Tagging

[JackDunaway]

Adding the tag count next to the tags is a big plus (+) for the new forum upgrades! It also allowed a little bit of analysis, which led to a couple of ideas:

1. In the top 100 tags, about a quarter are "bogus". The top bogus tags are "the, to, I, and, a, for, in, is, of, it, not, you, with, have, me, help, but, This, my, How, problem, Hi, from, On, That" Solution: Blacklist articles, pronouns, prepositions, salutations, "really ambiguous words like 'problem'", etc.
2. When I am typing a tag, I would love a quick autocomplete feature, like Google. This means tags are created from a pool/bank/database of pre-existing tags, not created from scratch. This would make tagging easier and more accurate. Solution: Autocomplete tags while typing
3. An overwhelming majority of people (read, everyone but Ben  ) do not know how to create good tags. This can be shown by looking at the distribution of the frequencies each tag occurs. There are literally THOUSANDS of tags that only occur once, which shows tags are egregiously misused by this community (it's not our fault, it's just that most of us are naive!). Someone even used his email address as a tag.   Solution: Only allow people with 100 or more posts to create tags. All other community members are allowed to pick tags from this "pre-determined bank/pool/database"

The LabVIEW board has very roughly 25k tags. Compare this to 500k messages, that's 0.05 tags per message. Compare this to StackOverflow, which has 700k+ messages and well over 1.00 tags per post. I consider StackOverflow the standard in terms of ease-of-use and information density for software development, and tags are part of what makes it so powerful.

In a nutshell, tagging is completely broken for the LabVIEW forums, and it needs to be fixed by the developers at Lithium if it's going to benefit the community. As implemented, the presence of thousands of unique tags actually hurts more than it helps because it requires effort with no benefit.

Oh, and I would still like a Forum Idea Exchange for all the other ideas that are burning a hole through my skull right now.

[Laura F.]

Hi Jack,

Thanks for all of the feedback on tagging. 

1.  I used to delete the "bogus" tags like "I", "a", "the".  I should do it again.  I have also just learned that I CAN set a filter so that these words cannot become tags.  I need to do a bit of investigation and testing but we can get this turned on.

2. I agree, autocomplete would be cool.  I previously saw this idea on Lithium's site and had voted for it.

3.  We had limited the people that could create tags to those that had achieved the "Active" rank of 200 posts or more.  We had very few taggers.  I can create a suggestion for allwoing a pre-determined list of tags.

I would like to create an Idea Exchange for the Forums.  I just need a bit of time to get the upgrade issues smoothed over and then I will work on it.

Thanks,

Laura 

[Hornless.Rhino]

Can you set a minimum tag length?

A minimum length of 4 would get rid of a lot of the shorter stuff

the, and, are, why, I, me, etc etc

[JackDunaway]

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@Hornless.Rhino wrote:

Can you set a minimum tag length?

A minimum length of 4...

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....nah. This would also preclude several information-dense tags such as RT, HMI, TCP, FTP...

Ideally, I would like only more experienced users to create tags, so presumably a blacklist would be less consequential anyhow.

[Ray.R]

Those useless tags are probably due to people writing sentences or phrases while creating a tag.

For instance, writing "Mary had a little lamb" would create 5 tags, one for each word.

So when others write sentences containing the letter "a", it pushes the number of hits up and "a" makes it to the top of the list.

Since the tag methods allows for multiple tag entries when seperated by a space, many should be filtered out.  However, some words, such as adjectives, will have no meaning.  For instance, "blue screen of death" would create 4 tags: 

"blue":  who would search a tag that says blue?  it has no meaning

"screen": well... there might be some people who would look this one up.

"of": completely meaningless

"death"  people would look at this one for the wrong reasons 😉

However, if it was blue_screen_of_death, then automatically people who experienced windoze know that the topic is crappy OS.

SO....  this brings up an interesting arguement about how tags are created.  And how much useless polution exists with tags.  On the other hand, many people who create their own tags won't be able to find the tags they created because if their intention was to discuss a blue screen because of an OS crash, they will/may not make the natural link to looking up the "blue" tag.   As such, is the solution to change how tags are created? Meaning that only one tag can be created at a time and white spaces are automatically replaced with underscores?  Maybe I should create an Idea Request for that..  🙂

[Ben]

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@Ray.R wrote:

...

SO....  this brings up an interesting arguement about how tags are created.  And how much useless polution exists with tags.  On the other hand, many people who create their own tags won't be able to find the tags they created because if their intention was to discuss a blue screen because of an OS crash, they will/may not make the natural link to looking up the "blue" tag.   As such, is the solution to change how tags are created? Meaning that only one tag can be created at a time and white spaces are automatically replaced with underscores?  Maybe I should create an Idea Request for that..  🙂

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That would screw with me since I paste a whole collection of space delimited tags.

