Time to clean up the shop front windows Parallax?

Peter Jakacki

I've mentioned this quite some time ago but silly me has to look across at the "POPULAR TAGS" column that hogs the screen and it makes me laugh wondering what these newbies think when they see this, not knowing any better of course. With the emphasis that Parallax places on making the forum friendly and helpful for newbies you'd think they would make a little effort and tidy up their shop front to better reflect their core business. Is what's popular at Parallax happen to be Basic Stamps, Javelin, sx chips, and Spinnerets? If I were a newbie I might be turned off at the sight of that. Is PropGCC less popular than Forth?

cgracey

Thanks for pointing this out, Peter.

Parallax Web People, have you got any response to this?

msrobots

@Peter,

the popular tags show the number of tagged posts (or threads?).

Obviously the furious Tachyon development beats the slow moving PropGCC development there.

And I guess also that posts rarely get tagged by posters, most posts got tagged by a script while importing into the new forum. That may explain the Stamp, Javelin and SX dominance.

I personally think the whole tagging thing is completely useless, if new posts not get automagically tagged or some script runs daily to archive a proper tagging.

And there lies the problem. How to tag a post correctly with some script?

By keywords in the post? Who maintains that list?

Easy with Tachyon, most posts in your threads contain the word 'Tachyon' somewhere, but that already does not work with 'Sensors'. Who writes the word 'Sensors' when posting about a Ping module or a thermocouple? Or uses 'PropGCC' in a post about programming a P1 in C with SimpleIDE?

Some features of the forumsoftware apply to this forum, other (like sort by votes) simply doesn't.

IMHO the whole tagging feature should be completely removed.

Enjoy!

Mike

DavidZemon

msrobots wrote: »

@Peter,

the popular tags show the number of tagged posts (or threads?).

Obviously the furious Tachyon development beats the slow moving PropGCC development there.

And I guess also that posts rarely get tagged by posters, most posts got tagged by a script while importing into the new forum. That may explain the Stamp, Javelin and SX dominance.

I personally think the whole tagging thing is completely useless, if new posts not get automagically tagged or some script runs daily to archive a proper tagging.

And there lies the problem. How to tag a post correctly with some script?

By keywords in the post? Who maintains that list?

Easy with Tachyon, most posts in your threads contain the word 'Tachyon' somewhere, but that already does not work with 'Sensors'. Who writes the word 'Sensors' when posting about a Ping module or a thermocouple? Or uses 'PropGCC' in a post about programming a P1 in C with SimpleIDE?

Some features of the forumsoftware apply to this forum, other (like sort by votes) simply doesn't.

IMHO the whole tagging feature should be completely removed.

Enjoy!

Mike

Agreed. Tagging is only effective when enforced - either by software (being a required input field) or by moderators. Without enforcement, it would be better to remove the feature (or at very least, remove the "POPULAR TAGS" section on the left).

Ken Gracey

I'll have Bump take a look at this on Monday, as he set up and implemented the system - and would be the right person to take care of it too.

Thanks,

Ken Gracey

twm47099

Reading this thread inspired me to look at the tags more closely. I saw the tag for the propscope. (I just bought one on the current sale.) The documentation for the PS had a link (now defunct) to the PS forum. But by clicking on the tag I got a clean list of the PS posts, which were very useful. So the tags can be helpful. Although for certain topics they would just lead to a cluttered mess.

Tom

Heater.

The whole tag soup nonsense was discussed at length when the forum last changed it's software base.

We were told to put up with it.