15
votes
What is or isn't allowed in tags?
I was posting a something earlier and tried to use an apostrophe in a tag, and it told me off for doing so. Well, kind of, it didn't mention what was wrong, but it was pretty easy to deduce. Can the "tags: Invalid tags" maybe point/link somewhere about what is or isn't allowed?
(also I'm just really curious, what are the limits? I just found out accents [or at least 'tést'] aren't allowed either)
I've got a doc about tagging in progress, I'll add a section to it about what's allowed. It's only ASCII numbers, letters, and spaces (or underscores, which will be treated as spaces). You can also use periods, but these aren't really part of the tag, they're used to indicate a hierarchy.
This is described a bit in the Mechanics page, but basically the tag hierarchy allows "sub-tags". So you could do something like tag a song with
rock.progressive, which is a more specific subgenre of rock. Doing it that way means that people looking for the tagrockwill also see all sub-tags as well, instead of them knowing that they need to look forprogressive rockseparately, or topics needing to be tagged with bothrockandprogressive rockall the time.Thanks for the answer! as far as I understand the subgroups will have some "bubbling up" effect, but looking for tags won't have any such effect? Or will there be granular control of tag searching, eventually?
I'm not sure if I'm understanding you correctly, but tags do find sub-tags as well. For example, here's ~music filtered to the
rocktag: https://tildes.net/~music?tag=rock&period=allYou can see that there are also posts in there with tags like
rock.progressiveeven though they don't have a separaterocktag.I'm not sure I'm understanding myself correctly, a day later. I think what I was trying to ask is that, even though there's a similar subtag/subgroup system, there's a difference in that:
if you're in the groups there's the bubbling up effect (e.g. a popular-enough post on ~food.coffee will bubble up to ~food), but there's nothing like that for tags, right? Looking for
rockwill show allrock.progressive?Right now it always includes any sub-tags, yes. In the future we could probably add an option to only show exact tags or something similar.
Somewhat related, would it ever be possible to combine tags? Something like this: https://tildes.net/~music?tag=rock,pop&period=all
Yes, should be possible to support. It's probably the interface that's trickier than just making it work, since it's easy to do one tag (they just click on it from somewhere) but harder to let people add/remove from the "current tag set".
Thanks for replying and sorry for replying so late, I haven't had a stable connection without data caps for several weeks.
If I searxch for progressive rock will posts tagged as rock.progressive show up?
No, not yet... but we have talked about potentially creating a tag synonym database so they would show up on the same results page.
It's early alpha so everything is a bit disorganized, there are no tagging standards in place yet, nor is any metadata like tags auto-completed or auto-populated on submission but all that will likely be implemented eventually.
E.g. Auto-completion of common tags is already on the feature list as high priority:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/142
For now you have to manually search for synonymous tags if you want to see all the results though:
https://tildes.net/~music?tag=progressive_rock
https://tildes.net/~music?tag=rock.progressive
Auto-completion of common tags: I don't know (and haven't looked hard, sorry) what you're using as a backend, but to experiment with this you could try https://www.algolia.com/doc/tutorials/search-ui/autocomplete/auto-complete/
as a way of quickly experimenting on weightings, UI etc.
And I just realised this is a terribly nondescript title. feel free to change, if possible.