UseBB Community

Major feature request (sticky)

Tags are getting immensily popular at various community websites (del.icio.us, Flickr, etc) and in other applications, online or offline.

It would be an idea to implement tags in addition to forums in 2.0, or to have one forum (like the single forum mode of 0.x) and use nothing but tags.

bbPress is the only software I know of which currently has a tags possibility.

Remarks are welcome...

Vanilla may use tags, I can't seem to remember.

I think it depends on who you want to appeal to. I think that if you still want to appeal to a traditional forum user then you'd need to retain the possibility (At least.) to view things as standard forums/topics etc.

If you feel there's a whole new user base to be won doing it with tags and a single topic list, then go for it.

For me I'm not sure If i could get used to using tags after so many years with multiple forums but I'd like to try, as it would hopefully make getting to content and dragging users into the community talk/issues more immediate. Make it more likely you see topics that interest you.

Though conversely it may mean that topics you may have got interested in by chance before will be bypassed completely. So maybe it wouldn't help broaden horizons much.

However i do think the current single forum mode you have is a pretty killer feature (If you do keep multiple forums.) for very small places. After all why have to click to see the topics if there is only one forum. It makes it more immediate and usable.

Tags even if they are not used in a way that changes the UI may be useful search tools . So either way tags are good.

Just checked it, Vanilla does not have tags, although it has a "discussions" front page where it lists all the current discussions similar to UseBB's active topics page. Probably tags usage will be put into it soon so you can list them on the discussions tab.

You're right about the 2 kinds of users, tags are a great new feature but getting rid of the subforums architecture would confuse most of them, as there has not been a forum solution which solely uses tags without a subforums capability. bbPress also still uses categories. After all a big portion of the forum admins will probably continue to use the traditional system.

So, the best is to create the tags system next to the subforums. Admins may choose whether they enable the tagging system, and they can just create one forum and enable the single forum mode and tagging to have a pure tags driven forum.

I've written about a few ideas for my Forum, but feel free to use them with UseBB too:

Private Topics:

Most forums have some form of private messaging functionality, usually just the ability to send a simple text message to any user or group of users.

A while ago (long enough for me to have forgotten exactly when), me and a few friends had the idea for private topics, that would replace the simple messages, with topics where the user can invite people to read and/or reply, making large scale private communications easy.

Topic Tags:

Tags, what would we do without them? In the past year they’ve become such a popular method for organizing information that there are now some forums and blogs that have completely abandoned the whole category idea.

However, there must be a way that we can combine the two into something more powerful? Perhaps within a category topics can be tagged, not only by their author, but by readers too. This could be used by moderators to find things like spam or flames.

Referring to http://www.zefhemel.com/archives/2005/08/09/rethinking-discussion-boards

The idea could be extended greatly with
- allowing other users to tag topics
- allowing (only moderators) to remove tags
- limit tags to a predefined set of tags (per subforum?)
- generate similar topics list
- generate RSS feeds based on (group of) tags
- etc.

There are quite a lot of possibilities.

I love the UseBB community... yesterday someone posted a very detailed and useful message at my forum, and I thought to myself it would be great if I could use tags to classify such discussions, to make it easier for users who visit the forum later to use the forum as a knowledge base. So I went here, and what do I find at the top of the list- a discussion about tags, of course...

So anyway, I think that allowing discussions/messages to be tagged can make a forum much more useful when it comes to looking for information in older posts. Just integrating tags into the search form can already add a lot of functionality. I guess that such a simple addition (letting users classify their posts by tags, and filtering by tags in searches) shouldn't be difficult to implement, and it doesn't require any significant change to the 'normal' user interface- a user can just ignore tags at first, but when they get to the search page they will 'discover' it.

Thanks for your ideas.

Indeed the tags can help with searching the forum, although we must mind the following:

If tags can be assigned by topic authors without any limits (the tags are not predefined) it is difficult to use the tags as a sort of "filtering method", especially when there are lots of tags. If the tags are predefined and limited in number, a search filter could be made in the same trend as the possibility to filter results to certain categories/subforums.

When there is an unlimited number of tags I think it would be better to provide two modes for the search engine:
- a "simple mode" which uses the tags to look up matching topics, this will provide quite accurate results (as long as all the tags were valid, but that's the task of a moderator);
- an "advanced mode" which uses the old way of doing fulltext lookups.

I just remember, WBB 2 (Woltlab Burning Board) has a feature called topic prefixes, which works practically the same way as a predefined set of tags and the possibility to filter searches to topics using the prefix. The only difference is that a topic can contain only one prefix, so it misses the "usefulness" of tags (be able to assign more than one per topic).

Dietrich, I agree that the default should be that only admininstrators/moderators can define tags, and then it would be the admininstrator's responsibility to keep the number of tags to a reasonable size.

As to searching, what I had in mind was something like a list of checkboxes in the 'regular' search form, which would allow the user to restrict the full text query to matches tagged by certain tags (or to search for the empty string + specific tags). If the default is that all tags are checked (and there's a button for quickly selecting/unselecting all tags), then both kinds of searches that you suggested are easily accessible from the same place, and you can easily do a combined search (tags+fulltext).