This post has no stupid tags

April 11, 2005 9:09 AM

I'm pretty sure this has been requested before here, but can we please have a way to flag posts with stupid tags, while the rest of the content of the post is just fine?
posted by grouse to Feature Requests at 9:09 AM (20 comments total)

Bruce Lee was really flexible.
posted by knave at 9:18 AM on April 11, 2005

It should be a single BruceLee tag. No one's going to be looking for "Bruce" and expect this post. That said, grouse, it's a nice feature request, but could we get a better example? That one seems not so bad.
posted by Plutor at 9:42 AM on April 11, 2005

BTW, is there a direct link somewhere on the site to the tag list pages? I know that this and this exist, but are they obvious to new visitors to the site?
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 9:47 AM on April 11, 2005

For AskMe, at least, it's in the archives page, PST.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 9:56 AM on April 11, 2005

grouse: Your name fits you.
posted by Doohickie at 10:24 AM on April 11, 2005

My first callout in almost 4 years,it's like I've finally arrived. Knave figured out why I put the tag. But if you include serious tags in your post, I don't see what's wrong with including one joke tag.
posted by drezdn at 11:37 AM on April 11, 2005

As Plutor mentioned, the problem is not a tag indicating the post is about Bruce Lee, the problem is that there are two tags, one indicating the post is about "bruce" and the other that the post is about "lee." The intended tag is "brucelee" as Ask.Me's tag parser treats terms with spaces as two separate tags. It's not a huge deal, but it impedes the usability of the tags for other users.
posted by stet at 11:45 AM on April 11, 2005

Oh, I understand now.
posted by drezdn at 12:33 PM on April 11, 2005

I shouldn't have mentioned a specific post, as I would not have called it out if I weren't asking for the feature. That's why I'm asking for a feature--this stuff isn't really worth a callout and discussion.
posted by grouse at 12:49 PM on April 11, 2005

Doesn't a joke tag on an AskMe post kind of defeat the purpose of tags? I've seen witty or dry humor tags work elsewhere, but adding joke tags in AskMe is just adding noise to the part of the site that's supposed to be most noise-free.
posted by mediareport at 12:50 PM on April 11, 2005

The space separator is starting to cause a few 'variations on the same tag', for instance there's album_covers and albumcovers, alternativeenergy and alternative-energy. Sooner or later it's going to get messy; comma separation seems like a good plan.
posted by TheDonF at 2:05 PM on April 11, 2005

I think "noise" applies, it just might take Matt a second look to realize that the noise is in the tags, not the post.
posted by scarabic at 2:32 PM on April 11, 2005

I haven't wanted to search tags at all yet; are there many Mefites who do find tags useful? I know it might be early in the game to ask that.

Tags are always messy; that's the trade you make for flexibility (heh). But maybe a one-line tag stylebook on the posting page? I'd second comma separation and maybe even a script to excise spaces and hyphens. Granted, then we'd get huge multi-word tags from people who forgot their commas.
posted by NickDouglas at 2:33 PM on April 11, 2005

Now, has anyone found the tag database to be hopelessly polluted with joke tags?

Or, has anyone found it to be hopelessly polluted with poorly typed one-or-two word tags?

No? Then isn't this putting the cart before the horse a little bit? Sounds to me like this is just one guy's grievance with joke tags. Do joke tags really need a flag all of their own? I don't think so. That, sir, is a molehill. It may seem large, but it's really just a molehill.
posted by shmegegge at 4:14 PM on April 11, 2005

I'm not going to mark an otherwise good post as noise.
posted by grouse at 5:13 PM on April 11, 2005

but you'll mark it for having a tag you don't like? What should then happen to the otherwise good post?

I'm just not seeing the big deal, here, I guess.
posted by shmegegge at 10:13 PM on April 11, 2005

The tag will be removed. Fearless Leader has seen fit to remove things like "quonsar" tags in the past.
posted by grouse at 12:44 AM on April 12, 2005

Actually on thinking about it, maybe the whole post was deleted in the case of the quonsar tag.
posted by grouse at 12:45 AM on April 12, 2005

speaking of which, I'm curious as to Leader comma Fearless's opinion on the matter.
posted by shmegegge at 10:27 AM on April 12, 2005

nobody can agree on the type of joining character, be it - or _ or just no whitespace at all.

I think the majority opinion is that there should be no space at all.

If tags were separated by commas instead of spaces, I think we would just end up with greater confusion - people would forget to put commas, and would still disagree about whether things should be oneword or connected-by-dash or whatever else (as has been an issue on the internet/ computers since the beginning...).

Joke tags aren't really the end of the world. if they became an actual source of confusion, I'm sure something would be done, but as it is, if someone for some reason chooses to search for all askme questions on BruceLee, they will have this not very relevant post among the batch. Unlikely to really be problematic.

Most people will probably use tags for posts on music or book recommendations, and maybe tech help. If those tags are commonly used in a misleading way for no purpose, then it'd be worth a call out, but this example isn't.
posted by mdn at 2:16 PM on April 12, 2005