I've stickied you about a project that another WebmasterWorld user is involved in that does just this.

Personally, I don't find tags terribly useful. One of the problems I have with the concept is that most implementations only permit one-word tags, not phrases.

I do think it can be a useful adjunct, though, to more conventional organization. So, forums, topic, AND tags might be useful.

I'd like to see more forum software support cross-linking to multiple forums. Often, a discussion is difficult to categorize into a single forum topic.

It would be nice for users to be able to choose how they view a forum's taxonomy. You should be able to view based on the site's fixed taxonomy, your own, somebody else's a generated tag cloud, etc.

A very old conferencing system - U. Michigan's Confer supported (supports? Confer still around?) each user building their own taxonomy. It wouldn't be much of a leap to support group-built alternative taxonomies.

yep,
i found some forums using tags is forum posts,
but i dont think, this helps,
since no one clicks on them much in forums.
just like adsense clicks, these are also less in forums ;)

Hi people,

Definitely - tag-based forums are the future. I work on the tag-based forum (won't tell you the name yet because we will release major redesign soon) and I can tell you that tag-based system can be made very powerful. In terms of topic categorization, navigation, and such - tags rule.

Tag-based system can improve topic categorization (by applying collaborative tagging). It can do what jtara called "cross-linking" - to let the discussion to appear under more than one "subforum". It can even let to "morph" the thread from one topic to another.

jtara - how about a system which can organize "subforums" based purely on tags?

If you want to know to know the future with the right mix of tags+ directories+community+search engines you can pm me as I am working on it.

A plain tag is useful when the sample is large but a weighted tag is much helpful. You can find some examples here [webmasterworld.com...] .

Currently I am working on making single user wordpress multiuser (a little better than their exisiting framework). Already done it but shifting it to sourceforge this week. Once I complete this I will be shifting to wighted tagging project.

I think the best combination is folksonomy and then arranging folksonomy units using a taxonomy units.

I have to admit upfront that I know nothing about tags, but I'm having a hard time relating this to the fairly large forum where I mod. I don't know if it's unusual, but the forums are separated by more than topics.

For example, one part of the forum is serious, another part is absolutely not serious. Someone might start a political thread in either place, but even though the topic might be identical the threads will turn out completely different from each other, because members understand what goes where. (And if a newbie doesn't, they can be gently redirected.)

One part of the forum is a gathering place for fans of various actors. No one but a troll would go there to give a scathing rant on how incompetent one of those actors is. But a site member might very well make such a post on the part of the forum that's for open discussion of cinema.

So, how would you implement tags on a forum where the categories are based on the tone at least as much as they are on the topic and, quite importantly, the same topic might turn up in more than one place but in very different forms? Or would such a forum just not be a good place to use them?

[edited by: Beagle at 10:40 pm (utc) on Nov. 16, 2006]