Allow tags on a post that aren't searchable (don't index)
Yaodema
started a topic
5 months ago
existing tags are all searchable (though only one at a time due to tag search constraints, and you can't search for arbitrary tags on a specific user's posts)
people may not want them to be searchable, however; sometimes you just want to leave a silly joke in your tags, and would rather it not clog up the tag space. or you'd want to put a tag onto a post that marks it as a kind of content (food, insects, etc) that some people might prefer to choose when they want to run into it.
the problem is, marking for content and marking for searchability are often at odds. cohost has gotten large enough that being in a tag is not just a way to be discovered by people who think your thing is neat, but also by people who appear to just be looking for fights. currently, the only way to post without automatically being highly visible is to not tag your posts at all. I am not the first to mention this issue, by far, but older threads on here about this feature haven't seen activity in a year.
my suggestion:
existing tags will remain marked with a #
typing a leading # into a tag will just absorb that into the normal tag, as if you didn't type the leading # (this should have been the case already, but it helps with the UI for the next bit)
typing a leading ! into a tag will flip the leading character from # to !, which indicates tags that are *not searchable.*
tooltips (or similar) will indicate what these symbols mean, both in the creator menu and in complete posts, but importantly,
tags can also be flipped into "don't add to searches" mode by flipping a switch of some kind on the interface, which clearly shows new tags added will be in the un-indexed ! mode.
this should both clearly mark tags at a glance, once one is used to the notation, and also make it easy for people not familiar with the notation to still learn about it and use tags in both ways.
internally, this should be implementable by having a separate field for ! tags that isn't indexed, which either the client or the server will treat as normal tags for filtering purposes (depending on whether the filter is "click-through warning" or "hide entirely" level)
Yaodema
existing tags are all searchable (though only one at a time due to tag search constraints, and you can't search for arbitrary tags on a specific user's posts)
people may not want them to be searchable, however; sometimes you just want to leave a silly joke in your tags, and would rather it not clog up the tag space. or you'd want to put a tag onto a post that marks it as a kind of content (food, insects, etc) that some people might prefer to choose when they want to run into it.
the problem is, marking for content and marking for searchability are often at odds. cohost has gotten large enough that being in a tag is not just a way to be discovered by people who think your thing is neat, but also by people who appear to just be looking for fights. currently, the only way to post without automatically being highly visible is to not tag your posts at all. I am not the first to mention this issue, by far, but older threads on here about this feature haven't seen activity in a year.
1 person likes this idea