Tagging is a big part of forum posting, but it needs to be properly used to be properly useful. The “xpages” tag on StackOverflow was a tag agreed in a Skype chat of XPages developers at the time. It helped to give a clear search criteria as well as increasing visibility of XPages outside the Domino community. Indeed for many years there was a feed going to Twitter of new XPages questions.
Tagging of Historical Content
When we imported content from other sites into the community forums here, we wanted to clearly differentiate them, to give information that we felt was crucial to identify the relevance of topics and identify their source. There are certain tags that were used:
- notes-domino-6-7 was used for content that was migrated in from the old Notes.Net Notes/Domino 6 and 7 forum
- notes-domino-8 was used for content migrated in from the Notes/Domino 8 forum
- notes-domino-85 was used for content migrated in from the Notes/Domino 8.5 forum
- notes-domino-9 was used for content migrated in from the Notes/Domino 9 forum
- servicenow was used for content migrated in from the various product forums since the products moved to HCL
Future Version-Specific Tags
We did not envisage creating specific version tags for currently-supported and future versions. We’re specifically capturing that information via the forum template, but that’s intended to benefit our HCL and community experts who want to answer the questions: information about version, platform, and more may be critical to giving the correct answer quickly. Historically in free-format channels that information is rarely volunteered and the absence can often discourage people from offering answers.
But is this something the community feel would is important to them?
Before answering, there are key caveats to bear in mind.
- As I mentioned, for tagging to be useful for search purposes, tags need to be used correctly.
- We’re already seeing that incorrect version tags are getting used and sometimes variants of tags. Consumers should not expect that searching for a tag will give all topics relevant to that tag.
- There will inevitably be a maximum number of tags that can be applied.
- Topics may be relevant to a release not yet available - or a release the user has not yet upgraded to. So tracking or searching a specific tag may not pick up older material that is still relevant.
- Once community members reach a high-enough level they have access to create new tags.
- Variants inevitably exist, even the most experienced individuals can inadvertently create or pick the wrong tag. So tracking or searching a specific tag might not be enough.
In addition:
- We don’t have full-time admins and our admins don’t have the time or expertise to re-tag.
- We don’t have a corpus of moderators to re-tag topics at this time and there are no guarantees people inside and outside HCL would step forward - and it should and must be both.
Feedback Request
Give us version tags because they will help us find or track issues for the specific version we’re using!
Hopefully it is apparent now that this assumption is wrong!
So should we create tags for supported versions of products? We’d like your feedback.
- Yes, I’ll accept that it’s unreliable
- No, it probably won’t be beneficial
- Yes, but only for main products on the home page (e.g. not products like Nomad, Verse or Domino REST API)
Remember, the date of a topic post as well as the information filled into the template should allow you to quickly identify if a topic post might or might not be relevant to your search. And if someone has linked to a technote or provided the technote number, that will also have versions affected.