[relentlessflame]

Originally Posted by Toua

Arguably, younger fans are taking over the fandom. I would personally not want to see AnimeSuki turn into a sort of "fun house" for children. [...] If you're going to go with the popular vote (displaying tags that have been clicked the most/agreed upon by the majority), then we can all pretty much guess that publisher labels, creator credits and other useful information will be pushed aside--the tag system will be dominated by genre names, or it'll be a plethora of every possible label known to man. [...] Case in point, you can't get away without a group of people that should know better than the majority taking the charge here. Elitism vs populism is an age old debate, but taking all things in consideration, I think the former is much needed in this case.

I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at here, but my gut instinct tells me that you're wrong. I don't think any among the mods or admins would allow the feature to simply "run amok" and become useless. No matter how it ends up happening, it's virtually assured that stupid tags will be removed, and useful tags will be added. And I don't have a problem at all with helping put in some extra effort to implement the sorts of tags that can be useful, and helping inform/persuade everyone of their usefulness.

In other words, I don't see why you're so pessimistic about it. I think that, with a bit of work, we can make this something useful, relevant, and much more than the "lowest common denominator", and we can do that without either resorting to total elitism or close-mindedness. I have more faith in the forum membership than you do, I guess. We'll get there.

Originally Posted by NightWish

My guess, on the reason for a multi-tag search not existing, is the added complexity on how you combine each tag. Do you want threads featuring ALL the tags, ANY of the tags, or worse still, do you want to be able to say ALL threads with x, BUT not y. It could be as complex as the keyword search. As it happens, expanding it to simply "search more than one tag" is a relatively trivial change (I have a working example on a test system).

From what I've read, it sounds like one of the early beta version of this vBulletin upgrade allowed you to search for multiple keywords using the comma syntax that you'd normally use for entering tags. For example, you could search for "romance,comedy,spring 2008", which would be like an "AND" search for all three. I'm not sure why they removed it, though, and I found some other comments wondering why it was non longer there. I assume that perhaps they lacked the time to optimize the code and so it was dropped from this version in order to be reintroduced later.

Anyway, whether you use that method or another, I'm strongly in favour or multiple tag search, and I think that would probably help alleviate the need for "composite tags".

Originally Posted by NightWish

Aside from the use of a two loosely related words (romantic and comedy) in one tag, what specifically about tagging the suggestion forum is negative? The only argument against it I can see is that it would "pollute" the results with lots of suggestion threads, which it would. But that would be helpful IF the tags are applied to a selection of the better suggestion threads.

Well, if we had multi-tag search, we could fix this entire problem by just tagging all suggestion threads with "suggestion", or by encouraging people to use the Advanced Search to restrict the tag search to only a certain forum. For every problem, there's a solution.