Invision Community 5: Tagging Reinvented

[SoloInter]

1 hour ago, Kirill Gromov said:

If I have 60 thousand tags now, what will I get after updating?

We have 6 199 tags on our side. 

Right now, they're there anyway. Whether there are 6, 600, 6000 or even 60,000 as is the case for you. So there are as many .com/tag/name pages as there will be in v5. The latter will just allow us to highlight, on a much more elaborate page, the most important according to our choices and leaving the others accessible as is currently the case, by clicking on any tag displayed here and there.

[Dreadknux]

12 hours ago, Matt said:

> Can we decide which tags can be included on the Featured Content page, or is it automated?

2) Right now, all tags but I think it would be nice to have a toggle in the AdminCP form to determine this.

Thanks Matt - I do think there's value to having a portal where all tags are listed, as well. If I may be so bold as to suggest... perhaps there could still be a landing page that exists at www.site.com/tags/ that displays all tags through the site, while the Featured Content page (www.site.com/featured or whatever) can be a little more bespoke/selective based on what tags the admin wants to put front and centre?

That seems like an elegant solution to me (and it offers users a useful place to go and browse through content if they ever get bored - at the moment in V4 /tag/ or /tags/ doesn't lead anywhere so it might also put something contextually useful there?)

Thanks also for the added detail on how the Featured options work - based on the "Featured Reply" GIF you shared, would that reply also appear on the Featured Content landing page, or will that reply simply appear at the top of the topic?

Edited June 7 by Dreadknux

[jesuralem]

13 hours ago, Joel R said:

Some thoughts: 

- This really is a bold vision. This isn't some copycat, incremental change to a feature.  This is a vision statement by IPS to challenge us, as community admins: What are your core competencies and major topics of discussios, how are you identifying them, how are you organizing them, how are you presenting them, how are you leveraging the suite of apps around those competencies? 

This is interesting in the sense that there's yet another new way of presenting content.  There's Our Pages for featured content, there's this new Tagging for tagged content, there's Leaderboard for popular content, there's Activity Streams for recent content,  and there's the traditional navigation.  

- This approach is very top down, which poses significant pros and cons. The beauty of the open tagging system was that, quite frankly, it required no administration on my end.  You want to mistype a tag? Go ahead.  You want to create a new tag? Go ahead.  As an admin, I now have the opportunity - and more candidly, the burden - to maintain, update, and cleanse a master list of tags. This brings up questions like: what is the threshold for when a topic is popular enough to deserve a tag? Who is going to maintain and update the tag among my staff (with ACP security access)? How am I going to publish and promulgate a new tag to inform users? Who is going to consistently monitor content to ensure content is tagged and tagged properly? How do I backtag content if I introduce a new tag? Should a tag's relevancy or usefulness ever go away, and what would I do then? None of these are necessarily new questions, but a closed end universal system sharpens all of these questions for the community admin.  

- For existing sites, we will be particularly challenged in trying to adopt this new vision. We are not equipped to update our existing content at scale: tools to batch add tags to certain sections, remove tags, batch edit / rename / merge tags, etc. 

 

My first impression is that vision seems impressive and amazing.  But it requires more upfront strategy, more upfront thought, and more ongoing work.  And this new system only works if the execution is there.  

 

I am totally in line with what is said here.

I think "tag administration" might be a burden for some of us and maybe some tweaks could make it easier, thinking out loud  :

• A feature so members might be able to suggest new tags
• Move the tag adminstration to the moderator CP and allow moderators to manage them : this way we could spread the load on more people and access it way faster than having ot go to the admincp.

Also having a tool to massively tag post would be very helpful since the new tagging system might in fact replace subforums for example.

[Esther E.]

3 hours ago, Kirill Gromov said:

If I have 60 thousand tags now, what will I get after updating?

25 tags. Or maybe a few more, depending on your setup.

As of now, the upgrader will give you a choice to either delete all global tags OR to convert the top 25 tags (by usage) to the new system. 

If you have node-specific tags (for example, for a single forum), you can choose to drop them or convert them. 

[The Old Man]

15 hours ago, Claudia999 said:

It would be nice if tag pages could be indexable for Google and Co. Or if we had the option to choose whether they are indexable or not.

