A couple thoughts about tags since this is a convenient place to do it (it would probably be good to write up some guidelines): A music tag shouldn't be necessary - I think if the tag is the same...
A couple thoughts about tags since this is a convenient place to do it (it would probably be good to write up some guidelines):
A music tag shouldn't be necessary - I think if the tag is the same as the group name, that's probably a sign that it's not needed.
I'm not totally certain, but I think using underscores to separate words in tags (and group names) would probably be best. music_video vs. musicvideo. What do you think? This could be helpful in the future for things like search, where it's nice to have the words separated instead of having to deal with substrings because you can't really be sure what's a word or not.
Yeah, I think the music tag is pretty redundant and while underscores are an okay way to separate two-word tags, it can get awkward with three-word (or more) tags. However, the bigger issues IMO...
Yeah, I think the music tag is pretty redundant and while underscores are an okay way to separate two-word tags, it can get awkward with three-word (or more) tags. However, the bigger issues IMO is the limited set of characters that is going to cause problems down the line.
E.g. Rhythm and Blues is always simply referred to as R&B but since you have restricted the character set for tags we can't use that. R_and_B, RnB, R_n_B all look wrong and Rhythm_and_Blues is stupidly long.
I know you want to keep the tags URI friendly... but TBH I really would suggest perhaps opening up the character set a bit more using URI Percent-encoding since I am 100% positive that R&B isn't the only example of how such a limited character will be a problem. Even steam uses % encoding and allows spaces on their tags for just that reason (Point & Click game tags as a prime example of why).
Another reason spaces and %-encoding is important is for standards in search. When peoplewant to search for "Word & Other Word" they want the result to reflect that... but if everyone is being forced to avoid using spaces and alternate character you will have a mess of non-standard and unintuitive tags like Word_and_OtherWord, Word_n_OtherWord, Word_and_Other_Word, etc...
I know it's going to be inconvenient in some cases, but you have to think about it from the perspective of, "in the future, when R&B is active enough that it needs its own subgroup, what is that...
I know it's going to be inconvenient in some cases, but you have to think about it from the perspective of, "in the future, when R&B is active enough that it needs its own subgroup, what is that subgroup named?"
It's definitely not going to be named ~music.r%26b. It's not just a display thing on the site - it's going to be in the url bar for every post on the group, and will be how it looks if anyone posts a link anywhere - https://tildes.net/~music.r%26b/asdf/title_goes_here looks really bad.
Hey Deimos! Nice place you've got here :) Regarding tags, I just made my first post and completely missed that tags were a thing, so I added them into my title instead. Maybe have a spot on the...
Hey Deimos! Nice place you've got here :)
Regarding tags, I just made my first post and completely missed that tags were a thing, so I added them into my title instead. Maybe have a spot on the submit page where you can enter tags before you post?
I think that tags should allow for spaces. If anyone wants to tag something with anything longer than a word or two (i.e., a common phrase), both underscores and mushing the words together are going to be annoying to type and unappealing to look at.
Hey Flashynuff, welcome! The site's awfully minimal right now, but hopefully usable. Agreed, tags should definitely be possible to add while submitting. The spaces thing is a little trickier...
Hey Flashynuff, welcome! The site's awfully minimal right now, but hopefully usable.
Agreed, tags should definitely be possible to add while submitting.
The spaces thing is a little trickier though. I think the problem is that if you allow spaces, space can't be a separator any more. So right now, if you wanted to tag this post with 3 tags: "retro", "pop", and "music video", what would you type in the tag box?
(Currently it would have to be retro pop music_video)
retro pop music video won't work, because then you'd get 4 tags.
You could do something like retro pop "music video", but I don't know if that's much less annoying.
Or possibly retro, pop, music video which is a bit annoying to type too, and forgetting a comma would mean your tags get combined.
Also, I'm not sure if you've seen it yet, but as I mentioned on the Mechanics page, there's a lot of interesting things we might be able to do when tags and group names are semi-interchangeable. Group names definitely can't have a space in them, so it would be best to keep tags the same.
However, I guess we could allow kind of entering/displaying tags with a space, but internally the spaces are actually underscores?
I'm just kind of rambling now. What do you think? Do any of those methods for entering tags seem better (or something else)?
