered nature of the front, but would love if the extra information was accessible without clicking through.

Not a coder, so I don't know if this is a big favour to ask of matt/pb.
posted by mosessis at 12:45 PM on October 8, 2007

The hama7 problem? What's wrong with a little misdirection? Also, I've never used tags as a means to clarify what a post I'm reading is about. Displaying tags on the front page will just make things more confusing, and less interpretative. Making tags hoverable will create more opportunity for misdirection, either through the use of silly tags, or through the prevalence of more non-descriptive posts that depend on hoverable tags for explanation. No thank you.
posted by phaedon at 12:49 PM on October 8, 2007

Previously.
posted by Rhomboid at 12:50 PM on October 8, 2007

I think this neatly solves the hama7 problem

There is no hama7 problem. There is problem with people who dislike that style of posting (and I'm one of those people, so I'm not throwing stones), but hama7 isn't doign anything wrong.

The tag suggestion sounds like feature creep. If you can see them on the front page, why not be able to click on them? Or see related tags? What if a post has ten tags, do you want to display them all? If this a "solution" to hama7 style posts, how often do such posts occur and does it warrant the recoding effort? It sounds like it would make people lazy, as they can just point to the tags and say "Hey, it's all there". In fact, this might encourage hama7 style posts, since people would have a the perfect defense of "Hey, the tags are on the front page, why should I write out a description?"
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:52 PM on October 8, 2007

I like his posts. But he does tag them, and i think actually DISPLAYING those tags instead of making you click the thread to see them actually resolves the obscurity issue people had with his posts.
posted by empath at 12:54 PM on October 8, 2007

Yes, why not be able to click the tags?
posted by empath at 12:54 PM on October 8, 2007

I would also predict the usage of one-off, throw away cutesy tags.
posted by R. Mutt at 12:56 PM on October 8, 2007

You can already see the tags if you go into the post. The difference in effort expended between moving the mouse to the right place to get a list on hover, and clicking to go inside the post is essentially zero.
posted by Wolfdog at 1:03 PM on October 8, 2007

bleh. I agree with phaedon and R.Mutt. It will encourage frivolous clutter and non-descriptive FPPs.
posted by desjardins at 1:03 PM on October 8, 2007

Why not make it a per-user preference?

That way people who don't mind clutter can have clutter, and those who don't like frivolous clutter don't have to have clutter.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:06 PM on October 8, 2007

I would also predict the usage of one-off, throw away cutesy tags.

Well, they've existed since tags were born, so you're not going very far out on a limb, but sometimes those one-off, throw away cutesy tags become part of the tagging canon, so they're not entirely useless.
posted by dersins at 1:06 PM on October 8, 2007

True. I actually meant to say increased usage, but you are right about the useful batshitinsane tag.
posted by R. Mutt at 1:16 PM on October 8, 2007

i think actually DISPLAYING those tags instead of making you click the thread to see them actually resolves the obscurity issue people had with his posts.

Right. People who won't click on the link to find out what it is are going to be mollified by having to click to display tags? Or displaying the tags (those form teh most recent hama7 post: arhiva7, weblog, graphic, netlabel, free, electronic, music) will really make things clearer?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:16 PM on October 8, 2007

CHANGE IS BAD.
posted by empath at 1:35 PM on October 8, 2007

UNNECESSARY ADDITIONS THAT DIVERT RESOURCES FROM MORE PRODUCTIVE CHANGES TO THE SITE ARE BAD
posted by patricio at 1:51 PM on October 8, 2007 [1 favorite]

CHANGE IS BAD.

No pouting. You can make another meta post in a couple of days.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:53 PM on October 8, 2007

dersins: "sometimes those one-off, throw away cutesy tags become part of the tagging canon"

Sometimes? You mean once?
posted by Plutor at 2:05 PM on October 8, 2007

Sometimes? You mean once?

At least twice. I'm sure there are more, but I'm way too lazy to dig any deeper than the popular tags page.

Maybe someone can write a greasemonkey (whatever the hell that is) thingumbob to find more.
posted by dersins at 2:29 PM on October 8, 2007

I would like to have this - with no clicking or hovering required if possible.
posted by tomcooke at 2:29 PM on October 8, 2007

Can we somehow make it possible to have MetaFilter pour our beers, light our cigarettes, load our bongs, defrost our fridges and scoop the poop and pee clumps out of our cat boxes ?
posted by y2karl at 2:57 PM on October 8, 2007 [3 favorites]

MetaFilter taggers invented "wtf"! You heard it here first!
posted by Plutor at 3:06 PM on October 8, 2007

No, this is technically impossible. You're going to have to wait for Web 3.0.
posted by shmegegge at 3:11 PM on October 8, 2007

I don't think this solves a problem, and is just a way to complicate things.
posted by nowonmai at 3:28 PM on October 8, 2007

MetaFilter taggers invented "wtf"! You heard it here first!

Metafilter taggers didn't invent batshitinsane, either. Are you willfully missing the point, or do you just have a case of the Mondays?
posted by dersins at 3:41 PM on October 8, 2007

The tags are in the RSS feeds, so there's a workaround in readers that display them. I think tags are more useful information about posts than everything currently displayed under them on the front page, so I'd favor this suggestion.
posted by scottreynen at 4:12 PM on October 8, 2007

Can we somehow make it possible to have MetaFilter pour our beers, light our cigarettes, load our bongs, defrost our fridges and scoop the poop and pee clumps out of our cat boxes ?

MetaFilter already does all those things for me. I keep telling it I don't smoke, but it lights cigarettes for me anyway.
posted by languagehat at 5:05 PM on October 8, 2007

Why don't we all just tag hama7's mom? That's what I like to call "win-win"
posted by Kwine at 5:06 PM on October 8, 2007

Super fancy would be displaying n tags, say three, whatever, ranked by frequency in the existing corpus.

E.g.:

bush
iran
war
(thread page only: ahmadinejad, op-ed, omgworldwariii)

or

photo
nsfw
batshitinsane
(thread page only: bodymodification, penis, ouch)
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 7:43 PM on October 8, 2007

empath: I like his posts. But he does tag them, and i think actually DISPLAYING those tags instead of making you click the thread to see them actually resolves the obscurity issue people had with his posts.

I'd put money down that displaying tags on the front page would coincide with the advent of tag-less hama7 posts.
posted by carsonb at 9:51 PM on October 8, 2007 [1 favorite]

matt, there is clearly a cabal, the hama7 problem is real and rampant, and I am holding a fucking spoon right now.
posted by tehloki at 11:30 PM on October 8, 2007

That's no spoon.
posted by blacklite at 3:11 AM on October 9, 2007

I am holding a fucking spoon right now.

Sorry, tehloki, not only is not not a spoon, there is no spoon.
posted by dersins at 8:48 AM on October 9, 2007 [1 favorite]

One of those "not"s should be a "that," and I shouldn't be posting before I have my coffee....
posted by dersins at 8:49 AM on October 9, 2007

Sounds like a huge mess of database queries to me!
posted by that girl at 10:09 AM on October 9, 2007