What I would really like is to be able to let others use my tags. not as part of the giant pile but let users naviagate my tags as if they were logged as myself.

And a step beyonf that would be...

1) new button "Merge this Users tags with mine" Just navigate to my page click the button and every tag I have is now yours.

2) Tag groups we could work as a team to assemble tag clouds free of polution.

Re: restircting tag entries by rookies...

I'm torn because sometimes the tags are used corrctly. I have seen at least one person that cut-n-pasted their entire Q into the tags. So for rookies maybe a limited of 5 tags each time. Yes they could go back and toss in more garbage but they would have to work to do that.

Re: Auto complete

Tagging tool does something similar when I click the right catagory.

Keep tagingg and have fun doing it!

Ben

[Ben]

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@Ben wrote:

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2) Tag groups we could work as a team to assemble tag clouds free of polution.

...

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I was so distracted while wrestling with those manuvers that I missed a body-slam pun oppertunity.

We could form "Tag Teams".

Ben

[JackDunaway]

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Ben wrote:

And a step beyonf that would be...

1) new button "Merge this Users tags with mine" Just navigate to my page click the button and every tag I have is now yours.

2) Tag groups we could work as a team to assemble tag clouds free of polution.

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I don't understand most of what you're saying here. I can see all your tags, and I can navigate your tags.

And I don't understand the concept of "ownership" of a tag. Merging all your tags with mine would be a maintenance nightmare... I would continually need to merge as you updated your tags.

With regards to using spaces as a delimiter: Ben, could you use commas instead?

[Ben]

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@JackDunaway wrote:

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Ben wrote:

And a step beyonf that would be...

1) new button "Merge this Users tags with mine" Just navigate to my page click the button and every tag I have is now yours.

2) Tag groups we could work as a team to assemble tag clouds free of polution.

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I don't understand most of what you're saying here. I can see all your tags, and I can navigate your tags.

And I don't understand the concept of "ownership" of a tag. Merging all your tags with mine would be a maintenance nightmare... I would continually need to merge as you updated your tags.

With regards to using spaces as a delimiter: Ben, could you use commas instead?

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Re: anvigating others tags

Maybe i don't understand how to navigate through others tags.

I can see your top cloud but when I start to drill down, I end up in a community cloud or mine.

Re: merging

The button would be optional and would suck in all of mine and add of those tags to your tags so it would be like you picking up all of my work and being able to build on that. You only have to re-merge when you want to. I was looking at it as a way for other to jump to the end instead of having to start from scratch.

I think I tried the comma when I was doing early testing. After all of the playing I decided on Camel case for compound words that should be a single tag eg BadPun. I extended that syntax to support the crosslinking in the tagging tool to use the underscore between catagory tags eg LabVIEW_Performance Is catagory LabVIEW sub-catagory Performance because it appeared (at the time I was testing it) that the tag engine ignored the underscores in searches.

Ben

[JackDunaway]

Ben, I'm getting confused here pretty quickly, it seems like we're starting to intermingle the features/capabilities of your homebrew tagging tool with the features/capabilities of the forum tagging system.

For the record, these statements apply to the forum tagging system and the forum search system leveraging these tags:

1. I'm with Ray.R in that space delimited tags seem like a bad idea. People search for "blue screen of death" and not "blue_screen_of_death" and not "BlueScreenOfDeath". The tag should look exactly like the search term: "blue screen of death" should be 1 tag, not 4. If you go to Google or Yahoo and search for "blue_screen_of_death", it does not automagically treat underscores as spaces. I'm surprised the search engine employed by this website ignores underscores - it bucks the conditioning I have received from other search engines.
2. If I search for "forum improvement ideas" without and then with the quotes, I get 44 and 41 results respectively. Then, if I search "forum_improvement_ideas", I get 41 results. Which is strange, because I have had over 100 posts tagged as forum_improvement_ideas for a few weeks.
3. I'm completely against having any type of a "Merge Tags" feature. I think tags should be completely public access for navigating, so there should be no need to to have ownership of a tag in order to leverage the benefit of the tag.
4. I assume most people are going to "navigate tags" by simply performing a search, not by clicking through tags. That being said, I think I lean towards making tags "search friendly" rather than "hierarchy friendly"
5. New concept: tags should have some notion of "synonyms". For example, "blue screen of death" should be functionally equivalent to "BSOD" when searching, and they should return the exact same result set
6. Old concept: searching for a term should be functionally equivalent to it's plural term, and the search engine is broke in this respect. The search "roles" yields 55 results and "role" yields 462 results.