[Idea] Category Tags can help everything! Here's why!

Yeah I agree implementation would be a very messy and huge thing to tackle. Not to mention I don't pretend to know exactly how this will truly affect the forums, would it be worth the risk to try? Would it be worth the time put in? Could a better solution come up in the time to make it? Could it take too much away from current projects? I can see all of these being solid arguments not to try this at all.

That being said, if I understand your concern correctly you are worried about too much/not enough gray area between tags, causing overlap and confusingly diverse posts within the same category, correct? Sorry, I'm just a bit confused there.

If the above is the case, then imho that's the beauty of allowing to upvote/downvote the tags themselves, as that will allow the community to decide what really is a 'Zyra post' or a 'New Player' post, and if a post is more 'Zyra' than anything else that tag (at least hopefully) would get more votes. But again, I don't delude myself to think that this is a perfect solution, there are bound to be problems, but I have confidence this has the potential to be be a good addition to the Beta. :)

Thank you for stopping by!

I believe that having more than one active tag on a post would alleviate some of the confusion. Especially with a forced tag being the sub-community the discussion is posted in. This would also help to move misplaced discussions by downvoting the parent sub-community tag (would probably want these to take a few more downvotes to remove).

With new releases, I don't think there is a substantial difference between a "new player" and a "veteran" other than the context at which they view the champion. Their knowledge of the champion is similar, as it's new to both parties, so I don't see how a discussion for one is irrelevant for the other.

That is also the benefit of allowing multiple tags though.

I could tag something as Zyra and eSports or Zyra and Balance or just plain old Zyra. If I like Zyra as a champion or want to start playing her, I may be interested in seeing all those different contexts. The problem with isolating the different discussions is that I really have to dig to find all the interesting posts about her.

If a new patch with changes to her came out, I could easy search Zyra + Patch or Zyra + Balance to get those posts and only those (no cosplays, no videos of her in LCS, no skin ideas).

Sometimes having the fluidity is good because it opens people up to discussions they might not even know are happening, however, you can use multiple tags to get as granular as you like.

I think the biggest problem I see is how many tags you would implement. Maybe I just want to look at posts about champions. Does each post about a champion need the tag Champion and The-Specific-Champion? Would you have behind the scenes logic that says if the tag Specific-Champion is used, the post appears if someone just searches Champion? Can the OP change the tags if the discussion takes off in a different direction? (example: I think Zyra is underpowered and post about balancing her, however the conversation turns to itemization and how it's not Zyra that needs a change, but the items she can build - could I add the Itemization/Build tag or would that just get lost? - What would happen if I deleted a tag? - Do the votes just go poof? Can I delete tags?

Those questions would be more of the issues I see with this system, though I think a solution could be found.

edit: obligatory thank you for your time, we're just trying to help come up with new ideas, and I'm sorry about all the hate you guys are getting from a lot of people :/

Tags are on of the first things I thought was missing when I looked at this new beta. (imo) Community assigned tags provide a much better method of organization than "sub-Leddits."

Take your Zyra example. WIth a tagging system one poster might post "I saw Zyra played at LCS..." and tag it with "Zyra" and "Balance." I, as a low elo Zyra fan, come access this post when I filter for those two tags. I see the thread but decide it's relevance is esports so I add/upvote the tag "espots." Now anyone who wants to avoid esports discussion can do so by setting their filter to look for "Zyra" and "balance" and "NOT esports."

The key here is that any given post needs multiple tags and users need to be able to preform boolean filtering. That is to say you need to be able to set tags that you want to see and tags you want to avoid. Being able to "or" is also handy, for example if I want to search for "adc OR support" to see discussion about one and/or the other.

If you really wanted to go crazy I think removing the votes on posts and replacing it with votes on tags would help solve the "popularity censorship" problem people have been concerned about. Post unpopular? It'll get tagged "troll" or "wrong" and the more people that hate it the higher it'll appear when I filter to view trolls and wrong posts.

Agreed that we'd have to be careful.

Fluidity

I think a lot of topics for discussion, don't really exist in isolation (ex: discussion about a champion's mechanics is often entangled with a discussion of their balance), so tags could actually help clarify the context of a conversation.

As you said, this could be a problem - blurring the line between content and context - but I tend to think that's something to be wary of (creating too many tags), rather than an intrinsic problem.

