Tagging may be a good system for blogs, but it has a LOT of issues for forums.
First of all, like the article says, tagging is a way of improving file systems.
The DLDB is a file system. The forums are not file systems. They are conversations.
Conversations are held in places -- in a room, at a park, over the phone, over a chat service, through posts on a forum. A forum is a place where people meet to converse.
In a forum, you need a place where people come to meet. Otherwise it will lose its sense of continuity and community. You need to be able to look back on the things that have happened, like a history, especially on a site like SEN.
When I come to SEN, I usually just want to meet people, discuss topics that come up, and help people with any mapping questions they have. That's the key -- ANY questions. I'm rarely looking for a specific topic. If I am, then tags could improve the search capability for the site, but other than that, I'll MAKE a post in UMS Assistance or Theory and I know people will find it there who I will want to talk to, and who may be interested.
With tags, you have to anticipate which tags certain people will search for. In order for tags to have any reilability, you need common tags that must be used... but what if someone realizes a tag doesn't apply to a post? Who changes it? A mod? What if the flow of the conversation changes halfway through (which it does a LOT at SEN, often for the better)? Do you have to change the tags?
Removing tags is like telling someone they're wrong about what they think they're talking about. But moving a thread to a new forum is like telling them to just have this conversation someplace else. With forums, you just simply lay out the rules for each forum and therefore you only have to pay attention to one set at a time. With tags, what are you going to do? Lay out rules for each tag? If you did, that means you'd have to know the rules for every single tag you use, and then why not just use a forum? People have different connotations for words.
If you don't moderate tags well, then lots of stuff will slip through the cracks. That's okay for a blog, but not for a forum where people come to ask for help and therefore depend on responses.
Tags also suck for moderators. The way it is now, you just split it up by forum. With tags, if you split it up by tag, that means there will be lots of overlap, because that's the point of tags. If every mod patrols all the posts, well, there's obvious problems there. If this was a gigantic site with hundreds of new threads a day, I could see tags being useful, but as it is... removing the current folder system would be catastrophic.
If tags were
added to the current system, that'd be different, but I still think it'd be a waste of effort to make sure all tags are accurate for each topic, especially when topics change. Tags are great for huge vaults of static files, but not for communities.
Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jun 6 2008, 11:20 am by razorsnail.
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