This has been on my mind for a while, and I've voiced a similar concern 1.5 months ago in the recurring topic, but it went unnoticed.

Israel has been and still is actively committing genocide against people of Gaza. You can read a summary of the reasons it's being called a genocide in the Wikipedia entry (and its sources) . Wikipedia itself has recognized it as genocide, naming the entry Gaza Genocide, and it's a major feat considering the contentious nature of the topic and the heavy regulation and debates in Wikipedia culture. Even a UN human rights experts said in March that there are reasonable grounds to think a genocide is being committed, and UN is dominated by US influence, and is much slower to act and react, especially when western or US interests are concerned (which applies in this case, because Israel is an ally).

Israel's online propaganda machine has been hard at work about this issue, in order to control the narrative (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Israel also now ranks among the world’s leading jailers of journalists., another evidence of their commitment to suppress dissenting voices and control the narrative around this issue. It's also worth noting that western coverage of Israel's acts has been said to be legitimising Israel's behavior.

I think most things in the world are some shades of gray, and it's very understandable for people to have ambivalent attitudes about it, but I do not think this is one of those cases, for the following reasons.

• There is an active, ongoing genocide.
• The genocider nation-state has been spreading its propaganda to control the international narrative, especially in US (because US is its biggest ally and funder). It's doing this because it knows support from US and its allies is crucial to keep the genocide going. This involves manufacturing consent in the citizens of these nations.
• Tildes is heavily populated with citizens of US and other western nations.
• Not actively opposing this propaganda means one is helping -albeit indirectly but still significantly- the genocider nation.

I should clarify that, as of this moment, I'm not blaming the moderators, and I'm not saying they are doing this consciously and with full consideration. Instead, I'm trying to illustrate what is going on in the wider context, and what the actions in this mini-environment mean in the wider context. Simply put, genocidal propaganda is not an issue where you can follow the middle-ground, especially when you have power over a community.

For these reasons, I propose two changes in terms of moderation.

1. Both from now on and retroactively, change the names of the "Israel-Hamas war megathreads" to "Gaza Genocide megathreads".
2. Create and, both from now on and retroactively, use the tag "Gaza Genocide" when tagging.

The first point is self-explanatory. As for the second point, there comes up only 4 topics when I search for "Gaza Genocide" in the site, even though there have been numerous discussions about it. None of them have the mentioned tag, but they have the Gaza and Genocide tags separately. Furthermore, one of the topics is mine, and I had put the tag Gaza Genocide but it was later removed by moderation, and replaced with other tags mentioning this topic. Again, not throwing personal shade to anyone, but I think this is not a good way to go about this topic. A special tag would give it more visibility, which the victims of the genocide need.

These are my suggestions. If anyone can think of anything else, they are welcome to share as well.

Based off of a suggestion @lou made about special tags, I wonder if would we could make a tag that is automatically applied when a lot of comments are added all at once and then removed when it reaches a more normal level of behavior?

I came to Tildes to get away from the endless political talk of reddit. Is there any way to unsubscribe from the political threads here? Most of them seem to be posted in ~misc, but there's other content there too.

A pretty simple feature. Just seems like it would be handy to apply a tag to posts that provide non-paywalled or archive links for posts that are walled or 404'd. The idea just being that it seems too much to put an "Exemplary" tag on it, but it seems too significant to just get a vote.

Ideally this would add the free link under the "Link Description" scrape, but that's probably hard to do. I guess you could also promote the tagged comment to the top of the stack, but then it seems like you can game out the sort to promote your commentary rather than just the link.

It is currently possible to block unwanted tags on Tildes. It would be great to also have a feature that allows users to raise tags they're more interested in. Posts with raised tags will get a score multiplier for the user that raised them, in the same way as Exemplary comments get a score multiplier.

An example of a website that implements this really well is https://lesswrong.com, where you can give score multipliers to different tags to raise or lower them on your homepage.

With the constant influx of new users from Reddit, every once in a while I see people complain about some type of content that they find disruptive and annoying. They take their dissatisfaction to the comments, either criticizing the poster or expressing their annoyance.

Those contributions are often disruptive and offtopic themselves, derailing a potentially productive discussion

Tildes has a feature that may come in handy in those cases: filtered tags. It allows the user to prevent content they dislike from being displayed to them.

