Clearly flag tagging permissions for posts to communities

[kaberett]

Title:
Clearly flag tagging permissions for posts to communities

Area:
tagging, community administration, posting, error messages

Summary:
For many communities, creation of tags is limited to administrators-only, to prevent an ever-growing list of subcategories, misspellings, etc. For some communities, it's also the case that only administrators are able to apply tags to posts. It should be clear on the Post an Entry page whether either of these settings is in force for any given community.

Description:
When managing tag settings as a community, there are the options:

Who can create new tags and add or remove tags from entries? Anyone/Members only/Administrators only

Who can add existing tags to entries? Anyone/Members only/Administrators only/Entry author and administrators


On the Post An Entry page, it is not [as far as I know!] made clear which of these settings have been chosen for any given community, which can lead to confusion when e.g. someone is trying to be helpful by tagging their entry but adding tags to entries is restricted to administrators only. (The major use-case I've seen of this is in the LJ community vaginapagina, where administrators choose entries that are particularly well-framed and have particularly useful discussions in comments to tag, in order to build up a "resource library" of past posts, which would be less information-dense and useful if all entries relating to a topic were tagged.)

Suggested solution: when somebody selects a community from the "post to..." drop-down, or clicks "post to [community]" in the navstrip, the "tags" area of the Post An Entry page should automatically update with a useful legend. One way I envisage this working:

* if only administrators can /tag/ entries, the tag box should be greyed out with a brief legend to the tune of "only administrators can tag entries in this community". The full list of tags could perfectly well remain accessible, with a similar legend top & bottom and all the tick-boxes greyed out.

* if only administrators can /create/ tags, the tag box should have a brief explanation along the lines of "please choose from existing tags", and typing into the box should result in searching the community's current list of tags.

Poll #10449 Clearly flag tagging permissions for posts to communities

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 68

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
63 (92.6%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)

(I have no opinion)
5 (7.4%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[ninetydegrees]

Is it still the case in the new post entry page? If so then +1.

[kaberett]

I'm using the beta update page, and I'm pretty sure that this is not in fact fixed in it, as far as my rather desultory testing went (and even if it is, the worst thing that'll happen is I have to tag this post as a duplicate :D).

[ninetydegrees]

Thank you!

[musyc]

Yup. I use the new update page. There's a comm I post to that has admin-only tagging. Every time, I open the "browse tags" option and get confronted with a blank box and a unhelpful "Error Unable to load tags data" message. It always takes me a second to remember that the mods do all the tagging there and I can't. It's a terribly unclear error message - I know the tags exist, but it doesn't tell me why I can't use them. If I were unfamiliar with the tagging system/allowances, I'd be very frustrated with it.

[ninetydegrees]

I also find this kind of workflow (letting you do something then telling you it will be ignored or is impossible) very frustrating. Thanks for the info!