Improved Tagging – Stack Exchange | Hacker News Reader

Improved Tagging – Stack Exchange

blog.stackoverflow.com

34 pointsLiveTheDream9 comments

...that thing is monstrous. It seems to me that it presents an almost frightening display of information. The synonym handling is great, but why not keep the original tag display and show the wiki description as a tooltip when hovering over one of the options?

I personally think the ui is kind of intimidating, and will drive people off tagging because of the suggestion that you should actually do all of the "work" of reading those descriptions.

The problem with tooltips is discoverability. The idea of this change is to make the wiki descriptions plainly obvious to even brand new users who wouldn't know such a thing exists.

My suggestion would be to only show one of these descriptions at a time as a sub-element of the first suggestion displayed in the old-style list (with other suggestions displayed as well, but without the description). This would make the description plainly obvious to a new user, but without the information overload presented in the current tag suggestions.

While its ugly, I can give a little insight in to why I think it (or something like it) is a good idea. This attempts to solve one problem that I see daily as a steward of the "canvas" tag, which is used for HTML5 Canvas questions.

A lot of people will tag something with "android" and "canvas" when they are looking for help with the Java Android Canvas. I have to retag these to "android" and "android-canvas" because the Java Android Canvas has its own tag and the questions related to it are very different than the questions related to Android using HTML5 Canvas.

To help people a little while ago, I wrote excerpt for the "canvas" tag as Canvas is a commonly named object used for drawing or as a layout container. This tag is for HTML5 Canvas. Use "android-canvas" for Android and "wpf-controls" for WPF.

Of course nobody ever saw that until after they posted their question, if they saw it at all! But now they are much more likely to see it.

So I welcome this, though I think there is probably a slightly nicer way to do it out there.

This still doesn't solve the problem of helping users discover what tags are out there. I didn't even know about tags like 'discussion' or 'support' until I read this post, and I wouldn't have thought about typing them in to see if other people are using them because they seem somewhat obscure.

The 'discussion' and 'support' tags only apply to the meta sites, not the main Q&A sites. When you post a question on a meta, you're required to tag it with one of four tags which help the mods/admins filter the purpose of the post - bug reports, feature requests, open discussion, and support requests.

If you've ever made a post on meta, this would have been made obvious since the tag input box comes prepopulated with a list of these, and the submission fails if you don't use one. If you don't post on meta, however, these tags are meaningless to you.

What I like on SO is how their search works with multiple tags. It's very effective.

It seems like the Stack Exchange sites have a surplus of workers willing to do busy work like retagging questions. So I'm not even sure this is a problem they really need to solve.

saw that changing yesterday. one post had regular tags, the following one had that monstrosity.

scared the hell out of me.

for now I'm thinking it's not necessary at all. just matching synonyms would suffice. don't have to show them on screen like that.

This is the timeless geek UI solution: Just throw more information at the user.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com