Major Renovation In Use of Tags At EpicureanFriends.com

A major challenge here at the forum is deciding into which forums to post new threads. We separate out topics into logical subforums to the best of our ability, but many threads address more than one core topic.

The standard way to deal with that problem is to use "tags" when setting up threads (there's a box for that when you start a thread). It's also possible to simply include in the body of a post a hashtag like #Ethics, which the system will then be able to find automatically when searching by tag.

The problem with tags, however, is that over the years we've developed a multitude of single-use hashtags that overwhelms the system, and it becomes impossible to use such a large number of tags productively.

Today I've done a massive culling of years of single-use tags that lead nowhere, and cut the master list down to those you see here on the page entitled Tags Overview (also known as Complete Tag List).

We encourage the use of the standard tags as people create new posts and edit old ones. Words that occur only once or very few times are best left for individual searches using the search box, but we'll build lists of the key tags over time as a navigation aid. Let us know if we important tags are missing (almost certainly we need more) but we'll continue to curate them over time to make sure the number doesn't explode as in the past.

Tag Overview - Epicureanfriends.com

www.epicureanfriends.com

Great question Patrikios. Here's the answer:

1 - Anytime someone starts a new thread, they should see this box right underneath the title box. If you type any existing keyword, like "Ethics," you should see a popup allowing you to select that keyword. (Meaning, as you type E -T -H-I ------- at some point the popup will appear.

2 - At any point in any post, you can precede a word with a pound sign / hastag ( # ) and a tag will be created. As soon as you complete the post, you'll see that that word is now blue, and when you click on it you'll be taken to a page showing all other occurrences of that tag.

Here's where a problem can arise, however: It's also possible to create a new Tag just by typing in a random word. For example you can type into the Tags box, or just use a # sign, in front of "supercalifragilousexpialedocious" and a tag will be created. Or if you type "PD 10" instead of "PD10" then the tag PD 10 will be created, even though we're generally using PD10 (without the space) as the standard designation.

The system at this point doesn't allow us to limit tags to a particular set of choices, so over the years we've had a huge number of very specific tags which served no use.

That's something that the admins will fix periodically by pruning tags, so the users don't need to worry -- just when possible try to look at the list of existing tags page, and use existing tags where possible. Here's that complete list of all tags.