To add a filtered tag, click on Filtered topic tags right below Browse the list of groups. You will be taken to a page where you can add any tags that you want to filter, one per line.

For example, if you are displeased with the amount of videos on your frontpage, just add videos and save. Now you won't see any video submissions.

If, at any time, you wish to see those posts, you can either click on View unfiltered list at the top of the page or click on the tag Videos in your Filtered topic tags list.

That way, you will never be annoyed by content you don't like :)

If you don't like a type of content, don't complain about it. Filter it!

I thought I could get away from "what [general topic or icebreaker that 99.9% of people have an opinion on]?" questions by filtering out ask.survey, but that seems not to be the case. There are still quite a few that are being considered just "Ask" questions, and not "surveys". Are these not being categorized very strictly, or is my notion of an ask.survey question mismatching that of the moderators of Tildes? Or is the ask/ask.survey distinction up to the poster, and not moderators?

I come to Tildes for articles on specific subjects, not ocean-wide-open questions that generate maximum participation froth. I might have to start filtering out ask as well (as ask.survey), but I'd rather not have to do that. If people ask "what [specific problem or specific topic]" questions, I'd be interested to read them.

Hi all.

I was wondering if there was a way to see all the tags that have been created on Tildes and their popularity? It would help when working out what tag to use, etc.

Maybe even a popularity break down by group that the tag was posted into would help loads when selecting the correct tag.

I can see that auto-complete for tags uses the 100 most commonly-used tags, not sure if this is by group or site wide, but even that list would be great to see.

Many thanks!
RRR

I've noticed we've gotten in the habit of using the author.[name] tagging convention on articles and blogs and I think this is a great idea. But to me it just seems more important than having to see it as just a tag amidst all the other tags. Right now we put the site name and favicon in a prominent spot whenever we post a link, and I get that this is much easier to extract reliably from just scraping the page than the bylines tend to be. But I wonder if any author.[name] tag could get promoted to a special spot in the "Article: X words" element?

Of course this does leave the question of what to do about multiple authors, but I think the usual convention in academia is to list the first author who appears on the list as the primary author.

I assume this has been discussed before, but when I tried searching for it the abundance of topics with "author" tags made it so I couldn't find anything. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

For many they are considered ~hobbies so ~hobbies.cars and ~hobbies.motorcycles would be a logical place. I don't know if ~transport would be a suitable main category for this since then trucks, tractors, trains and boats could also go there without bloating hobbies' sub-groups too much.

I'd like to hear your input on this, cheers.

There have been recent posts that reflect in-depth knowledge and significant effort to provide comprehensive information on a topic (examples here and here).

Yes, it's possible to bookmark these posts for individual reference. However, Tildes doesn't have a pinning feature given the current very loose organization of subjects/interest communities.

In that absence, I'd like to suggest a globally used ".wiki" sub-tag appended to topics, to narrow search results to highly informative entries on a subject.

Please let me know your thoughts on this.

I'd go ahead and add the .wiki sub-tag to a couple of entries myself, but I've lost tagging privileges after a long stretch of inactivity. Please consider that I'm interested in volunteering again.

This is a place to post your ideas about what to do about Tildes groups and tags. I'm going to write about some problems (as I see them) and save my ideas about solutions for the comments.

The taxonomy problem

We have tags and groups and they are somewhat arbitrary. A tag could be a group someday. A group can be downgraded to a tag if it's not used much.

Topics can have multiple tags, but they can be in only one group (and its ancestor groups).

It's hard to pick the right group. An example: a post about animals could go in ~enviro (for wildlife), ~hobbies (for pets), or ~science (for a scientific study). So where do you put news article about a scientific study of the effects of house cats on wildlife?

Adding ~animals seems like it would be a good thing because now you have an obvious place to find all the posts about animals. Animal lovers rejoice! But from a taxonomy point of view, it makes things worse, because now you have another place where you could logically put an article and another place to go looking for it. More groups means more edges and more edge cases. It's enough to make you wish for crossposts.

