[Solace]

As far as stickies go, this thread is essentially to see what's working for people and what isn't. My personal goal is to slowly get these stickies updated and useful for as many as possible. Among some of the problems I've noted -

Some sections could use stickies removed entirely or condensed.

Some are just out of date and could use revamping or removing.

The format isn't universal across the forums, this makes it more difficult to distinguish between "Must read", "Useful but not urgent", and "this thread is bumped so much it may as well be a sticky".

So in addition to updating formatting, I'm also looking at going section by section and making the stickies cleaner and more relevant.

Originally Posted by KholdStare

Once upon a time, something like a group of people who would be given permission to add tags to threads (more than the current limit) was proposed, but that never took off. If this group was created, then they could make tag searching much more useful, and can tag manga or anime in threads too.

Well, tagging kind of died out in general. Unfortunately the enthusiasm just kind of waned, and the moderators (myself included) just have no pressing urgency to revisit tags.

Originally Posted by felix

I'm still of the opinion (as then) that restricting tags to only pre-defined ones is the best way to go. Keeps expectations on the system low: "we have THESE, you can use them to find X, Y, Z", unlike the current "oh everyone can tag with anything and you can search them!" So what if I can search them and there are many? does google try to give as many results as possible at the cost of accuracy. Do I even want to make use of tags as just this search tool? These are just some of the easy problems that come from a lack of clear objective.

You can actually turn this wording from tags to stickies and the meaning is the same. In the current state there really is no consideration of how to use them and also how many things get in your way when you try to use them. I guess you could call that a usability testing problem.

I do find it funny how the reasons Solace highlights for changes in stickies apply so much more to tags. There doesn't seem to be any concern for tags though. I'll take it as moderators don't really use tags in general.

Well in defense of the forum, it is old. There's a lot of policies we used to employ that don't hold as much weight as they used to, like licensing, which have shifted our approach. Consider this the first toe in the water towards getting things cleaned up. It won't be something that happens overnight though.

I don't personally use tags, but that's just my personal style of browsing. I hardly use bookmarking either...I'm just weird like that. I can't speak for the other staff though, I'm sure they use more features than myself.