Tags vs. categories

TomteTummetott

There are already some discussions about this, but I also wanted to give my view on the topic of categories vs. tags.

I think a forum should have both.

First of all there are categories (with their subcategories), which is a structured hierarchy of "places" a discussion can appear in. They reflect the main characteristics of a forum and the most important characteristic of a single discussion. Categories are definied by the admins.
(One discussion has to of course appear in at least on category. But I also think that a post should be able to appear in more than one (sub)category, like "cake" plus "sweet" in my example below.)

Then there are tags, which are globally available and meant to further specify the content of a discussion. Not all tags are important enough (yet) to become their own category as well. Tags are also definied by the admins, to prevent a total tag mess.

Here is a quick example

Let's assume you've got a cooking forum (because we all love food right?) with the following categories:

Cooking
- Pasta
- Rice
- Soup
Baking
- Pizza
- Bread
- Cake
Deserts
- Sweet
- Salty

Now I want to discuss how to improve a new recipe for some delicious vegan brownies. Therefore I would create a discussion unter "Baking > Cake" and tag it with e.g. "chocolate", "american" and "vegan".

In this cooking forum you would not want a (sub)category for chocolate, but you want users be able to show all posts that have been tagged with this (and other) tags and also follow them if they are interested in all content that contains e.g. chocolate.

Users could therefore be enabled to create search filters (and follow these filters to have the resulting discussions show up in their "following" section.)
Some variations:

Filter 1: Show me all discussions that contain the tag "apples"
Filter 2: Show me all discussions that contain the tag combination "vegetarian" + "tomatoes"
Filter 3: Show me all discussions that contain the tag "cheese" in the category "cooking"

Tag or category?
How do you decide, if something should rather be "just" a tag or if it is important enough to get its own category?
Take cheese (who doesn't love it) for example. It can be part of any recipe, which would be a good usecase for tag, but is so important to most people (and can even be a dish for itself), that it might be a good choice to make it become its own category as well. An easy measurment for admins to decide, could be the sheer number of discussions with a tag. If it exceeds a certain level, you can create a category for this next to the tag.
This way you can add all content that is mainly focused on only cheese in the cheese category and all the other dishes that just have cheese as an ingredient could be tagged with "cheese".

What do you think about this concept?
And is there a way to achieve this kind of setup with current extensions? For categories the extension by @askvortsov would probably be a good start.

(For some reason I feel like making myself some food now 😃 )

tankerkiller125

There is also a hashtag extension which functions kind of like tags. However it's been marked as incompatible I believe. Someone could feel free to update it though.

Something I want to note on a personal level is that I find the traditional layout (something your describing) to be cumbersome and for that matter disconnecting. With categories I could potentially spend my entire time in one category (and so could others) creating in a sense, a sub-community where I don't know everyone on the forum, don't see discussions I don't think I would be interested in (even though maybe there are some really cool conversations going on there) and I feel like I don't know really where to start reading on those forums.

The default layout of Flarum I believe invites people to step outside of those sub-communities, invites them to participate in more discussions in areas that maybe they don't normally participate in and is super easy to get the hang of after a little bit of time. Further it's much easier to get started because all of the discussions are right there in front of you. Further I think it allows people to meet even more people and participate with more members.

fakruzaruret

tankerkiller125 hashtag extension is abandoned.

TomteTummetott

tankerkiller125 I don't see this problem of users getting stuck in specific categories at all, because categories are just an UI element that helps to structure the content of a forum in a more efficient way (quickly finding what you are looking for). Being part of quite some forums that mostly all use categories, I've never experienced anything like that. Especially because flarum has the "all discussions" area that invites you to discover all sorts of new content.

clarkwinkelmann I played around with it a bit and the more traditional setup I've described might work out with the tag system flarum comes with, if I would be able to visually seperate secondary tags in the left sidebar (e.g. having something like a button that says "tags" and when you click it, the secondary tags are displayed). At the moment, secondary tags (= "normal" tags) look excactly like primary tags (= categories), which makes it impossible for the user to distinguish between them. Is there anything planned regarding this?

In addition to this: Do you plan on offering more than one sub-level of primary tags? The only thing I could find regarding this was this.

clarkwinkelmann

Flarum kind of has both with its two types of tags.

Primary tags are like conventional categories.

Secondary tags are like conventional tags.

For example you can see how we use secondary tags on this forum to apply "solved" to discussions, whatever primary tags they possess.

I have not seen many reports of people complaining about limitations in the tag system of Flarum. Usually people just complain about the "unconventional" layout we gave to tags. With an extension like Categories, Flarum tags can be shown in a more conventional manner, but that extension does not change how tags work in Flarum, it's just a visual change.

I think the tag system we ship with Flarum is very powerful and flexible.

askvortsov

I'll also note that eventually, we might want to redo parts of tags to make it a bit clearer/more flexible (as perhttps://github.com/flarum/core/issues/395), but that is very much a post-stable issue that still needs discussion. Feel free to voice suggestions there though so that they don't get lost when this topic is revisited eventually!