The competition problem

Tags are better for taxonomy, so why not just have tags? Because classifying topics isn't the only thing we want to do. As Deimos wrote about, eventually we'd like to have somewhat more independent communities, closer to subreddits but hopefully without their downsides. It would be nice if subreddits that wanted to migrate to Tildes could actually do it. We also want to have a good mix of topics on the front page, while allowing some groups to have a lot more posts than others.

I'll start with an analogy: if a school has only one sport that matters, the people who are good at that sport win socially, and other people don't have as much of a chance. But if you have multiple sports and clubs that people care about, there are more ways to win at something. I don't believe pretending everyone is a winner works all that well, but more ways to win promotes diversity and creates useful social ambiguity.

The front page of Tildes is the most visible and has limited space. That creates an all-against-all competition between topics. We also have groups with their own leaderboards, but they are lesser competitions and it's unclear if they matter yet. (I'm using them more, though.) Meanwhile, each topic has an independent leaderboard for its comments that doesn't conflict with any other game. (Maybe that's why I like megathreads?)

I haven't been thinking of Tildes in terms of leaderboards, but maybe it can explain why old-timers are often reluctant to post topics? We aren't really trying to win, but we have ideas about fair play. When there's only one game anyone cares about, we don't want to drown out other worthy topics by entering too many contestants. We're also a bit reluctant to enter anything that's too specialized into the competition, because it doesn't "deserve" the attention. It's not a worthy contestant and it's just gonna lose.

Also, sometimes this isn't a game you want to win. Entering a controversial topic into a competition can get you unwanted attention, and that's often no prize at all. When a game isn't one you wanted to enter, getting attention is more like losing than winning.

For the front page, I expect this problem will get worse with more people. Entering the competition brings more attention than before.

Note: thinking of a topic listing as a leaderboard for a game is only an analogy and I don't mean to promote competitiveness. They weren't designed to be leaderboards and I think we'd like to see design changes that reduce competitiveness. There are known downsides to competition that we don't want, like "cheating" to win with "unworthy" strategies and the rules-lawyering and jealousy that come with that.

Ideas?

Some rules for this "game": Please post one proposal per comment. If you have multiple independent ideas, you can post them separately, but post them together if they're interrelated.

Roughly knowing how many times each tag has been used would provide users actionable information if they would like to search or filter by tags.

It might improve UX when applying tags, but might have undesirable side effects in user behavior.

I can think of three places this might be implemented, and I don't know which, if any, we want:

When filtering topics by tags:

• informs users how large or small their scope is
• this view should probably be kept somewhat up to date

When looking at a topic's tags:

• informs users where to start searching/filtering
• passively builds a frame of reference for how tags are used?
• this view could be allowed to become outdated and stale without issue

When applying tags

• a more common tag might be less accurate, but it might be more helpful?
• in the auto fill issue weight by frequency was proposed, which is somewhat similar but more opaque
• this should probably use pretty recent counts as well

Tildes has a lot of threads that are not time dependant, be they asks, surveys, recommendations and hypotheticals. Should we make an effort to give these posts an evergreen tag, and maybe even auto bump them back into circulation after a few years?

I was trying to add andré bazin as a tag on an article about the film theorist André Bazin, but the box became red and prevented me from submiting. So I had to use the incorrect andre bazin.

I suppose there's a very rational technical reason for not using accentuation on tags -- even so, I believe it would be useful to suport those characters, since many languages use them.

Clicking a tag provides the search results for that tag in the local group. Since some topics appear across groups, I think it'd be useful to view site-wide results as well, optionally. Does that already exist?

When you click in a tag in a tildes group, you see the topics that have been posted in that group with that tag according to your filters. There's also a link to go back to normal viewing. I think an option to see that tag in all groups would be a neat addition, even if not particularly important. Thoughts?

This idea is inspired (at least for me, there are probably actual forums like Tildes to draw better comparisons to and take better inspiration from) by Danbooru (P.S: This image is just SFW scenery but the site as a whole is not) , where they have meta tags for stuff like image resolution, if it has commentary, it it's translated, animated, GIF, etc.

Should we consider that but for tags like long and short read or watch, videos, reposts/duplicate posts, spoiler threads, recurring.[ ], maybe news article authors too (also appropriated from Danbooru), since these can supercede any topic or group and will rarely be suggested in any single one of them?