Everyone uses commas as separators in tag systems and it's an industry standard at this point so I don't think you're being all that realistic about the concerns there. ;) retro, pop, music video...
what would you type in the tag box?
Everyone uses commas as separators in tag systems and it's an industry standard at this point so I don't think you're being all that realistic about the concerns there. ;)
retro, pop, music video = retropopmusic video is the expected outcome for the vast majority of people when writing tags.
And if people do forget the commas the first time they input the tags they can learn the proper form and correct themselves after... or, once "mod"/community tools come into effect, other people can correct the mistake for them.
I think the best method for tag entry is tab-complete, similar to how Tumblr does it. You type the full tag, spaces and all. Then, if you want to enter more tags you hit tab or enter and keep...
I think the best method for tag entry is tab-complete, similar to how Tumblr does it. You type the full tag, spaces and all. Then, if you want to enter more tags you hit tab or enter and keep typing.
For your example, that would end up being retro<tab or enter>pop<tab or enter>music video<tab or enter>
This would be harder to incorporate into the mobile design, since phones don't usually have tab keys on their keyboards. They do usually have enter keys though.
For the tag hierarchy, i do like the idea of displaying things as a space but actually having it as underscores. That seems like it would avoid a lot of dev headaches (or possibly introduce more, haha). You could also disallow spaces in a hierarchical tag: i.e., you could do marvel.spoilers but not marvel movie.spoilers or marvel.movie spoilers
I disagree with that as the "best method"... comma separated value is the industry standard for tag systems and IMO it should be used on tildes as well, not some potentially confusing alternative...
I disagree with that as the "best method"... comma separated value is the industry standard for tag systems and IMO it should be used on tildes as well, not some potentially confusing alternative system that offers literally no benefits over the industry standard and even has some glaring shortcoming over it like being unfriendly to mobile users.
Just checked Tumblr -- it actually completes a tag when you press comma, as well as tab or enter. It's more or less the same concept, using some character that isn't a space to separate the tags....
Just checked Tumblr -- it actually completes a tag when you press comma, as well as tab or enter.
It's more or less the same concept, using some character that isn't a space to separate the tags. It doesn't really matter what character is used, whether that's a comma, tab, or enter.
I'm not suggesting an alternative system, just that a system that 'completes' the tag before submitting them so the user has immediate visual feedback on what their tags are. It's just a front-end thing -- it has no actual bearing on how the tags are submitted.
Mobile-wise, yeah, most mobile keyboards don't have tabs. that's why I suggested using tabs OR enter lol
Yeah, there is nothing stopping tildes from accepting multiple delimiters... commas, tabs or spaces (although spaces makes using spaces in tags impossible). However outside of comment fields...
Yeah, there is nothing stopping tildes from accepting multiple delimiters... commas, tabs or spaces (although spaces makes using spaces in tags impossible). However outside of comment fields <enter> usually submits already filled out data to the site and so that is the expected behavior and why you probably shouldn't use that as a separator mechanism. That expectation is the reason so many sites require you to hold alt while hitting enter in order to get a newline.
A couple thoughts about tags since this is a convenient place to do it (it would probably be good to write up some guidelines):
musictag shouldn't be necessary - I think if the tag is the same as the group name, that's probably a sign that it's not needed.music_videovs.musicvideo. What do you think? This could be helpful in the future for things like search, where it's nice to have the words separated instead of having to deal with substrings because you can't really be sure what's a word or not.Yeah, I think the
musictag is pretty redundant and while underscores are an okay way to separate two-word tags, it can get awkward with three-word (or more) tags. However, the bigger issues IMO is the limited set of characters that is going to cause problems down the line.E.g. Rhythm and Blues is always simply referred to as R&B but since you have restricted the character set for tags we can't use that.
R_and_B,RnB,R_n_Ball look wrong andRhythm_and_Bluesis stupidly long.I know you want to keep the tags URI friendly... but TBH I really would suggest perhaps opening up the character set a bit more using URI Percent-encoding since I am 100% positive that R&B isn't the only example of how such a limited character will be a problem. Even steam uses % encoding and allows spaces on their tags for just that reason (Point & Click game tags as a prime example of why).
