Dear @Ryan H.
I've been playing a little more with the Advanced Tags & Prefixes over the weekend (mainly to clean up the mess of an open prefix system on my community ), and I was hoping to throw out a couple of larger suggestions over things that bother me regarding tags. (To be clear, these points bother me about the tagging system in general, not your app.)
1. Moderation over new tags - I've always offered an open-ended prefix system so my tags can organically grow over time. However, there's no way for me to moderate the growth or to ensure the relevancy of new tags without checking each new topic's tags and prefixes. As such, I'm wondering if you can consider adding a moderation tool for new tags (eg. they need to be approved first by Moderators before they appear; otherwise they remain hidden).
2. Relational schema - I don't really know how to properly describe this, but in essence .. some sort of relationship-based system among the tags that can provide a logical and hierarchical categorization. Here are two examples of relationships:
Equivalency: The tags "dog" and "canine" are equivalent to each other, so if a user selects one of the tags to discover more content, he gets content tagged with both since they are the same. This is a huge problem for me as my users will define new tags like "dog" "dogs" "canine" and "hound" when they're all the same.
Parent-Child: The tag "dog" is a child tag of "animal." So if a user selects "animal," then he gets results from "dog" "cat" and "cow."
Right now, the tagging system is one big pile where all tags are equally distinct and independent. I'm wondering if you can help bring some sense of order to tagging? Maybe?