Tags are, in a nutshell, a way to categorize things for the person who might be looking for them. When we post a product for sale, we try to employ two kinds of tags. Those that use common keywords (like say [valentines day] that a lot of people are likely to use as keywords to search for. Then we use tags specific to our own design, like say [cute vintage pink cupid illustration]. Those type tags specific to our own design are only going to get you found if the searcher searches for those specific keywords. Which is why we struggle so much to come up with good ones and also why searching the MP can be such an exasperating mess. Search results depend greatly on what we as designers use as tags.
In the forum here, we can tag our posts as well as add tags to the posts of others. But here in the forum, the goal is to help others find the info they need rather than attract views (and thus possible sales) to our products. Except for in the Show Me forum where we want affiliates to find and promote our stuff. So we're adopting the same "use as many specific tags as possible to describe my design" philosophy here as we do for the MP. In my humble opinion, that's a mistake.
The Show Me threads are already specific to either product type or design theme. When we add tags really specific to our own design after that, we're just re-creating the search mess we already have in the MP. I mean, if an affiliate is looking for {cute vintage pink cupid illustration] why would they take the extra steps of coming to the Show Me forum and searching instead of just searching the MP to begin with?
Every tag we add becomes part of the "tag cloud". We're only what, 4 days in? and there is already seven pages of unique tags in the Show Me cloud:
The more overly-specific tags we use in the Show Me, the more there is for affiliates to sort through. And again, why would they when they could instead just search the MP directly for that kind of thing? The more overly-specific tags we add, the more we are burying ourselves in the already overwhelming assortment of tags in the cloud to browse. From what I see today, the sidebar of "related tags" shows the same tags no matter which post topic in the Show Me I am viewing. And one of the Mods already mentioned they are working on how best to display tags there given that there are already so many.
If an affiliate is browsing the Show Me, there's a chance they might decide to click on the tag for say [magnificent+wonderful+image] if they even see it, but I think there's more of a chance they would click on broader things like [valentines day] or [50th anniversary] or [pink designs]. But again, they might not even see those broader things if they are buried in pages and pages of very specific tags.
I don't know. I am approaching this from the point of view that tags in the forum serve as a way to create virtual categories for users to click on. When there are pages and pages of "categories" it becomes overly cumbersome so why bother when you could instead just search/browse directly from the MP?
The other point of view would be that tags are for bringing searchers in so use as many specific ones as you can on the chance someone will search for that and find your exact thing. But that leads me back to - why would they take the extra steps of searching the Show Me that way when they could instead just search the MP that way?
Just my opinion and I could be completely wrong in it, but it seems like the more overly-specific tags we use, the more we are hurting ourselves by re-creating the same search mess we already have in the MP which makes it harder to be found instead of easier.
Also related - Labels. From what I can tell, Labels are Tags that only the OP can apply, and are only pertinent to that topic starter. Yesterday I noticed there was a sidebar in the Show Me of Labels and all of them were product types, and listed in alphabetical order. I thought that was super convenient. It meant posters and affiliates both could use that sidebar list to quickly find the "thread" for the product type they're interested in, instead of having to scroll from one page to the next looking for X thread. Today, I am not seeing that Labels sidebar. Probably something they are working on again as they figure all this out themselves given the sheer amount of labels/tags being used. So I am thinking that if you start a new thread in the Show Me, use your Labels wisely for broad things; if you want to be really specific for your products, use Tags.
The old forum had half a dozen or more most recent created/most recent sold type threads. And yes, items posted there could be anything. In my post I repeatedly said it's overly-specific tags that I think serve no real purpose there and might even be problematic while suggesting broader tags such as [valentines day] or [50th anniversary] or [pink designs] would probably be better.
As the new forum is now, you can only search from the main page and then after entering your search terms, on the results page you can then use filters to narrow it down to a specific forum. But here's the thing, the results only show you the original thread-starter post of the thread your tagged post appears in. So for example, I tagged everything I posted from my Atomic Tie-Dye design collection with "atomic tie-dye" , hoping that would make it easy for me to keep track of what I have already posted from that design theme. So I type that into search, narrow it down to the Show Me forum, and get 6 results and yes, those are the 6 threads I posted in. But it's not showing me my post in that thread, it's showing me the title of the thread and the OP name and the Labels they used for that original post. Clicking a result takes me to the original post that started the thread so still have to scroll down through the replies to find mine. The old Show Me threads could get very long. Which means even searching, one still will have to scroll through page after page to find the single post in that thread that used the keywords they entered.
As I said, I simply can't fathom why an affiliate would spend the extra time to jump through these extra hoops to search the Show Me when they could instead just search the MP directly. I can see the value of the Show Me for broad/general collections of products, like say pink designs or kitchen towels (cause we all know that searching the MP for something like kitchen towels can bring up hundreds of results that aren't actually kitchen towels, depending on tags the designers used.) In the Show Me, if the thread title is kitchen towels, that's what you're going to see in that thread.
So I am all in favor of broad/general tags in Show Me posts, especially for Labels used by thread-starters, but I'm not yet seeing/understanding the benefit of using overly-specific tags there. If anything, they are just making the tag cloud, which is now up to 13 pages long, a chore to browse. And to get to that tag cloud, one has to go to the Show Me, open a topic/post, and then click a tag from the end of any of post. Then you'll see a list of Related Tags on the right pane and an option to View All. (Which is where you find the 13 pages of tags.) If you choose one of those tags, and then click on a post in the resulting list, it does this time take you to the individual post and not just the thread starter.
But again, this brings me back to - why would anyone bother? Maybe as the forum matures as the Z team refines it, all this stuff will mesh into a useful, simple, quick way to find things in the Show Me, but for right now, I am not seeing how overly-specific tags are useful. (And if you look at the tag cloud, you'll see some dandies.)
Super interesting! I have all my tag preferences on. I don't recall what the defaults were/are but huh, never occurred to me to consider people might have them turned off. Which means tags for that group of people are only useful as keywords in searching (as opposed to how I see them - as categories to browse), which leads to what I was saying above, that the results only take you to the OP, not the individual post within that thread that contains the keywords you searched for. 🤔
I would think because they could browse the forum for threads for say kitchen towels or cat photography and that is what they would see in the thread. Searching for stuff in the MP could return dozens if not hundreds of irrelevant results because that is dependent on how designers tag things. And you could search the Show Me for those broad threads instead of aimlessly scrolling around the pages looking for them. I can't know but I doubt people were/are searching the Show ME for super specific things, they're looking for the thread with a whole collection of things on the broader topic they want. Which makes over-tagging your specific design within that collection sort of useless IMO.
Tags become keywords that are searchable by anyone, regardless of who tagged what post. You may be thinking of Labels. Labels are special tags that only the OP can add to their original thread-starter post. But they still become keywords for any searcher. Not sure why Labels are special but guessing maybe they carry more weight than regular tags in search results.