If it's not clear what that looks like, imagine all the normal tags being suggested/typeable at the top and all the meta tags being suggested in a separate search box just below the current one, which are displayed regardless of which group you're in, since they can apply to all the site.

This post has twelve tags

My intuition says that’s too much. I’ve noticing that most people use a lot more tags than I do, but I don’t really know how they work, hence the question: is there such a thing as too many tags? What’s the best practice?

Say I wanted to create a thread about running. Running is a sport and hobby. Sports is often seen more as the professional side of things (say, Olympic running). Then again, many runners take their hobby quite seriously and definitely exercise it as a sport. How do I know which one of those two groups is the more appropriate?

This article I posted has been marked as a long read with 2.7k words but this other article I posted has 4.7k words and hasn't been marked as such so what gives?

We should probably also consider a 'medium read' and apply some of these standards to videos as well.

I'm sure it comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with what I generally submit to tildes that videos, history and history.military are my favorite topic tags... but some of the other slightly more obscure ones I also enjoy (all music related) are live, soul.blue_eyed, singer_songwriter, and cover_songs.

What about you all? What are your favorite topic tags on tildes?

p.s. If you provide the associated https://tildes.net/?tag=topic_tag links to the ones you mention so that we can all peruse them, that would be greatly appreciated. :)

Simple question. For people's original poems posted in ~creative, should they be tagged "poem" or "poems"?

"poetry" is the broader category, and includes discussions about poets and poetry in general. However, when someone posts their poem, should that be tagged "poem" or "poems"?

The tagging guidelines say (or used to say - since I re-organised the Docs pages, I can't find this reference any more) that tags should be plural. That indicates that "poems" is the better tag. But the post contains a single poem, which makes "poem" the better tag.

Opinions?

EDIT: In the end, I went with the popular choice. When I looked at the tags used in ~creative, I found over a hundred topics tagged "poem" and only four topics tagged "poems". It seems that most people naturally choose "poem" when posting a poem, so I standardised the few differently tagged topics to use "poem".

I know there's a task for grouping synonymous tags together, like "humor" and "humour". How high a priority is this?

I ask because poor @mycketforvirrad shouldn't have to feel like he needs to add a tag for "wildfires" every time someone posts a topic about the Australia bushfires (and tags it "bushfires").

How does this work, why are some tags on separate line?

Example:

How big are the fires burning in eastern Australia? Interactive map

~news australia · Article: 207 words
natural disasters bushfires

The australia tag is next to ~news, not in the tag list below.

(Emphasis on Some.)

Could there be a rudimentary auto-tagging system for automatically scraped stats? (Auto-tagging video content as videos, music artists by their names, long reads/watches,individual blogs and YouTube channels?) It could serve as a QoL feature and save some taggers and forgetful posters some time (I almost always forget to tag my videos accordingly and they're only tagged because someone remembers to, which is way too menial a tag to still need be added by humans.)

I've been noticing a couple of weird formatting issues with tags on topics. For some posts, the first tag is shown before the metadata, then the rest of the tags are on a new line below. This isn't always the case, and so far I can't find any rhyme or reason for whether it does or not. It's not like some CSS float issue or anything, it's actually creating two <ul>'s. — example

The second issue I've noticed is sometimes the dangling part of a letter like lowercase "g" will be cut off by the footer. It seems like this is caused by .label {line-height: 1.2;}, but it's also inconsistent, and I haven't figured out why. In this example the "g" in "climate change" is not affected.

Maybe it's just me, I dunno. Firefox 70 on linux. I'd create a gitlab issue, except I am very lazy.

I usually don't mind my tags getting erased and someone putting a more appropriate tag, but I want to know what is wrong with people.doing.something, or someone doing something, or someone.doing.something. I tried various ways today, and each one got removed, and I would like to know why.

I don't know if this would be only an option when you are creating a comment, or added to the list of tags like "Exemplary" and such, but an option to have a "Spoiler" comment tag that collapses the comment but doesn't affect ranking might be a good edition to the "What is your favorite media/What have you consumed recently/Recommendation threads." It's also something that the site already supports, and most importantly, looks atheistically pleasing to me compared to highlightable Spoiler Script.

