Topic listings can now be filtered to a specific tag
This is the first of several updates coming soon to make the topic-tagging system more functional, since it's been only informational up until this point.
You can now filter a topic listing down to showing only posts with a particular tag by clicking on that tag in the listing. It will affect the current listing you're on, whether that's your home page or inside a group. So for example, clicking a "facebook" tag on your home page will take you to this page - a list of all topics with the tag "facebook" in your subscriptions. Doing it from inside ~tech would go to this page instead, which is "facebook"-tagged topics inside only ~tech.
One thing to note is that (as mentioned in the mechanics page), tags can be hierarchical and this filtering supports that. For example, filtering to "rock" in ~music will also show a post I made yesterday tagged "rock.progressive".
Let me know if you notice any oddities with it or have any feedback about how it works.
And just like that, you've made a better music discovery platform than reddit :P
edit: are there any plans to "standardize" tags? e.g., so we don't end up with
new.releaseandnew release?I'm sure we'll want to have some sort of tag autocomplete/suggestions at some point, but a lot of it can probably also just be managed manually once trusted users are able to edit other users' tags. Then if there's a mistake with the tags it's easily corrected.
How far away is this feature? A week, a month, three months, a year?
It probably depends exactly what I do. The "other users can edit tags" part is extremely simple, the harder part is more "show a log of who changed the tags and what changes they made".
Perhaps under the "browse list of groups" button there could be a "browse list of tags" that provides a wordcloud/listing of the popular tags in use for that page. It would make it easier to see what the "chosen" version of a tag with multiple possible variations is.
That would have the problem of limiting people's choices to tags that have been used before. They might not be inclined to create new tags, even when necessary.
If I'm reading this correctly, the intention here would look a little like the way booru sites categorise images right?
You let all users tag images and then have moderators that curate the tags.
You then also have tag synonyms, tags that essentially do exactly the same thing as another tag. A facebook tag is the same as fb, for example.
Is this interpretation correct? If so I completely agree with it. It's the most powerful and functional way of tagging things I've seen and it works for even the most nuanced of things...
I would even go so far as to suggest allowing all users to tag when you have the moderation for it. And then letting it get sorted out by mods. I think a positive side of this is that it will get heavily abused by bad users, which will be a relatively painless way to identify bad users without them actually affecting the comments or other users. A malicious tag for "gay agenda" is much much more preferable to a derailing comment. And is super easy for moderators to fix. Less intrusive than the malicious commenting activity to the majority of the userbase and really not very damaging to the site as a whole. Easy bans.
Giving the bad people ways to out themselves as bad users and remove them without actually harming most of the community seems like a really solid concept. At least for as long as the site is invite-only.
Very neat, thanks. I take it this means you can't do the opposite yet, filter out tags?
That should be next. It's a bit more work because it requires more on the interface side (you'll want to be able to set up persistent filters).
Thank you for this @Deimos, very nice mechanic that I'm really glad is up and running, good job!
I didn't even notice the change at first because of how subtle it was. It's a nice mechanic to see in place, though. I'm sure I'll be getting plenty of use out of this. Thanks! :)
Will we be able to click on tags on the sidebar (when we open a post) soon? It would be nice not to have to to back to the homepage or manually type in the tag into the URL.
Hmm, should be possible. Where should it take you? Inside the topic's group, filtered to that tag?
That's what I would expect.
I would think it should behave like clicking a tag from the post list view (which makes it filter tags across all groups), but being able to also filter for a tag inside a group would be nice (maybe have an option for what group(s) to filter in).
I was expecting that to take me to the same destination as clicking a tag in the global feed view. Meaning, all groups with that tag.
Excellent! Thank you.
Is it possible to use multiple tags? Say if I wanted to find new rock music, could I filter ~music using the "rock" and the "new release" tag?
Not yet, but that's definitely something we'll want to have eventually.
If multiple tags are introduced then i would like to see some nice syntax for combining them. Meaning disjuction, conjunction, negation and parantheses.
perhaps:
* for conjunction
+ for disjunction
- for negation
would be: show me all posts that contain art, or are not about books and music and facebook all together
productions:
FILTER ::=
"(" FILTER ")"
| "-" FILTER
| FILTER "+" FILTER
| FILTER "*" FILTER
If we get complex syntax like that, we'd ideally also have an easier way to use it for the dummies such as myself. The example you give is a bit too unintuitive, I think, for many people to bother with it.
Wonderful to see! Thanks @Deimos!