Following our recent discussions about mandatory tags, why not force users to use tags, but also help them along..?

Say I create a discussion with the title "Sharing a variable between PHP scripts on same page"

Something like Javascript would automatically place into the textbox: sharing variable PHP scripts same page

So all the program will do is remove spaces and common words like "a" etc, just making things so much easier for all with next-to-no effort/change to the users?

Just an idea?

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If there is no difference between tags and content text when searching, what is the point in duplicating the text via tags?

Agreed with both Prit and The Rev. Cannot see the point in automating the tagging system as it simply wouldn't result in meaningful tags much of the time, and where it did it would just be replicating already searchable data.

Agreed with other responses. What is the benefit of random articles being tagged with the word 'same'? The tag cloud will just turn into a cloud of commonly used words.

A lot can change in just a few weeks. I'm playing around with auto tags now. Don't mind me ;) If my theory works, I'll explain myself in a few days after I test it out.

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With the tagging - I used to do it out of a sense of duty more than anything - I didn't really think about it. But what is the point? Really? For searching, DW has a forum and sub-forum structure (which you can filter), with searchable title/content and article type filtering. Where does the tagging come in? Surely the content should contain all words you would expect to find in the tags? Not criticizing - just curious - of what benefit is 'tagging' on DW? Does it have wider implications for external search engines?

StackOverflow and many other sites as of late have really trained people to work with and respond to tags. Advertisers and PR guys from companies such as Dell want to be able to have a short branded URL that they can type in and find all articles related to their product.

Our search functionality uses Google's API and is not too customizable. It's really a glorified sitewide google search.

I wanted the ability to do something like http://www.daniweb.com/tags/codeigniter and show me a list of recently updated articles that are related to using the codeigniter php framework.

Pulling out keywords from most articles also allows me to make full use of the tag cloud functionality to associate articles together. This helps when generating the Related Articles in the sidebar.

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Ah, ok. Thanks, seems a little clearer.

So how do we make use of tags to do a search when the Daniweb search uses Google?

Click on a tag, or use the tag cloud at the bottom of forum and article pages.

First on my todo list regarding tags, now that I have my auto-tag feature working the way I'd like, is to have my auto-untag feature working. The goal there is to do some automagic tag maintenance by removing tags from articles when they have only been used once, ever, and are over a year old. Essentially that would put all newly created tags into a testing phase of one year, where the tag is removed if just the one single article ever used it.

Great, I'm so happy that I've got everyone thinking!

I really like the sound of how we can now really use this idea (and tags in general) so great work guys and girls and can't wait to see what happens next!

I also want to point out that the main benefit of tagging comes from using tags that aren't keywords found in the posts. For example, tagging articles related to DaniWeb's API with the tag daniweb-api. Without a human doing that, that's something that no search functionality would ever be able to do.

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