How to make tagging easier?

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When I want to tag a post, I often come across the issue of “tagging uncertainty”. E.g.

  • Did I use singular (KungFuMovie) or plural (KungFuMovies) on other occasions?
  • Did I use ’native’ (KurosawaAkira) or Western (AkiraKurosawa) name order?
  • Have I even used a tag on this topic before, or is it the first time?

In order to check, I:

  • scroll up or down until I see the top of the community sidebar info
  • middle-click the link there to the community home page (only available on my own community because I placed one there myself) to open in a new tab
  • switch from posting window tab to that new tab
  • scroll down until I see “All community tags”
  • click on that
  • look for the tag I’m interested in
  • go back to the tab with the posting window
  • write the desired tag

E.g. for this very post, I wasn’t sure whether to tag it “tag”, “tags” or “tagging”. I had to click “Communities”, search for “help”, middle-click on “Piefed Help”, switch to that tab and then look at the tag area to see which form has been used previously.

Some ideas that might make tagging easier:

  • a “See all community tags” link next to the tags field in the posting window (easy to do?), opens in a new tab or a pop-up
  • auto-suggest one or more tags once you start typing one in the tag field (hard to do?), like on Mastodon
  • any other ideas, anyone?
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PieFed dev

Tags are chaos, embrace it.

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OP

Honestly?

At this point, given their very limited range of usefulness (one-community-only, mods can’t add, remove or edit tags on posts, clicking #tag won’t find #tags or #tagging, the work required to try to avoid such ‘tag splitting’, Lemmy users can’t add them, Lemmy users can’t see them), I’m tempted to just stop bothering with tags altogether.

But then I remember “Search this community” doesn’t really work…

jackiechan tag vs “Search this community” for jackie

So if I give up on tagging and community search is broken, what option does that leave for anyone trying to find something in a community? Flairs? Or just plain, old Ctrl+F? (Yes, I’ve had to resort to this with Piefed, with varying degrees of success.)

(I’ve already learned to keep an Alex Lemmy page open all the time, so I can do things like search a community.)

So I guess I have to keep tagging if I want Piefed users to be able to ever find anything. And I guess it will still involve me doing all those steps I listed in OP. :( Not exactly a candidate for !piefed_joy@piefed.social

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Love the spirit ha ha

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PieFed dev

It’s kind of a “wisdom of the crowd” thing. The idea that on average, in aggregate, most of the time, it starts to make sense and be useful. But individual posts are often tagged very “wrongly”.

Having said that… For space reasons the tag list in the sidebar is limited to 30 tags and I’m sure there is more we could do to improve the utility of it. Maybe a separate page which has a rotatable tag cloud at the top and below that the list of posts dynamically updates based on whatever is the currently selected tag…

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IMO the ability to make batch correction to tags (by the senior mod?) would be helpful for a cleaner tag experience.

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