This week I wanted to talk about the power of the Tag in the forum software. It has been a feature in the software for a long time now. Although we use them slightly differently in our Stories Archive, they function the same with our search system.

What is a tag?
It is a descriptive word that you can attach to a topic, blog, gallery image, ebook, story, etc. This word is that searchable. The system is set up so you can group like-tagged items together.
For example, anything tagged "Renee Stevens" would show up if you click here: http://www.gayauthors.org/forums/tags/forums/Renee+Stevens/

What is a prefix tag?
On the forums in particular, the tag section has a check box next to it that says 'use first tag as prefix'. What this does is put the first tag as a highlighted word preceding the Topic Title in the forum index.

Why do we want to use prefix's?
As part of our cleaning up of the forums, we are combining some forums and would like to use the prefixes as a way to still keep things sortable. For example, we already use common forums for our author groups. When we use tags, say 'myr' for any topics relating to my stories, it allows us to group like topics together when we click on the tag. So if you click the 'myr' tag, you'd get all the topics that have that tag. We could do the same with "humor" or "gamer" or "sports" for example.

How do I use tags?
Tags are pretty simple. If you want to use a prefix, then write that tag first and then hit comma. each time you hit comma, the word will solidify into a tag with a little 'x' next to it. If you're using the prefix, just tap the check box. If you'd like to add more tags, just write the tag and follow it with a comma. It's that easy.

Hey, why isn't my new topic showing up in search?
The search system is slightly delayed and updates about every 15 min. It will be after that that your topic should show up under the tag search.

Why can I only select certain tags?
Some areas of the site have the tag listed in order to control sorting. Stories Archive is a great example. You cannot type your own tag there, you must select from what is available. In some forums, we have prepopulated tags as well. This is done to make things easier. For example: domluka, dom luka mean the same thing, but would be two different tags in the system.

I encourage everyone to start using tags. They are there to make your lives easier after all