Right now, there is number of comments visible when on main/group page. What would you think about excluding comments that are collapsed by default, such as those labeled as noise? I'm disappointed when I see 7 comments at an article, but there is none actually relevant to the article itself. The disadvantage of this is that the site could feel more dead, especially in low-activity groups.

Inspired by @Lawrencium265's suggestion from a few days ago on advanced topic tag filtering:

After the discussion the other day on expanding groups into sub groups I had an idea about topic tags, advanced tag filtering rules. The main argument against sub groups is that it would sequester people away from each other. By allowing more advanced tag rules you could subscribe to topics that you're interested in, but further filter those if they include topics you don't like or allow certain threads that would get filtered out unless they contain a tag you are interested in or are within a certain group. I think this would attract different people to threads that wouldn't normally be and allow more diverse discussion and insight. So instead of having gaming.tabletop you would use the tabletop tag under gaming and those who are not interested in it can filter it out and those who are solely interested in it can subscribe to it, and then if a topic gets tagged in an unrelated group that you otherwise wouldn't be interested inyou will know about. This also has the side benefit if preventing cross posting or duplicates.

I have decided that the topic of this week's unofficial discussion is going to be on the Tildes topic tag system. But rather than make it specifically on topic tag filtering and that idea in particular, I figured we could open the discussion up a bit more and have a community brainstorming session on the topic tag system in general. I.e. Anything related to tag browsing, tag filtering, tag organization/standardization, etc.

Feel free to comment on any of the open "topic tag" related issues on Tildes Gitlab that pique your interest and you would like to discuss more in depth, propose your own new ideas related to topic tags, or even just spitball.

The point here is to open up the conversation and get ideas flowing freely, so with that in mind, let's please try to keep things positive, and keep any criticism purely constructive and friendly so as not to discourage people from participating.

Previous Unofficial Weekly Discussions:

Week - #1

Other relevant links:
Donate to Tildes - Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board - Tildes Official Docs

This was inspired by this post where the user tagged the post as "sugges" rather than "suggestions."

Since tags decline in utility with minor spelling mistakes like this, I wonder if there could be a way for nitpicky grammarians, like myself, to just go through an edit broken tags, add relevant tags, prune unnecessary ones, etc.

I guess it would be sort of a moderation responsibility, but I expect we would prefer they focus on content moderation. Tag editing is low-key enough that people with this responsibility probably wouldn't need to be vetted as thoroughly or held to the same kind of community standards of behavior that a mod would be. We'd just have to trust them to not be pranksters or abusive with it (e.g. making tags like "this poster is a doodyhead").

among the things i have been working on for the past day and change is documentation of the novel uses of hierarchical tags on tildes, how they vary by group (or in the cases here, across most or all of the site), and how we might best begin to standardize, introduce, or deprecate them going forward so we're on the same page and end up with tags that aren't a giant, unfriendly, user-unintuitive mess.

obviously, though, this is something that should probably include community input since the community generally determines the tags used in the first place; therefore, this is your chance to check my work, suggest additions, removals, etc. to this draft and in the end, hopefully help craft a standard of hierarchical tagging that's simpler, more intuitive, and more consistent for everybody on the website to use so we can reduce future meta discussions on this and make tags better overall.

this will be done in chunks for convenience purposes (your sake and mine). therefore, if you would be so kind as to try and limit your suggestions to the pertinent tags, that would be most helpful.

Mostly group non-specific tags

There are also a number of tags which are more general and occur or can occur in several or all groups on the website. Some of the more common conventions of hierarchical tags that are generally not group-specific are:

economics. and similar tags

The economics tag can occur in several groups, most often ~science, ~news, and ~misc. While it can take hierarchical tags, standalone economics is usually fine. Nonetheless, with specific branches of economics like microeconomics and macroeconomics, hierarchical tags should probably be used (thus economics.micro, economics.macro, economics.applied, and so on). Examples of this in action (and further specification under this scheme) are:

• economics.trade (economics and trade)
• economics.micro.urban (urban microeconomics)
• economics.policy.employment (economic policy with respect to employment)

However, when placed in ~science, the standard is always socialsciences.economics over economics. to align with the standards of tagging in that group, thus socialsciences.economics.trade instead of economics.trade. Given that economics. in this case is itself a hierarchical tag, it may be pertinent to break off the last hierarchical tag into its own tag where it would lead to three consecutive hierarchical tags, like so:

• socialsciences.economics.micro and urban areas
• socialsciences.economics.policy and employment

law.

