Sorry in advance for asking this, I'm sure it's been asked plenty of times before but this is something I've been wondering for a while now. At the moment we can tag posts by gender, but not substance. Why is that?
Personally, the more I visit this forum the more I find myself skimming over it in search of mud content. Wouldn't it be nice to filter this stuff out without having to comb through it each time? Better yet, I'd love the ability to toggle this stuff in our user accounts so that only stuff you're into appears site wide.
I know implementing all this probably isn't easy, but is anyone else in favour of seeing it happen?
Not a bad idea, other than restricting what one sees to what they already are into. It doesn't lend itself to a person broadening their horizons.
Having said that, I suppose when posting, there could be boxes to click, such as 'mud', 'slime', 'pies', etc. The person posting would click all that apply to their particular posting.
I mean, it seems like a lot of work for very little difference than what we have now. I mean, unless you're looking for a necropost, most things seem to stay on the first messy page for 2-5 days or so if someone isn't filling it with useless/existing threads like "where can I find mud" etc. The thread's title should be kinda clear enough to know what you're looking for, and you can always search for keywords.
I don't know how tags would really function differently from this design. For instance someone could have a thread titled "Birthday cake fight". So the OP could tag it with things like 'birthday' 'cake' 'food fight' etc. But you can also search for those terms and find the same things.
If you made tags dynamic and/or to include keywords found in replies to the thread that would create all sorts of chaos. In the aforementioned thread above someone could reply "boy, I wish it were a mud fight on their birthday". So now 'mud' could end up getting tagged and that's not what you're looking for at all.
Can anyone expand on this or how it would work better, or be easy to implement?
So, I imagine that it would be fairly easy for MM to add that option to posts, but it would be extra work for all the posters to actually use those tags.
We're more likely to miss threads that interest us this way than we are to save ourselves the work of 'combing' through threads. Are there really all that many to go through? Manual tagging, as Flank suggests, is actually a real drag for posters too and left to our discretion would be susceptible to corruption and therefore no guarantee of accurate search results.
It's a community forum and vast content store after all now rather than simply a 'directory'. That's 20 years of evolution for you!
Love you, too
