dw_suggestions | Smarter Tag Tracking

Title:
Smarter Tag Tracking

Area:
tags, tracking

Summary:
When tracking an entry, a shortlist of tags from that entry should be provided first, rather than the entire taglist.

Description:
Stolen from <a href="http://community.livejournal.com/suggestions/995518.html">this suggestion on LJ</a>.

Tracking a specific tag on a journal or community is a wonderful way of only following the entries you are interested in. Generally, I will have followed a link to a specific entry, read it and wanted to follow the other entries with that tag. (For example, a fanfic WIP where the author has created a tag just for that story.)

If you click on track on that entry, you get the option to subscribe to a tag, but are then presented with every single tag used on the journal. It would be far more useful for that option to only offer the tags used on that particular entry. Having to scroll through the whole list is a pain.

A More Choices button (or something of that kind) might be a good idea, just in case someone wanted access to the other tags, and in any case, if someone clicked to the track screen from the Profile then I'd expect the whole list to appear. For most people using the function though, limiting the tags to the ones that you've seen most recently, on the entry that you are interested in, seems a much more useful arrangement.

I can see an argument that users might be confused not to see the full list, but I think that seeing a whole list of tags, most of which have nothing to do with what you are looking for, is far more confusing. Particularly as tracking tags seems to me to be something much more likely to be done by more experienced users - though that is only my guess, not fact.

ETA - msilverstar has come up with an excellent variant in the comments - "I could go for the set of tags for the entry, followed by a line on the menu and then the whole set of tags." I'd be more than happy with that as a solution, it still addresses the basic problem of making the tags for that entry easily accessible.

Poll #2354 Smarter Tag Tracking

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 32

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
19 (59.4%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
7 (21.9%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)

(I have no opinion)
6 (18.8%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Just defaulting to the tag that is currently on the entry would be so great. Maybe the alphabetically first if there is more than one. I really dislike the current default to the first.

I could go for the set of tags for the entry, followed by a line on the menu and then the whole set of tags.

If someone is using the colon trick to make hierarchical tag sets, the popup tags menu could do that with submenus.

Those are both good suggestions, and would be better than the current arrangement.

The problem with the first is that often entries do have more than one tag and there's no guarantee that the one you want will be the first alphabetically, but it would still help in a useful number of cases.

The second sounds completely acceptable, as far as I'm concerned, if it's easier to code/less confusing.

You're completely welcome to link to this suggestion here from the LJ suggestions entry if you'd like to (both on this and on any future ones); a "this is also being discussed for Dreamwidth" and a link, or something.

This is welcome for a couple reasons.
1) Because I say so. ;)
2) Because it's possible that there will be some good ideas here that don't come up there, and it's therefore relevant to the discussion there.
3) Sometimes (oftentimes) Dreamwidth gets any given implementation of an awesome idea first; sometimes (less often, as the codebases drift apart) a Dreamwidth patch can be applied to LiveJournal directly, or modified to suit. A link to a relevant Dreamwidth suggestion then makes it easier for the minion who's attempting to search that down to find the Bugzilla entry.

If you don't feel like it, no need to, but it's welcome if you choose to.