Ok, so some of you may have noticed the tagging feature on LAVA.

With very little explanation, I'm going to let everyone play with it and let me know what you think. If you're concerned about the style or look of it, don't worry, I can change that later. I just want to see if it is usefull and functional right now. We can play with the look later.

This tagging feature is available to everyone for now during the testing phase. It hasn't been decided if it will be a Premium Members only feature.

Edit: OK, so I'm seeing some issues already with this tagging feature. If you tag a post, it doesn't show up globally in the top of the topic. Apparently you Have 3 types of tags: Forum (tag a whole forum), Topic Thread or individual post.

Also discovered that the Global Tag Cloud is located here.

Can anyone tell me what tags do for me that I couldn't do already with a search? I'm more than willing to give them a shot and try to like them, but I just can't figure out what they're good for and how they help me use LAVA (or LabVIEW) better. They strike me as a solution looking for a problem.

For those of you who use (or like) tags, how do they improve your forum experience? What do I need to do to start seeing them in a different (and better) light?

If you know the words or phrases in the post then searching may be fine.

Tags let you define key words that do not appear in the post.

Once the tag DB is built-up the tag clouds will show the most common tag in bigger font.

Tags that appear in the same post are related, so...

If you tag strategically, you could over time create a tree of related tags to drill down to a topic that you want.

Others that do not know all of the key words could browse to a good post by drilling down.

THis link in the "dark-side" shows if you start with LabVIEW then you can click on LabVIEW_Performance to see links that speak about performance.

Happy tagging to you!

Ben

One comment I have is please try to avoid using the word LabVIEW in your tag since all of LAVA is about LabVIEW.
I also see tagging as a way to categorize things beyond the standard LAVA categories. For example, one use-case is to tag all the posts that have code downloads then it would be easier to find some code you've seen here.

BTW, how come no-one is tagging?

'cause it ain't ready yet?

I tried to add the tag "Twilight_Zone" to this thread (note the thread not any of the posts) and got a message that ready something like "notavail".

Ben

I got a 'The tag you submitted is not allowed'.
Editing an existing tag is allowed (see your question about no-one tagging)

Ton

Hmm. It's intermittent, it seems to work sometimes. Looking into it.

Is there any option of hiding the tag section of each post (it's visually distracting)? I didn't see any obvious options in the control panel.

There isn't an option for this but I could make it less distracting by changing the font size and colors.

I think that hiding it would be anitproductive with respect to the idea of tags, but I agree that they're distracting - they're huge! I'd prefer to see something that's just one small, medium gray line of text, preferably in a font different to that of the thread post text. Something like this:

Tags: This content has not been tagged yet

I can currently tag so it seems to be fixed.


I like your idea.

Thanks, it already looks better.



To be frank, it's too much of a pain. Tags are only really useful if you use a limited subset and that requires discipline and some automated tools. Ben has his auto tagger, but I don't always have LabVIEW open and I can't say I really feel like coming up with\learning\using the relevant set of tags.