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
