Adding Tags?

November 19, 2005 4:36 PM

Sorry if this has been mentioned before, but I was wondering if readers would ever be able to add tags to a thread. The reason I am asking is that when I wanted to show the video linked at the top of this thread to a friend, I first looked here. When I did find what I was looking for soon after, it occured to me that if I could just add a video tag to the thread, it might help someone else. Again, I apologize for for whining about something that might already be a resolved issue - I don't frequent Metatalk much.
posted by jann to Feature Requests at 4:36 PM (12 comments total)

From the beginning of the tagfrenzy, I've militated for user-added private tags to be possible, but visible only to that user (and thus private) to create, in effect, an organizing and bookmarking feature.

Public tags on the other hand should only be addable by the thread starter, though, I'd say. Too much gaming of the system otherwise.

There have in fact been numerous discussions about it. I think mathowie may be planning a few features leveraging tags, and this may be one of them. I can't remember what he's said about it.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:43 PM on November 19, 2005

Private tagging would be great, especially given that search has recently become less useful with the removal of the native site search feature.
posted by killdevil at 7:04 PM on November 19, 2005

There's too much margin for abuse: think of all the threads which would be pegged as "Crap", "GYOBFW", "Drunk", "WTF", "Lies", "Tinfoil", and "Drama", to name only a scant few. And that's on a good day...
posted by Smart Dalek at 7:08 PM on November 19, 2005

yeah, I figured that would be the answer. I was just wondering if there wasn't any consideration of having some sort of user-based component. alternatively, I'd be happy with some comments on the "post a link" or posting guidelines page, encouraging people to tag their threads, and giving useful advice on tagging best practices. For example, I'd really appreciate it if more people would tag their posts not only with words regarding the subject of the link, but the medium as well.
posted by jann at 7:28 PM on November 19, 2005

Well, being a Luddite late adopter type, one project is to go through my past posts and add tags. The topical ones will be straight forward. However, in regards to the music and arts posts, I am open to intelligent suggestions--my email is on my user page.
posted by y2karl at 8:10 PM on November 19, 2005

I'm patiently waiting for my tagging feature request to still come through...
posted by Robot Johnny at 9:16 PM on November 19, 2005

Make tags completely public. If people are dicks about it ban them. It's too crowded anyway.
posted by nthdegx at 6:56 AM on November 20, 2005

It would be nice to have user-added tags, it seems to me; every time I make a post I wonder what tags I haven't thought of adding. If it turned out to be considered to be a very helpful asset, maybe the cost of abusing it could be high, to seriously discourage idle fiddling.
posted by taz at 7:36 AM on November 20, 2005

erm, basically, what nthdegx said.
posted by taz at 7:37 AM on November 20, 2005

Why not make it so that commenters can only tag based on already-available tags? That is, you can't make up new tags if you're not the original poster, you can only add tags that already exist. That way, if someone wanted to use tags maliciously, they'd have to add the tag to one of their own posts first, and looking for the first instance of a tag would reveal who'd tagged the post that way. Also, there could be a list of unallowable tags.
posted by eustacescrubb at 2:41 PM on November 20, 2005

Well, as long as we're all going to get a pony this christmas, I think my ideal system would be one where anyone could tag any post with whatever they wanted, and then I as a user could elect to ignore a given user's tags. Sort of a very rudimentary web of trust situation. I could see this chewing up a good amount of server CPU though.
posted by whir at 7:42 PM on November 20, 2005

...and now that I'm thinking about it, the above wouldn't solve the tag vandalism problem for non-registered users.

I suppose an alternative might be to have an "official" collection of author-listed tags and a whole different set of user-added tags, with the understanding that the user ones night be a more contentious set.

I don't personally see a lot of value in purely private tagging, and it seems a pity to let all that community-generated metadata go to waste.
posted by whir at 8:25 PM on November 20, 2005