Geneone Forum Tagging Redux

February 9th, 2006

A while ago I introduced a tagging feature into Geneone Forum. The forum software has been used on Evolution 5 for over a month now so I’ve managed to get some good feedback on how well the tagging is working.

At present: When you create a new discussion, you are asked to provide several tags. This is stored in the database and allows users to then find all discussions with a certain tag.

From experience, there are several problems:

The general quality of the tagging is very low.
Most people don’t bother tagging probably because it’s optional and because there is no direct benefit in doing it.
Tagging relies on the original topic starter knowing what they are doing and using good tags.
There can be quite a lot of inconsistancy in the tagging.
Most of the community has no say in the tagging.

Unlike so-called "Web 2.0" websites, Evolution is very much aimed at a non-technical audience. I believe this goes some way to explain why tagging is not working. Users don’t fully understand tags nor do they have anything to gain from them.

I plan to modify the forum tagging system to address the issues by introducing communal tagging - allowing everybody to participate in tagging. (Initially this will rely on the small subset of the community who do tag; hopefully others will hop on the bandwagon later)

Users can tag discussions as they wish. These will be stored in a database and the user can quickly access any discussions they’ve tagged. Users will essentially "vote" for tags. It’ll essentially double up as a bookmarks/favourites system. If many users have tagged a discussion with the same term, that tag is then "made official" and can be used to access the discussion.

In theory, this should make tagging much more useful.

How it solves the above problems:

The general quality of the tagging is very low.
With some communal moderation it should be possible to weed out bad tags. The quality of the tagging does not depend on the person who started the discussion.
Most people don’t bother tagging probably because it’s optional and because there is no direct benefit in doing it.
The tagging doubles up as a bookmarking/favourites system making it easy to find discussions you’ve seen before.
Tagging relies on the original topic starter knowing what they are doing and using good tags.
Communual Tagging gives the responsibility to the whole community.
There can be quite a lot of inconsistancy in the tagging.
Hopefully, having more of the community tagging together will weed out much of the tagging inconsistancy.
Most of the community has no say in the tagging.
As above.