Tagging properly (quick tutorial video—please do this)

The War Room Detroit Lions — The Den
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Hi all, I’ve seen some of you begin to be more proactive tagging your topics: THANK YOU. Even if you’re a miserable Stafford hater who worships at the feet of Sheila, I’m super proud of you. :wink:

Tagging is an important feature that will generate more activity/discussions/people willing to join, especially as the draft nears. But we all need to do our part to make it better.

(The auto-tagging feature helps some, but is no substitution for user-generated tags).

For tag groups, we have:

  • NFL Teams (yes, even tag the Lions)
  • NFL Draft Prospects
  • NFL Draft Positions

If your topic is about the Lions drafting Hutch, tag it “Detroit Lions” and “NFL Draft”—which unlocks the player you need to tag. If it’s about Hutch and other defensive ends, like Kavyon Thibodeaux, tag “Kavyon Thibodeaux,” and “Defensive End” and anyone else relevant.

As the video above highlights, you can use a fuzzy search like “Kay” to find what you need (no need to know how to ask Google how to spell Thibodeaux, like I just did).

Let me know via private message if you have questions

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Nate, I was going to show muting a Tag and found something a little puzzling…

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I can’t find Stafford as a tag to mute.

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Players aren’t tags, only prospects. Otherwise it’d get impossible to manage.

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Well, if there was ever a case to be made for adding a player’s tag, it’s Matthew Stafford.

Still, it’s a good tool and look forward to seeing it used, especially on some of those names aren’t exactly household.

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I was looking for an officiating tag for my last post, not sure if it is worth creating or not.

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Considering it.

I’d prefer the forum revolve around teams and the draft, at least initially. But let me dwell on this one.

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I understand, and most officiating posts, imo, are responses to specific games, instead of game neutral.

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I could not find a relevant one for announcers, either…when you edit, you must tag, so I resorted to the Lions as a tag. Perhaps you could add misc. topics like officiating, announcing, as they come up? Or maybe one for “NFL” when its a multi-team issue?

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I get it, but there’s other considerations. So, some background …

Tagging is always interesting. In theory, ‘tags’ should be user generated (I do content strategy for a living, so it’s sort of my thing to nerd out about this stuff). Tags can bind content to help people find/identify what they need in a way they’d expect, shedding a parent-child structure that might limit discovery. Think early days of Google vs. Yahoo. It’s ultimately why Google won.

But if we do user-generated tags on a forum, it can quickly become chaos, and there’s no manpower to reel it in. So “#Announcers” could also become “#Announcing” or “#Anowncing” (have you seen how some of us spell around here?) or “#F*ckChrisCollinsworth” or whatever.

So we need a controlled vocabulary, especially if we want to keep it draft-leaning. This means eliminating user-generated tags in favor of managed tags with user suggestions.

As we grow, I think I’ll be introducing more and more tags to manage the chaos, but keep it helpful. I can see the usefulness of tags like ‘#FreeAgency’ or #Officiating and I’m guessing users will help suggest ones that are missing. I also like ‘#NFL’ for multi-team topics. I’m dropping the individual team tags in favor of team categories this weekend. The fact you and others are actively asking for certain tags is awesome.

Let’s keep this conversation going. It’s very helpful as we make modifications to increase visibility of good conversations on the forum.

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