Categories/Tags Proposal

erlend_sh

Now for some taxonomy challenges:

How would you migrate the wordpress.org forum to Flarum? (originally asked on Discourse).

How would you migrate forum.xda-developers.com to Flarum?

Toby

I didn't actually know that this is similar to how WordPress does things. I think that how well a system is used ultimately comes down to how simple its UI is, so that will be a big focus here 🙂

I'm liking the technical implementation you've suggested, it's very well thought out. I'll most likely build on this approach. Relationships add a bit of complexity, but again that would come down to how good the UI is.

I think that per-post tags are outside the scope of the default implementation, but would be great as an additional extension.

Migrating the WordPress support forum seems like it would be easily achievable. Discussions can be tagged with a category (on the right), generic tags (on the left), and plugin/theme tags as required.

XDA Developers is a nice challenge. My first thought is that you'd have a single "category" for each device. Then you'd have generic tags for "help", "accessories", "android dev", "original android dev", "themes and apps", etc.

erlend_sh

Glad my rant was of some use 😃

Here's another really powerful usecase for relationships:

Tagging tags

(I know rite)

Take the engine forum I manage for instance, hub.jmonkeyengine.org. I'd like trusted users to be able to create new tags within the game: grouping, so that when they start talking about a game of theirs in different Categories, it's still easy to keep track of their game.

I'd like to be able to tag tags within the game: grouping. All that really means is that you create a rule that says TagX, TagY and TagZ will always be added (in the background) if user applies TagA. These tags wouldn't have to be visible in any interface except for the special filtering actions when they come into play.

Here's an example:

I add a new game to our forum with the following tag:

game:shovelville

This tag is in turn tagged with the following tags:

gui:lemur
shader:legacy
status:alpha

At its simplest, all that means is that I could do a filter search for all threads currently in status:alpha, and I would find all Shovelville topics among them. Furthermore, since these tags could not be altered per topic but rather only via the unique tags they're attached to, you wouldn't end up with messy Shovelville taggings where it's marked with status:alpha in some places and status:beta in others, and some places not at all. Once I go into the game:shovelville tag and change its status:alpha tag to status:beta, that change will immediately be reflected in all topics tagged game:shovelville.

solhuebner

As I would love to see a possibility to integrate BuddyPress I would need to use a tag for each group that exists and would automatically assign that tag when a user is creating a topic in this group (e.g. Cisco) . More than that I would need an option to only allow these group members to see topics with this tag when the group is hidden or private but all users should be able to see the topic of the group is public. Is there a way to handle visibility? The user can then add a tag (predefined for this Cisco base tag like Hardware / IOS...). I could also go with category / subcategories but it looks like tags are preferred here

Franz

Sorry for not getting back earlier...

I think this sounds good in theory, but I'd be interested to see the mockups. Not one hundred percent sure whether it can work. But no clue either why it shouldn't, just a gut feeling 😉

@erlend_sh Thanks for the great feedback!

tsanyqudsi

Just more inputs, i hope these can be useful..

As much as we all love tags. I suggest that flarum has the "tags inspection" feature.

i've seen many community sites or such that abuse tags... i mean look at twitter or instagram.. sometimes we have those tags that .. a bit useless 😛

basically ( if tags inspection module were activated ) every week / month the system would scan all the tags that older than a week and have less than 5 posts that has the same tag.. moderator / administrator can delete those tags from a post. I'm sure it would be helpful for user-defined tagging.

A user that reply to a post can propose to change / add new category or tags for the thread that can be approved by the thread starter / moderator / administrator. It's the same as "report this post" feature and making things easier for the forum staff.

erlend_sh

tsanyqudsi I wholeheartedly agree. The thing that can be a bit hard to understand here is that what Toby is suggesting is merely a general purpose taxonomy) that can extend to a variety of classification concepts, Categories and Tags being two among them.

I wouldn't want Tags enabled by default either. Most communities shouldn't. Jeff Atwood neatly summarised some fundamental issues with tags. Neatly crowdsourced everything-goes tags is a pipedream imo.

The time to use tags is for special purposes. See my examples above with the game project, the multilingual site and the WordPress plugin "microforums".

All Flarum needs out-of-the-box is Categories. The whole point of this idea - provided it's technically feasible - is that after Categories has been implemented, you basically get the optional addition of Tags for free.

Regarding the technical aspects of implementing such a system though, here's some food for thought though: bbPress (the plugin), which is tightly based on WordPress, decided to base its category system on WordPress' Custom Post Types instead of the pre-existing taxonomies system. bbPress tags on the other hand do piggyback the native WP tags taxonomy (hope I'm recalling this correctly). You could always try get in touch with the bbPress core dev John James Jacoby in hopes of picking his brain about this, he's a swell guy.

pcoud

Hi everyone,

Very interesting... IMHO the lack of tags has been a major shortcoming of the first generation of bb/forums platforms (and for a long time, see for example this discussion)

In my view, tags are really great way to support in a simple and flexible manner user-defined categorization, and also to support "virtual boards" (or to have dynamic categories, defined as the collection of posts matching a given tag or group of tags). In most previous forums, boards/folders are structured statically in a hierarchical way, which is a strong limitation: ok, posts usually belong to one main topic category, but could also be relevant in multiple others. There are also post attributes which are not "topic category" but that are nicely addressed by tags: stuffs like "solved" (for problems/questions), "Ref" (for example thread that ends up as good resource for further reference), "urgent", "area" (for post relevant to a geographical area/city) and so on... many communities need tag to express some attributes used for easy filtering/access to posts.

I think that current "categories" could stay are they are, serving for broad-level categories while tags would express finer attributes/properties. I don't think that sub-categories would be that useful provided that tags are supported. I also think that a tag system should be "flat": hierarchies among tags are usually obvious and users end up in using only "leaf level" tags, which is fine to avoid the over use of tagging. However, I think that a way to enforce the use a set of admin-defined tag can be important, as free use of tag by users easily results in multiple tags expressing the same concept but with different words.
Anyway, tags support would be really great !
Just an opinion

19eighties

Are custom tags (by members) possible?

ron_jeremy

19eighties Are custom tags (by members) possible?

Dominion Not at the moment, but @Toby has mentioned making it possible down the road.

Chaos would ensue. Absolute chaos. Just visit a random Wordpress blog to see how badly tags are managed by only one person, let alone a large number of people.

If this is implemented please make it an option or extension.

Dominion

Not at the moment, but @Toby has mentioned making it possible down the road.

Dominion

ron_jeremy If this is implemented please make it an option or extension.

Tags themselves are an optional extension, so it stands to reason that user-created tags would also be optional. Making things optional is pretty much at the heart of the Flarum design philosophy.

... When you get right down to it, that's what made Toby's recent announcement of mandatory signatures with a minimum 500 pixel height as funny as it was (at least to me). It's just so contrary to his usual way of doing things.

HavocK

It might be offtopic BUT i don't see any attachements on Toby's first post...

All i can read is :

[attachment:554f34933c6cd]

Am i the only one ?

Toby

HavocK It's because this is a very old topic that was imported from an esoTalk installation.

HavocK

Toby Ok !

LawuKini

LawuKini i found another example of post grouping by category and tag in youtube

Only site admin can define category (primary tags in Flarum)

User can set their own tags (secondary tags in Flarum)

Thanks