The law tag takes a very large number of modifiers and can be used in just about every group due to the fact that law generally transcends the current set of groups Tildes has. Historically, topics related to law have been tagged in the [modifier] law format (i.e. medical law, copyright law, us law, and so on); however, this has generally been phased out by the community in favor of using hierarchical tags for the modifiers. Therefore, with respect to pre-existing tags, constructions like medical law should be deprecated in favor of law.medical. In addition, the following tags which do exist should be converted accordingly:

• medical law (convert to law.medical)
• international law (convert to law.international)
• labor law (convert to law.labor)
• employment law (convert to law.employment)
• antidiscrimination laws (convert to law.antidiscrimination)
• copyright law (convert to law.copyright)
• maritime law (convert to law.maritime)
• environmental law (convert to law.environmental)
• gun laws (convert to law.guns)

All single modifier tags should follow a pattern like this. In other words, if you were going to tag something as "abortion law", you should do law.abortion instead of abortion law. Currently well established tags following this format are: law.citizenship, law.international, law.labor, law.marriage, and law.juvenile.

The following tags with location tags in them (and similar tags like them) should be converted slightly differently from the above tags. Instead of being rolled directly, the locator tag (or what would be the locator tag) should be broken out from the tag, and the tag that is left should have its modifier turned into a hierarchical tag if possible. Thus:

• usa federal laws is converted to law.federal and usa. (To elaborate in this case, the usa is separated, leaving federal laws which can be converted into law.federal)
• us law is similarly converted to law and usa
• european law is converted to law and european union

However, this should generally not be done with tags which refer to specific laws. For example religious neutrality law, blue laws and safe haven law are tags which should not be converted to use hierarchical tags because it makes little sense to do so.

There are also two specific tags which should generally not be rolled, which are martial law and law enforcement. Martial law is mostly used to refer to a specific state of affairs rather than an actual subset of law, so it makes little sense for this to be grouped into the law tag, while law enforcement is not really law in the sense being tagged here and is also covered by other tags like policing; using law.enforcement for this purpose would also be ambiguous, since it more likely would refer to enforcement of legal doctrine.

The use of the sharia law tag is ambiguous. Since sharia is de jure a form of law, it would make sense to roll it like the other examples so that the tag is law.sharia; however the two uses of it on Tildes are sharia law and there is currently no real consensus on whether or not to roll it in this manner.

nsfw., trigger., tw., cw. and similar tags

nsfw., trigger., tw, and cw. are all universal tags that have been used in one form or another to separate out content which might be objectionable and which are still useful for these purposes. Although all four have been used, the community has largely settled on a standard of using trigger. over tw. and cw. with potentially triggering content primarily for reasons of clarity (the trigger. tag also been put forward by Deimos previously as a way of handing potentially triggering and objectionable content). nsfw. is also sometimes used, but this is less frequent and usually carries a different implication than trigger. does.

As mentioned above, if you are using intending to use a tag of this sort, the preferred option in almost all cases is trigger. over tw. or cw.. For all intents and purposes, tw. and cw. should be considered mothballed and previous uses of them should probably be converted into trigger. at some point (particularly the duplicates tw.death, tw.suicide, and tw.selfharm).

The main established tags under the trigger. banner are:

• trigger.death
• trigger.selfharm
• trigger.suicide
• trigger.sexual violence
• trigger.rape
• trigger.assault
• trigger.child abuse
• trigger.transphobia
• trigger.homophobia (not used yet, but presumably applicable due to trigger.transphobia's existence)

These are self explanatory for the most part, and cover most bases; however, if you feel that a particular topic is likely to be triggering for some people, it would be courteous to tag it accordingly in line the above tags. (Do also note that all of these tags can be and often are applied as standalone tags instead of being grouped under trigger. due to the fact that trigger. has waxed and waned in popularity over Tildes's existence.)