The problem that first occurred to me (apart from concerns with impacting on site SEO and human search-ability in terms of finding existing content), is that it creates a lot of duplicated content, which goes against the grain in terms of maximising crawl time budget. Matt started to reduce impact on limited SEO bot resources a couple of years back, by overhauling the robots.txt feature for the good bots that comply with it. Do you see a featured content area as kind of a pseudo site map or should it be marked as not indexed to avoid further duplication?

60k of tags is kinda crazy and unmanageable! Tags used to ideally be used to group related content. A tag with only one piece of content is fairly pointless because the search feature should pick that up anyway. Perhaps that’s not the case with tags any more though.

 

[SoloInter]

3 hours ago, Esther E. said:

25 tags. Or maybe a few more, depending on your setup.

As of now, the upgrader will give you a choice to either delete all global tags OR to convert the top 25 tags (by usage) to the new system. 

I'm a little confused by the answer given. What do you mean 25 tags? And drop the other tags ?

I'm afraid of this answer. Do we have the choice of losing all the tags or selecting only 25 ("and a few more")?

We have thousands of tag, we need to keep all of them.

Edited June 7 by SoloInter

[Matt]

1 minute ago, SoloInter said:

Do we have the choice of losing all the tags or selecting only 25 ("and a few more")?

We picked a number, if people need more then we can convert more. What we don't want to do though is set people up to fail by converting over hundreds of tags because it's likely you'll never get round to setting them up and managing them properly.

[SoloInter]

6 minutes ago, Matt said:

We picked a number, if people need more then we can convert more. What we don't want to do though is set people up to fail by converting over hundreds of tags because it's likely you'll never get round to setting them up and managing them properly.

We have tags for each player who played under the colors of our club. This already represents a little more than 1000 players and therefore 1000 tags ("first name last name" = 1 tag). 

We have almost 20,000 news articles written. Each personality involved in this news has their tag.

Each football club mentioned in the news has its tag.

Each foreign player at the club but for whom a topic was created because he is part of the transfer window news, has his own tag.

The photos published in the galleries talk about places, cities, stadiums, etc... so many tags.

We have a mass of content that we interconnect via links and also and above all thanks to these tags. 20 years of history. 

I assure you that all these tags are well managed, useful, important and that the new management and presentation announced provided a reward for this good management. Until you talk about the default conversion limit and show skepticism about having thousands of tags.

What should we think about it?

[TracyIsland]

Quote

1) Each tag must be created in the AdminCP (Content Discovery > Tags). It's a bit like the current "closed" system where you have to add the tags manually if you want your community to use them.

if we enable a closed system in 4.7, does that mean that in the upgrade to v5, all the tags will already be created in content discovery > tags?

[Matt]

5 minutes ago, TracyIsland said:

if we enable a closed system in 4.7, does that mean that in the upgrade to v5, all the tags will already be created in content discovery > tags?

That's correct. 

27 minutes ago, SoloInter said:

We have tags for each player who played under the colors of our club. This already represents a little more than 1000 players and therefore 1000 tags ("first name last name" = 1 tag). 

We have almost 20,000 news articles written. Each personality involved in this news has their tag.

Each football club mentioned in the news has its tag.

Each foreign player at the club but for whom a topic was created because he is part of the transfer window news, has his own tag.

The photos published in the galleries talk about places, cities, stadiums, etc... so many tags.

We have a mass of content that we interconnect via links and also and above all thanks to these tags. 20 years of history. 

I assure you that all these tags are well managed, useful, important and that the new management and presentation announced provided a reward for this good management. Until you talk about the default conversion limit and show skepticism about having thousands of tags.

What should we think about it?

That's why we're here talking about it. We made decisions, and then adjust as needed based on feedback. However, I'm not sure that use of tags is mainstream. It's unusual to have 1000 tags, and the application is niche. But this is an open conversation.

[opentype]

I have to agree with SoloInter: There needs to be a way to keep the strategically(!) created tags, independent from fitting in a most-used basket or low numerical limits. 

There is of course the noise of user-generated forum tags, which might have little value or even do more harm than good. But the strategically created tags need to be kept, independent from any hard limit.

In fact, in the new system they can finally shine and be more useful than ever, but they need to be there to begin with. The alternative of dropping the tags and having the admins go through years of content to add them back in, isn’t really a viable option.

