Jun
6th
2015
Blog Tags · 6:10pm Jun 6th, 2015
Knighty has implemented blog tags.
I think this is an important point to ask ourselves what tags we should be using for stuff to try and ensure consistency and make tag searching more useful.
Examples of some potential confusion:
Review vs Reviews - Which should be used for posts containing reviews? Should it be singular all the time, or plural all the time?
Recommendation vs Story Recommendation vs Recommendations vs Recommended Reading vs ??? - A lot of obvious tags for stories that we recommend people should read, which one should be used?
I'm not sure where the best avenue for this discussion would be, but it would be a good discussion to have.
Seems obvious to me: singular for blogs containing a single review, plural for blogs containing multiple.
3127551
That's exactly why it is a problem. If you click on "Review" or "Reviews", you're going to want to see other reviews. If you have review (singular) and reviews (plural), then you're going to miss out on a ton of reviews.
Seems like it'd be good to have a few preset standard tags for people to use for things like reviews and recommendations, and then give users the option to make up their own tags for blogs on more obscure topics.
3127561
Yeah, that seems like the logical approach.
3127556
Which is why knighty needs to make tags accept regular expressions! Then you could search for "reviews?" to match both 'review' and 'reviews'.
3127565
What percentage of site readers know what regular expressions are, much less would think to use them?
Quite frankly, as it is implemented right now the blog tagging system seems more like a proof of concept than anything else. Not allowing people to see what tags are being used makes the system borderline useless from an user point of view. Still, I think it would be nice if people who post frequent reviews agreed on a specific tag to use – for a future transition to more robust system if nothing else. #Reviews sound like the best option in my opinion.
I think recommendations and reviews should both be plural, no matter how many are in the post, because people searching are more likely to search for plural (because they're looking for plural.)
As for exact phrasing, while it would be useful for Knighty to set something, I get the feeling that's something that will develop a standard over time anyway. As a few bigger name people pick something, other people will follow suit. Which is not to say our circle can't decide on a standard.
I vote for #Story Reviews, #Episode Reviews, #Story Recommendations (or even #Story Recs), and #Writing Advice as tags we'd use and be looking for most often.
My working rule is one-word (if possible) singular tags for subjects that will be common. If I were you or PP, for example, I'd tag multi-story review posts #Review and then anyone searching for, say, "My Little Dashie review" would be able to find it.
You can always use different tags for the same idea, though. So for a series of blogs on craft you could tag them #Writing #Writing Advice #Craft and hit all bases at once.
3127574
Good point! We'll need to make sure people know how to use regular expressions before they can use the tag search. Some kind of test, maybe... :twilightcrazy:
Oh. Wonderful. Now I have four years of blogs to back-tag.
Well, maybe not that many, but there are several dozen I should.
As for where to have the discussion on tagging conventions, I want to say the site post announcing the update. Where I see you've already raised the topic.
The fact that you can tag up to twenty tags means it should be fine to use both "review" and "reviews" until standard nomenclature is agreed upon.
Tag aliasing is another way to solve a lot of this problem. If "review" or "reviews" becomes an alias of the other, a search for either will return both.
The Unicorn Twilight and the Alicorn Twilight tags used to behave in a similar way to this.
Apparently searching for posts tagged "reviews" also pulls up posts tagged "review". (it also shows that John Perry has been busy tagging his old posts).
3128354
Reviews pulls up review, but review does not pull up reviews.
3127551 No; this is a tag. You want to be able to search for blogs with the tag and find reviews. You don't want to have to know ahead of time whether the thing you're looking for was the only story reviewed in the post or not. I vote for 'review', since some people are always going to use that.
Is there any way to search by tag yet?
3127606
I think just the opposite: people are more likely to search for the singular. As in, "Fallout Equestria review". And writers writing a review of just one story are almost certain to use 'review' instead of 'reviews', whereas those writing multiple reviews might use 'review'.
3128968
Yes, the search bar at the top of the page has an option for blog posts.
EDIT: I lied. It doesn't appear to work. The only way I think is to kludge it by URL, unless I'm missing something.
#review
#recommended
#art
#update
#pinkiepie
#hoers (every post gets this one)
I'm just gonna tag all mine #ponyrelated