Tagging in Competitions Time

One-Eye

The fundamental problem of tagging remains - in that it depends on users setting the tags and setting them correctly when posting a comp. I sincerely doubt this will happen.

I may not have got this fully correct, but the two main uses of tags that I foresee are:

1. FOLLOWING - you could follow one (or a combination of more than one) tag and get notifications when a comp that meets the criteria is posted. This would be particularly useful for "end date compers" who could follow "Daily" and "Mag Daily" and get a notification when these comps are posted.
2. SEARCHING - You can use the search function so that search finds comps with a particular tag (or more than one tag) - eg. Search for all "Website" entry tags if you only want this type of comp etc.
   I think that the most useful tag search function would be to find all comps except those with certain tags and I expect that the only way to do this would be to search all the other tags. eg. If you want to ignore "gleam" and "raffle site" comps you would have to search with all 7 remaining tags.
   

The BIG PROBLEM WITH SEARCH is that results do not show the "entered" ticks/crosses and without these the "tag search" function is next to useless. It should also be noted that many users don't fully use or even understand the search function so adding tags into the mix would not be very helpful.

Personally, I hate that I would be expected to set tags on the multitude of comps I post each day, and yet I can't see me ever needing or using tags in any way after!

Joolski

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81993666#Comment_81993666

Okay thank you, thats great. I can't see that I would use Tags personally, just because of how I use the forum.

MSE_Stephen

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81991756#Comment_81991756

Hi @priorslee

A counter argument from it being an assumed default that doesn't need a tag would be with the tagging system, as it stands, you can't use tags to exclude items from a list (I have put in feature request for this functionality)

So a user who only wants to see competitions with a website entry, would not be able to get a view that shows only those competitions - You can't have a view that excludes Social Media etc., to leave you with the tag-less that's left.

Nor would you be able to tag-follow Website comps.

That said, the aim here is to give Compers some tools to try, not to force a system that doesn’t work for the community. If we provide the Website tag and Compers decide it isn’t useful or don’t use it, that’s fine. But I think it’s worth offering it during the trial, because with changes like this we often don’t know what will work until people have had a chance to try it.

MSE_Stephen

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81993609#Comment_81993609

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81993699#Comment_81993699

To address some of these points,

@Joolski

For the main Competitions time section, nothing will change on the main index of Comps. You won't even know tags have been added - which is actually bad because initially tagging will be less useful until we move to a slightly new layout in the future, that shows tags before you open a Comp.

@One-Eye

For the Search, yes i'm hoping that one day we can have an exclude tags option.
I don't know if we'll ever get checkboxes in the actual Search page, because although Vanilla will be building things just for us to fully integrate the Comps time bits into the forum, the Search page is a very different thing.

MSE_Stephen

Hi everyone,

Tags are now live in Competitions Time.

If you haven’t already, please take a look at the new tag-following system, which lets you follow tags you’re interested in and could really help improve the section: https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/tagging-page

(Formatting of the tag list will be fixed later!)

At the moment, tags are not especially prominent, but that will change in the coming months when we move to a new layout. In that layout, tags will be much more visible on the competitions list and should make it easier to find the types of competitions you’re interested in.

🙏 For now, please, please could you use tags whenever possible when posting competitions? 🙏

It would really help us build up a useful bank of well-tagged open competitions, ready for when tags become more prominent in the new layout.

Please don’t worry about getting everything perfect. Just add the tags that seem most useful and relevant to the competition you’re posting.

Thanks again for all your feedback and help with this. We’ll keep listening, reviewing how tags are being used, and making improvements where needed.

EnglishWelshie

A bit of feedback now tagging is live.

I was going through my mag daily and daily posts and have edited the ones I posted to add the tag to test it out.

Adding the tag is really easy I found and doesn't take up any extra time really as all that is needed is a click on the tag when posting new comps.

When clicking on the tag section on the main board though the red and green buttons are missing which will make things difficult in knowing if a comp has been entered, skipped or not entered. I feel that the red and green buttons should be there as it makes things so much easier when viewing comps.

My personal viewpoint is that I think the tags will be useful especially for when I have been on holiday and have lots to catch up on as it will be much easier to check for dailies, mag dailies etc. I comp by entering as they are posted except for when I go away when I have to comp by end date until I catch up once back home.

MSE_Stephen

Hi @englishsummer

Thanks so much for tagging your posts.

Yes. This is very much just an early first step. Where things will really take off is when we can get tags AND checkboxes on most views. That's when, we hope, members will really see the value in tags. Especially as more tools to use tags are released.

For now, we just wanted to get tagging in place, and hope Compers will take the extra few seconds to tag posts. That way, when we have the new system in place, lots of Comps will already be tagged and we're not starting from scratch!

If Compers could tag, even though the benefits aren't fully in place yet it would be incredibly helpful! 🙏

One-Eye

@MSE_Stephen - early feedback

👎️ Minor problem - when posting, you can select a tag more than once (I did it accidentally!)

👎️ Minor problem - now that we are live, can you remove the "test" tag.

👍️ It has turned out that it is no problem selecting tags when posting as it is very quick and doesn't delay. It might be worse if we expand to have 16 or more tags.

Am I wrong in remembering that in early discussions on the subject of tagging, it was said that:

1. All tags would apply across the whole forum, and there wouldn't be a dedicated subset for comps.
2. The order of tags would not be fixed but would re-order according to usage.

Haribobo19

I think it would be good to show the tags that each competition has on the standard competitions board as you're scrolling through them, so that we dont have to write (FB), (IG), (Gleam) etc. in the title too.

Comping_Rich

could we have YouTube to the list of tags?