Adding tags/keywords

[tagawa]

Yankidank & co., you have our sympathy for the trouble you've been having. Such a shame that all that data has been lost but your ability to rebound is impressive.

Talking of the data loss, there were some good suggestions in this section and one that was in the air was the addition of tags or keywords at the right of the screen below the category names, I believe. I initially thought this was a good idea as tag clouds seem to be becoming more popular and therefore more accessible to people. A couple of reservations I've since thought of, however, are:

1. If it is the submittor who chooses the tags for a story, there is a lot of room for errors that will go uncorrected. With categories, you could choose an inappropriate one but that's about it. With tags, you could choose several inapproriate ones and also add in a lot of mispelling, eventually ending up with several variations of what should be a single tag.

2. The submission process would be slowed down which could lead to people giving up and therefore fewer stories. I think this is only a minor issue if the user interface is good.

3. With users being able to input text there is inevitably room for spam and abuse. With comments, spam is resigned to a single page and can be overlooked but with tags it becomes part of the navigation system and is obviously more serious.

These are negative points but on the whole I still believe a clever implementation of tags would be worthwhile. Look forward to hearing what others think...