
Improved Tagging – Stack Exchange - LiveTheDream
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/improved-tagging/
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awj
...that thing is monstrous. It seems to me that it presents an almost
frightening display of information. The synonym handling is great, but why not
keep the original tag display and show the wiki description as a tooltip when
hovering over one of the options?

I personally think the ui is kind of intimidating, and will drive people off
tagging because of the suggestion that you should actually do all of the
"work" of reading those descriptions.

~~~
AgentConundrum
The problem with tooltips is discoverability. The idea of this change is to
make the wiki descriptions plainly obvious to even brand new users who
wouldn't know such a thing exists.

My suggestion would be to only show one of these descriptions at a time as a
sub-element of the first suggestion displayed in the old-style list (with
other suggestions displayed as well, but without the description). This would
make the description plainly obvious to a new user, but without the
information overload presented in the current tag suggestions.

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simonsarris
While its ugly, I can give a little insight in to why I think it (or something
like it) is a good idea. This attempts to solve one problem that I see daily
as a steward of the "canvas" tag, which is used for HTML5 Canvas questions.

A lot of people will tag something with "android" and "canvas" when they are
looking for help with the Java Android Canvas. I have to retag these to
"android" and "android-canvas" because the Java Android Canvas has its own tag
and the questions related to it are very different than the questions related
to Android using HTML5 Canvas.

To help people a little while ago, I wrote excerpt for the "canvas" tag as
_Canvas is a commonly named object used for drawing or as a layout container.
This tag is for HTML5 Canvas. Use "android-canvas" for Android and "wpf-
controls" for WPF._

Of course nobody ever saw that until after they posted their question, if they
saw it at all! But now they are much more likely to see it.

So I welcome this, though I think there is probably a slightly nicer way to do
it out there.

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misuse-permit
This still doesn't solve the problem of helping users discover what tags are
out there. I didn't even know about tags like 'discussion' or 'support' until
I read this post, and I wouldn't have thought about typing them in to see if
other people are using them because they seem somewhat obscure.

~~~
AgentConundrum
The 'discussion' and 'support' tags only apply to the meta sites, not the main
Q&A sites. When you post a question on a meta, you're required to tag it with
one of four tags which help the mods/admins filter the purpose of the post -
bug reports, feature requests, open discussion, and support requests.

If you've ever made a post on meta, this would have been made obvious since
the tag input box comes prepopulated with a list of these, and the submission
fails if you don't use one. If you don't post on meta, however, these tags are
meaningless to you.

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ck2
What I like on SO is how their search works with multiple tags. It's very
effective.

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smackfu
It seems like the Stack Exchange sites have a surplus of workers willing to do
busy work like retagging questions. So I'm not even sure this is a problem
they really need to solve.

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gcb
saw that changing yesterday. one post had regular tags, the following one had
that monstrosity.

scared the hell out of me.

for now I'm thinking it's not necessary at all. just matching synonyms would
suffice. don't have to show them on screen like that.

~~~
dpark
This is the timeless geek UI solution: Just throw more information at the
user.