Another reason spaces and %-encoding is important is for standards in search. When peoplewant to search for "Word & Other Word" they want the result to reflect that... but if everyone is being forced to avoid using spaces and alternate character you will have a mess of non-standard and unintuitive tags like
Word_and_OtherWord,Word_n_OtherWord,Word_and_Other_Word, etc...I know it's going to be inconvenient in some cases, but you have to think about it from the perspective of, "in the future, when R&B is active enough that it needs its own subgroup, what is that subgroup named?"
It's definitely not going to be named
~music.r%26b. It's not just a display thing on the site - it's going to be in the url bar for every post on the group, and will be how it looks if anyone posts a link anywhere -https://tildes.net/~music.r%26b/asdf/title_goes_herelooks really bad.Hey Deimos! Nice place you've got here :)
Regarding tags, I just made my first post and completely missed that tags were a thing, so I added them into my title instead. Maybe have a spot on the submit page where you can enter tags before you post?
I think that tags should allow for spaces. If anyone wants to tag something with anything longer than a word or two (i.e., a common phrase), both underscores and mushing the words together are going to be annoying to type and unappealing to look at.
Hey Flashynuff, welcome! The site's awfully minimal right now, but hopefully usable.
Agreed, tags should definitely be possible to add while submitting.
The spaces thing is a little trickier though. I think the problem is that if you allow spaces, space can't be a separator any more. So right now, if you wanted to tag this post with 3 tags: "retro", "pop", and "music video", what would you type in the tag box?
(Currently it would have to be
retro pop music_video)retro pop music videowon't work, because then you'd get 4 tags.You could do something like
retro pop "music video", but I don't know if that's much less annoying.Or possibly
retro, pop, music videowhich is a bit annoying to type too, and forgetting a comma would mean your tags get combined.Also, I'm not sure if you've seen it yet, but as I mentioned on the Mechanics page, there's a lot of interesting things we might be able to do when tags and group names are semi-interchangeable. Group names definitely can't have a space in them, so it would be best to keep tags the same.
However, I guess we could allow kind of entering/displaying tags with a space, but internally the spaces are actually underscores?
I'm just kind of rambling now. What do you think? Do any of those methods for entering tags seem better (or something else)?
Everyone uses commas as separators in tag systems and it's an industry standard at this point so I don't think you're being all that realistic about the concerns there. ;)
retro, pop, music video =
retropopmusic videois the expected outcome for the vast majority of people when writing tags.And if people do forget the commas the first time they input the tags they can learn the proper form and correct themselves after... or, once "mod"/community tools come into effect, other people can correct the mistake for them.
I think the best method for tag entry is tab-complete, similar to how Tumblr does it. You type the full tag, spaces and all. Then, if you want to enter more tags you hit tab or enter and keep typing.
For your example, that would end up being
retro<tab or enter>pop<tab or enter>music video<tab or enter>This would be harder to incorporate into the mobile design, since phones don't usually have tab keys on their keyboards. They do usually have enter keys though.
For the tag hierarchy, i do like the idea of displaying things as a space but actually having it as underscores. That seems like it would avoid a lot of dev headaches (or possibly introduce more, haha). You could also disallow spaces in a hierarchical tag: i.e., you could do
marvel.spoilersbut notmarvel movie.spoilersormarvel.movie spoilersI disagree with that as the "best method"... comma separated value is the industry standard for tag systems and IMO it should be used on tildes as well, not some potentially confusing alternative system that offers literally no benefits over the industry standard and even has some glaring shortcoming over it like being unfriendly to mobile users.
Just checked Tumblr -- it actually completes a tag when you press comma, as well as tab or enter.
It's more or less the same concept, using some character that isn't a space to separate the tags. It doesn't really matter what character is used, whether that's a comma, tab, or enter.
I'm not suggesting an alternative system, just that a system that 'completes' the tag before submitting them so the user has immediate visual feedback on what their tags are. It's just a front-end thing -- it has no actual bearing on how the tags are submitted.
Mobile-wise, yeah, most mobile keyboards don't have tabs. that's why I suggested using tabs OR enter lol
Yeah, there is nothing stopping tildes from accepting multiple delimiters... commas, tabs or spaces (although spaces makes using spaces in tags impossible). However outside of comment fields <enter> usually submits already filled out data to the site and so that is the expected behavior and why you probably shouldn't use that as a separator mechanism. That expectation is the reason so many sites require you to hold alt while hitting enter in order to get a newline.