I would love, love, love this.

This would be very very cool and I really hope they put this into effect.

Apparently I voted this up sometime in the past, but I'm not sure what this would involve.

Firstly, how do you expect people to add the tags? Are you envisioning an extra entry field when someone posts a comment? If that is the case I'd personally end up hiding it, to avoid clutter.

Secondly, what is the purpose of having it in the first place? Without an accompanying module (such as "ListPosts") that could filter by tags, attaching tags to a forum post would be pointless.

20 people have rated this up so far, so I'm wondering why. If it was implemented already, how would you be using it?

I use Wikidot primarily for teaching writing courses, and tagging offers a very useful metacognitive exercise for students to think about the different ways they could "chunk" their work. Not having that capacity on forum posts is a missed opportunity for higher-order learning and reflection, especially when some of their best writing and thinking happens in an informal response or exercise on the discussion board, as opposed to a high-stakes full-length essay. The benefits of this kind of self-organization make the act of tagging, even before adding the ability to filter or navigate by tag, far from pointless.

In addition, tag-based navigation allows my students to see who else is writing on similar themes or sources, encouraging collaboration — especially in research-based courses. (I imagine something similar happens on non-educational sites, as well.) When the number of the students/users is large, this can make the difference between finding a useful connection or not. Again, to exclude forum posts from the realm of what might be relevant seems a missed opportunity. Think of how much excellent advice happens on the Wikidot Community forums — if you're limited to full-text search, it can be harder to filter the signal from the noise sometimes.

As to appearance and mechanism: For the most part, the forum post editor is the same as the page editor. If that editor would have a way to adjust tags before saving (which is under discussion elsewhere), then I would expect it to work the same way here — perhaps with a single extra text-entry line underneath the main editing window, for space-delimited tags. If tags are to remain separate, I would imagine accessing them on the forum via Options, the same way you access Edit and Permanent Link. For display of tags, I'm flexible, and would imagine the styling should be, too: something similar to the way posting dates are handled, or last edited dates (for edited posts) strikes me as minimal clutter.

As you point out, I would definitely also wish for some kind of search mechanism — either a separate ListPosts, as you suggest, or (my preference) an attribute for PagesByTags and ListPages that would allow users to include or exclude forum posts, much as we now can for Search. But until we can have tags at all in the forum, it seemed odd to request that other change.

Ben, in your situation and the limits that exist on forums, I wouldn't use the standard forums at all. Instead you could build a page-based forum system which would give you all the benefits of the ListPages module, categories and tags (including listing by tags), the set-tags module, childpages and so on. In other words lots of features that the standard forums cannot do. I would also use dataforms for this to provide a nice interface for your students to enter their comments.

This page-based solution takes more work to set up but will give you what you are wanting.

Interesting. Can you point me toward some models of what the dataforms would need to look like for this?

Actually, I was only thinking of the ability to add tags to a forum thread, not to individual comments under the thread. I would just like a user, when making a new thread, to be able to associate tags to that thread. To me, forum threads that are started as threads in the forum itself, are pages of information that can not be found via a tag search like the other pages on my site can. I want this for simple, pragmatic reasons.

My site may have a page articles no "push-ups" for instance, and an individual thread on "push-ups". BOTH of those may be valuable sources of info and discussion. But only the page will be found should someone follow the "push-ups" tag.

"Again, to exclude forum posts from the realm of what might be relevant seems a missed opportunity. Think of how much excellent advice happens on the Wikidot Community forums — if you're limited to full-text search, it can be harder to filter the signal from the noise sometimes."

My sentiments exactly. Not a week goes by that one of my members does not ask me about some thread they remember that they are having a hard time finding by search.

I don't think that forums and their functioning, from what I can see, is an important thing to many wikidot users. I seem to be in a minority and this is making me consider the undesirable option of moving my forum elsewhere so that I can have it be more fully functional. I thought this had been voted up more but now i see it has been voted back down. I'm increasingly frustrated that anything to do with forums is unpopular and disregarded. People join my site to participate in the forum. That means members for wikidot as well. In the future as I grow more and more people will joint and participate. Unless the forum does not work how they are used to forums working.

I don't want page based forums..they would confuse the heck out of almost everybody. I feel like giving up, to be honest. I keep seeing confusing features that I could never understand being very popular even though only a couple of people would ever be so technically oriented they'd want to use them. But the simple little pragmatic things like this are deemed unimportant. Sorry, I hate to complain, but I am frustrated and I am beginning to think that wikidot is not a place for "regular people" to start sites, but is more oriented toward people looking to do fancy things that only a very few people understand.

I know that lots of users are getting wishes accepted that they love. But as just a guy who wanted to start a strength training site (with other stuff) so that people could come, read, and participate in a forum..about 1 in 20 of the accepted wishes can I actually understand. Most of them..I don't even know what they would be used for. This is something that all my users, not tech-oriented, could put to use. The other problem is that it's not just what the site owners want..it's what the users of those sites might need to improve their experience.

I hope this works out soon. We need more votes

i want this too..