Malone Tags

[Christian Robottom Reis]

On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 12:09:32PM +0200, Daniel Holbach wrote:
> The current list of tags contains around 75 tags (Sébastien counted :-))
> - I feel the list will continue to grow and in the end defeat the
> purpose of tags completely, as bugs won't be grouped as effectively as
> they could (in addition to the task of finding the correct tags).

Well, there are a few arguments that can be entertained here.

    a) That tags are light-weight, that any end-user can easily add one,
       and that the ones that really matter are the ones which are most
       used.

       If this is how it should work, then we should really only display
       N most used tags, and get on with life.

    b) That tags are light-weight, as above, but that we nudge people
       towards reusing existing tags instead of creating new ones.

       To do this, we could prompt people "Are you sure" when they are
       adding a tag which we've never seen before. We could display a
       list of existing tags so that people could choose from them
       rather than making up their own. We could also display counts
       next to the tags so that people could easily clean up one-off
       typos and tags which were actually unused. We could also offer a
       place where a product could define text or a URL to an "Official
       Tag Guide".

    c) That tags should be heavy-weight, that only product/project
       owners should be allowed to create them. End-users would be
       allowed only to select from existing defined tags. This is
       exactly how Bugzilla keywords work.

    d) That tags should be heavy-weight, as above, and that only
       privileged people should be allowed to set them.

The approach so far has been pretty much a), but we are moving towards
b), because we currently think it is the best compromise between
ease-of-use, flexibility, low-startup-cost and effectiveness as a bug
grouping mechanism.

I'd be happy to hear opinions on this.
-- 
Christian Robottom Reis | http://async.com.br/~kiko/ | [+55 16] 3376 0125