https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-official-discourse-tags-plugin-discourse-tagging/26482
This is a plugin I’ve been keeping my eye on now, and looks like a good alternative to our sub-sub-categories need since people can watch tags. It would also be a flexible option that teams can use as they see fit.
Would there be any objection to adding this?
It looks like you can’t filter a category by tags (yet):
https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-official-discourse-tags-plugin-discourse-tagging/26482/20?u=leomca
My main concern here is people having to manually add tags and people adding tags that are not related or duplicated with similar names.
I just noticed on meta, it looks like you can only select from a predefined set of tags.
That’s good. So what would be our user scenario for using tags instead of categories?
I’m interested in possibly using tags for an MDN category on Discourse. I’d like users to be able to tag threads based on the topic area(s) and/or locale(s) they’re discussing. For example, a thread about translating JavaScript docs in French could be tagged “JavaScript” and “fr”. Or a thread that has to do with both HTML and DOM docs could be tagged “HTML” and “DOM”. Topics do not necessarily fit into a strict hierarchy, so multiple tags may be relevant.
As background, there has been interest for a long time in having “affinity” groups on MDN, based on areas of interest. Such groups are pointless without a way for members to communicate. But the MDN dev team has been reluctant to implement a messaging system within MDN, because there are so many issues involved, making it a very large effort. Using Discourse with tags might be one way to let affinity groups communicate without building a huge new messaging feature into MDN. Users could choose to watch only the tags they’re interested in.
My ulterior motive is to provide a motivation to migrate the MDN community to Discourse. Right now, we use mailing lists(/Google groups/newsgroups) to communicate. As things stand there’s no reason to overcome the inertia of the current system. But if people starting using Discourse to talk to their affinity groups, the need for the mailing lists might wane, until one day maybe we could do away with them.
Bump! (And moving to Feature Requests)
The plugin has seen a number of improvements from when we last looked at it, including having ‘staff only’ tags, and adding the ability to mute/track/watch tags.
You can see them in use on Discourse Meta: https://meta.discourse.org/tags
I would find them useful in Community WebDev > Discourse, and I think they could be useful in this category for marking things as wanted.