[SoloInter]

1 hour ago, Matt said:

That's why we're here talking about it. We made decisions, and then adjust as needed based on feedback. However, I'm not sure that use of tags is mainstream. It's unusual to have 1000 tags, and the application is niche. But this is an open conversation.

Our objective since the beginning has been to offer French-speaking supporters a bible, a reference, with as much historical information as possible about their club through several tools that you have wonderfully developed. 

Many themes are covered

- News
- Matches
- Players
- Leaders
- Clubs
- Nations
- Competitions
- Stadium
- Events
- Pictures
- Forums
- Videos
- Palmares
- ...

For example, tags make it easy to find all the content assigned to a player (using the tag bearing their name). 

Many players have various detailed content (news, photos, videos, etc.)

I don't know if this functionality is used globally or not, for us it is a very important element.

Please give us the opportunity to convert everything.

Edited June 7 by SoloInter

[Matt]

To be clear, all "closed" tags created are converted. These are the tags you set up as an admin.

The 25 number is based on the top "open tags" that members have created.

[SoloInter]

49 minutes ago, opentype said:

I have to agree with SoloInter: There needs to be a way to keep the strategically(!) created tags, independent from fitting in a most-used basket or low numerical limits. 

There is of course the noise of user-generated forum tags, which might have little value or even do more harm than good. But the strategically created tags need to be kept, independent from any hard limit.

In fact, in the new system they can finally shine and be more useful than ever, but they need to be there to begin with. The alternative of dropping the tags and having the admins go through years of content to add them back in, isn’t really a viable option.

Exactly. Especially since on our side, the tags are created only by the staff. A member will never be able to create a tag. Tags are used strategically, well thought out, framed in their writing, and already limited to the main themes of the content in which they appear.

Edited June 7 by SoloInter

[Matt]

See my post above. I think there's a little confusion over the tag conversion process.

All 'closed' tags admins have created are converted over.

We then offer to convert the top 25 user created tags over, as well as any per forum/category tags.

[Dreadknux]

2 minutes ago, Matt said:

To be clear, all "closed" tags created are converted.

Would this include any tags that have been listed as "Defined Tags" in AdminCP (my community is currently set to 'Open Tags', but there are many Defined Tags I have built myself in the field below the 'Tagging Mode' option in AdminCP > Posting > Tags)

[Matt]

1 minute ago, Dreadknux said:

Would this include any tags that have been listed as "Defined Tags" in AdminCP

Yes, all these, regardless of how many, will be converted.

[SoloInter]

Just now, Matt said:

See my post above. I think there's a little confusion over the tag conversion process.

All 'closed' tags admins have created are converted over.

We then offer to convert the top 25 user created tags over, as well as any per forum/category tags.

oh interesting indeed, it becomes more precise but it remains worrying.

Indeed, these are not closed tags.
 
All site staff (Admins, Moderators) can create new tags. They can select those who offer their seizure, but it is not a closed system. 

Also it is possible that members of the staff have created tags, content in a bygone era today as well as their rank. They are no longer members of the staff now and therefore their tags, if they are linked to this member, will be interpreted as classic member tags, falling within this limit of 25. It looks like.

[Matt]

There's plenty of time to think about how you want tags to work in v5 and when you are ready to upgrade you can tweak tags on your v4 prior to upgrading.

[SoloInter]

10 minutes ago, Matt said:

There's plenty of time to think about how you want tags to work in v5 and when you are ready to upgrade you can tweak tags on your v4 prior to upgrading.

But we've actually already thought about all that. And that's what's worrying. Because no matter how much we think about it again, we come across the same result: the necessity and need to be able to use thousands of tags

Unless there is an option to move all existing tags to the closed system before updating to V5. If we change to closed system, all existing tag will be saved ?

Edited June 7 by SoloInter

[Myr]

It's definitely a bold vision, and I can see it being very useful.  It'll give me a great excuse to do spring cleaning.

We can set the tag page's image, title, and description when we define the tag?

[David N.]

7 hours ago, Matt said:

Think of it like organising your house. You have a lot of things that can be hard to find (I know I had a charging cable here somewhere...) so you buy 10 large plastic crates and organise everything into those boxes (electronics, clothes, toys, cables, etc). You label each crate and it's now easy to find what you want. Need a charging cable? Open the cables box. Need to find your Gameboy (it's 1999 in my head) then go to the electronics box. It's easy.