If you are intending to post graphic content, or content which has the potential of exposing people to graphic content (broadly construed) and want to tag it accordingly, nsfw. is generally preferable over trigger.. nsfw. is quite rare, but one example of it in action is the nsfw.racism tag on Ignore The Poway Synagogue Shooter’s Manifesto: Pay Attention To 8chan’s /pol/ Board due to the exceptionally racist content screencapped as a part of the submitted article. nsfw.sex is also seen on Do Police Know How To Handle Abuse Within Kinky Relationships? due to the explicitly sexual nature of the article's subject, but this is more of a courteous measure than a necessary one--a qualified nsfw tag is generally not necessary, and if one is a moderator will most likely add it after the fact.

hurricanes., cyclones., and typhoons.

Tropical cyclone news generally fits into several places, most often ~news, ~enviro, or ~science. Generally, the standard for tagging tropical cyclones, whether they are hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, or other similar storms is to use the applicable term for the storm in question, and then use a hierarchical tag for the storm's name. Actual examples of this are:

• typhoons.yutu for the Pacific typhoon basin's Typhoon Yutu
• hurricanes.michael for the Atlantic basin's Hurricane Michael
• cyclones.idai for the South-West Indian basin's Cyclone Idai

This is relatively straightforward, and covers the nomenclature of all existing basins. However, some basins have not been represented on Tildes thus far, so here are the two cases where standards overlap for reference:

• the Pacific hurricane basin and the South Atlantic basin would both be represented by the same standard as the Atlantic basin (thus, hurricanes.patricia for the Pacific Hurricane Patricia and hurricanes.catarina for the South Atlantic Hurricane Catarina)
• the Australian, North Indian, and South Pacific basins would be represented by the South-West Indian basin's standard (thus, cyclones.tracy for Australian Cyclone Tracy, cyclones.fani for North Indian Cyclone Fani, and cyclones.gita for South Pacific Cyclone Gita).

For convenience purposes, storms which are named but have not hit hurricane status should probably still be referred to with the corresponding cyclonic storm tag for their basin, even though they have not formally reached hurricane, cyclone, or typhoon status.

If there is no name to refer to (i.e. a name has not been designated for the storm), a hierarchical tag should probably not be applied at all, since that would get messy and likely necessitate updates. With storms that have only nicknames or lack a name under the nomenclature since they predate cyclone naming (for example, the 1938 New England Hurricane) there's really no best way to do things, however, using a truncation of the nickname may be the most preferable option (for example: hurricanes.1938 new england).

Right now if a post is tagged with 'spoiler', that tag appears in its own color which is good. However, if you are interacting with a user and click through to their profile, there is no indication that some of their comments may have been in these spoiler threads and thus contain spoilers (just happened to me, thankfully for show I don't watch). It might be nice to somehow indicate these potential spoilers on the user page so that they can be skipped over.

The recent implementation of automatic tag suggestion has inspired another idea for me.

What if Tildes could suggest related tags to the one(s) you've already chosen? You select a tag for your topic, and then Tildes suggests other tags to add to your topic, sourced from tags which have been commonly used in association with that tag you've selected.

For example:

• You tag a topic with "facebook", and Tildes suggests "social media" and "privacy" to add.

• You tag a topic with "world war ii", and Tildes suggests "history", "nazis", and "military" to add.

• You tag a topic with "avengers", and Tildes suggests "marvel" and "superheroes" to add.

The data could be obtained by monitoring the frequency of associations between various tags: if tag B is frequently used in association with tag A, then tag B would be suggested as an additional option whenever tag A is used.

A recent thread has had its title changed due to the title being sensationalized. I'm not sure that this is the correct move, as the title in question was also the title of the submitted article. I think this does a disservice to the community as a whole, as it makes it appear as though we want to editorialize the content submitted here which seems to go against the ideal of fostering quality discussion.

"But wait!", I hear you say, "We have a topic log!" That will be ignored, easily, especially by those seeking to equate the community with something else. While we're busy misrepresenting content (because that's what changing a title does, it misrepresents), others will point at us and shout about how we're misrepresenting the content being posted. I cannot agree with this, and I think its detrimental to the community and the idea of Tildes as a whole. Note: Text-only posts obviously are excluded from this, I'm concerned with titles on submitted links that have their own title.