Great. On my forum, we've been using tags differently though.

My forum's topic is music production. People come to ask for help with their music gear. 

I've started tagging topics intensively since I discovered the "Relative Topics" widget. 

So I have tags for: 

• Specific audio plug-ins
• Specific audio hardware (audio interfaces, synths, pedalboards, drum controllers etc...)
• Specific error code messages
• Specific issues
• ...etc. 

That way if someone comes and says they have an error code #48 on their Mac, I tag their post as 'error code #48' and with a single click I can find all the threads that mention error code #48. 

If they have an issue with a specific audio interface I add the tag for that audio interface and they can quickly find out info regarding their audio interface such as compatibility with various OS versions, driver link etc. 

If they have a specific issue like "audio cutting out" I add that tag and they quickly find all the threads were others have reported that issue with solutions, or workarounds offered. 

So as you can imagine that can amount to a few hundred tags quite easily, and the number will keep growing as new gear or new issues or error code numbers come up. 

20 hours ago, Matt said:

If you have 100+ tags then it's not as effective. Ideally you want broad tags rather than narrow tags.

Is there a specific reason for that? I mean from the feature set as I've seen it described in your video and your original post, I can imagine that it would work quite well for us even though we have narrow tags. Maybe I'm missing something though? 

But for example I can see how someone with the a specific piece of audio hardware would be happy to find a page with all sorts of discussions related exclusively to their piece of hardware. And there are at least a few hundred pieces of hardware that exist (although I have honestly no idea exactly how many tags I'm currently using on my forum). 

I can also see a benefit in Google indexing a page that lists all discussions related to one specific piece of hardware. 

Do you think I've been going about this the wrong way and our tag use will now work well with the new tagging system? 

I can imagine other forums would want to use tags that way, for example a cooking forum would want to tag individual meats, veggies, fish, nuts, cooking techniques, countries or regions, wines, type of event, etc... or for example a car forum would want to tag individual car make/model, etc? 

[Joel R]

1 hour ago, Matt said:

There's plenty of time to think about how you want tags to work in v5 and when you are ready to upgrade you can tweak tags on your v4 prior to upgrading.

Will IPS consider a function on 4.x to help us convert individual open tags to closed tags? 

I'm willing to embrace this vision, but I can't start a closed tags system from scratch on a community that already has 6+ million content items.

[Joel R]

@opentype said something that was very insightful, which was something that I was struggling with.  

I actually think the true value of this new tagging page is not your biggest and broadest top dozen tags. Community admins already designed their forums to be organized by their biggest and broadest categories. 

Where I see the true strategy value in the IPS tagging pages is in the following areas: 

• Consolidating content from different apps - Especially for rich communities that leverage multiple apps like Calendar and Gallery and Pages and Blogs and Clubs and Downloads, the new Portal page will be amazing to pull them together and truly emphasize IPS as a suite of content.  
• Surfacing "ingredient" tags - These are tags like players on a team, components in a manufacturing process, parts of a car, or literally ingredients in food recipes.  Forums, by design, are usually top down in the approach.  We already start with our broadest and biggest categories and then break them down into categories and boards and subboard.  Where I think tagging can shine is to help discover with a bottom up approach. 
• Creating another form of taxonomy - For example, if you're a sports-focused community and you organize your boards by leagues, you can now create an independent taxonomy by geography, or by player position, or by year.  

This is going to sound contra to the vision of IPS of 10 large plastic crates, but I want the 200 or 500 or 1000 small lunchboxes! This new tagging page actually makes these smaller tags more worthwhile and easier to browse. 

If I only wanted 10 large plastic crates, my forums already organize in that manner.  (Also, this is literally all digital, not space in my garage, so going from 10 tags to 1000 tags leverages the scalability of technology, etc etc). 

Tagging is very philosophical. 

Edited June 7 by Joel R

[MythonPonty]

What about the possibility to convert / replace different Tags to aliases...

Members could currently use for "love" similar words. 

e.g.

Feeling
Warmth of heart
Devotion
Intimacy
Affection
Passion 

I could well imagine that the different words for love could be combined into one main tag --> love. 
This would allow me to reduce many of the existing tags. 

Edited June 7 by MythonPonty