Now, what happens when the title of an article is already sensationalist and editorialized? The authors, editor, and publisher obviously have biases and platforms they want to support. It currently seems as though we are changing titles to something different than what the title of the article is, and I find this extremely off-putting. I can understand wanting to avoid bringing that bias over to Tildes, but I cannot understand a reason to deliberately misrepresent that bias by changing an article's title. I think this is going to be detrimental to the community and the mission of Tildes to generate high-quality discussion.

Where articles with sensationalized headlines are posted, I propose that we must retain those titles. The system of tagging is sufficient to indicate that a title is too strongly sensationalized. Deviating from this norm is antithetical with Tildes' mission to generate and foster quality content and discussion.

There are too many responses to really get into things individually, but I must say I feel as though there has been a breach of trust. I had no idea that altering the titles of submissions would go so far, and it has destroyed the image I had of the site. Maybe the site will evolve more as the experiment continues, who knows. In the meantime, I've been accused of making arguments in bad faith multiple times in this thread. I'm deeply offended by this, as I've tried to present my thoughts and feelings as clearly as I could. This is deeply troubling to me, especially since those accusations have been given strong support by other users.

unless we stopped editing titles

This is a misrepresentation, I only ask that titles match the article they're from. Edit away if the title doesn't match the article, or is a user's text post. Maybe I wasn't clear, but there it is spelled out.

Also, there was never an ultimatum, but Deimos and other users would smear me with such claims. Being unsure of whether or not a community is a good fit for yourself is not nearly the same thing as an ultimatum.

People are regularly using regional tags like "south america", "europe", "asia", and "africa" on posts... but almost never "north america". If we're going to use tags based on continents, should we be consistent and include North America as one of those tags?

On the other hand, are continental tags even relevant? Should we just drop them, and use only country-specific tags?

(previous discussion)

There are a lot of "eu" tags being used, which leads to ambiguity about whether it's "europe" or "european union".

I think we should stop using "eu" entirely, and use only the longer, more informative, tags.

(previous discussion)

EDIT: Typo.

Disclaimer: I'm not sure if I'm just now noticing something that has always been that way, or if something has actually changed.

Post tags aren't clickable on the main page, or on any group page. I can click on tags inside a topic, but I can't click on tags on the main page.

I feel like I used to be able to do this. I'm pretty sure I must have been able to do this, because I've done some work in the past making tags consistent, and that's how I obtained lists of posts with certain tags.

Has something changed? Or am I imagining things?

Deimos and I were discussing the use of "ask" topic tags this week, and we agreed it might be a good idea to get a consensus on these.

At the moment, Tilders are using four "ask" tags on topics:

• ask

• ask.survey

• ask.recommendations

• ask.help

(There may be more "ask" tags created in the future, but these four are what we're all using at the moment.)

Anything that's a question gets tagged with "ask". Some specific types of question will then get tagged with "ask.survey" or "ask.recommendations" or "ask.help", depending in the type of question being asked.

• "ask.survey" is for questions about preferences and favourites. "What's your favourite horror movie?" "What's the best place you ever visited?" "What's your favourite type of holiday?" The asker is collecting data about people's likes and dislikes (even if they're not going to publish the results in a report later!).

• "ask.recommendations" is for questions asking for recommendations. "What's a good browser to use?" "What book should I read next?" "Which brand of phone should I buy?" The asker is looking for people to recommend things to them.

However, Deimos and I wondered about "ask.help". One interpretation we came up with was that "ask.help" is for questions looking for a specific answer, where it should generally be possible for people to think "yes, this is the right answer to the question". This would include questions seeking help learning about an academic topic, such as happens in /r/AskScience and /r/AskHistorians over on Reddit. Another interpretation we came up with was that "ask.help" is for questions looking for guidance on doing something, like a "how to" type question. This would be more like the types of questions in /r/Help and like the Help menus in software and the F1 key - helping people get things done.

What do you think about the "ask" tags? In particular, what should the "ask.help" tag be used for? In general, are the existing "ask" tags okay? Do we need more "ask" tags? Do we need different "ask" tags?

I have posted a few topics on tildes so far, and someone edited the tags on it. I looked at that person's profile but couldn't see any indication that they were a mod. I am aware of the coming 'trysf' system, but I think it hasn't been implemented yet. My question: how does one edit tags? Is this a certain account age required?