My apologies, I didn't actually intend it to be title prefix based, I was imagining something along the lines of Youtube tags, where GUI representations are shown at the bottom of the post. It just happens to be that most pre-fixes used currently are perfect for tag examples.

And yeah, tags can present some very interesting and constructive ways for individual sorting. That way you don't have to beat every post ever to get to the top, but just ones within a tag category.

Edit: Added a bit with youtube comparison, does that help steer away from the prefix interpretation in your opinion?

These are good additions, I'll work on adding them right now.

As for the negative tags, I'm afraid about trolls and such using those very tags to mislabel legitimate posts, but now that I think about it we could have the general negative tags (troll/repeat/witch hunt/inappropriate) be applied to all posts starting off as deactivated, i.e. starting off with -5 or so points so it would have to be voted a few times to be associated with these negative categories by a few people before it begins to be associated with them. Essentially making it harder for a single person to 'condemn' a legitimate post right off the bat. I think that's a good workaround. Thoughts?

Honestly when it comes down to it, like I said in OP, no list of catagories will be perfect and some of these tags may be abused/underused but that's why I love the idea of this in a Beta, where tags can be properly tested and worked with to provide the best options possible on 'release'.

All legitimate questions.

What would the interface for this be? A blank field that you type in words separated by commas? A massive drop down list?

I have no idea what the proper interface would be, and honestly I'd rather leave that to individual interpretation for now. It would, however, largely depend on which process is chosen. Like I said in OP, Default Assignment would clutter the interface no matter what. My personal imagining (under OP assignment) is a simple scroll capable box where OP can select tags he/she wants and it will display in somewhat transparant, small, low-profile boxes underneath the post. Very similar to Youtube.

Would respondents to a discussion be able to add a tag if they felt one was missing -- such as your "Insightful" tag? Or is the readers' only interaction voting on the tags?

This is also very dependent on which process you like. My favorite is OP assignemnt, where viewers do not choose the tags and indeed only vote on which ones they like, or downvote if they do not disagree. This does run unto the problem of OP's who do not use the system however. You could require a certain number of tags, but posts may not cross over enough tags to do that. Default assignment, in my interpretation, gives the scroll box where you can select tags to the viewers and not the OP. This can be better or worse, depending on how active and trustworthy the general community turns out to be.

If you do vote on a tag, is this number visible? Is there a graphic representing a tag which is grayed out or colored depending on if it's active?

In my imagining I have both of these. We would need some distinction to visually show of a tag has been "deactivated", but the number wouldn't be entirely necessary, but I feel that would be better to have than not have.

Why should tag votes determine placement on "hot" lists? Having content...

Sorry, I wan't clear about this I think. what I was meaning to get at was after searching for a tag ("Annie" for example) you Hot order all the Annie posts, allowing you to find the posts with highest voted "Annie" tag that have been posted relatively recently. I'll see if I can reword that section to be clearer.

Edit: I changed the first General Pros section mentioning ordering, is this better or worse in your opinion?

What would the interface for this be? A blank field that you type in words separated by commas? A massive drop down list?

The way I'd handle it it this: Below the OP you'd see whatever tags you post has, each with an up and down arrow like posts have so you can upvote or downvote it. Next line after the tags would have a small text field to enter a tag and a button "add tag."

The text box should have ample auto-complete for ease of entry. Once you click to add the tag it has an upvote from you already, like your own posts do now. Judging from the rest of this community beta Riot should be able to make the tag adding and voting fast and seamless just like regular posting and voting now.

If you do vote on a tag, is this number visible? Is there a graphic representing a tag which is grayed out or colored depending on if it's active?

I think the number could be displayed or represented vial color. High value tags are green (or colorful) and negative tags are red (or grayed out). Doing both could also work.

Why should tag votes determine placement on "hot" lists? Having content that is "Annie" does not make your post relevant anymore than having your content be about "e-Sports". The only way I could see a tag determining placement on lists is if there is a "Controversial" tag to bring it up, or the negative tags to bring it down (which is what reporting is supposed to be used for in the first place).

I'd argue for tags being the only thing you vote on to put a thread in "hot" lists. My thought is this. Users would mostly be browsing the boards by preset and custom filter lists.

For example instead of having a sub-leddit "Fan Creations" you's have a "Fan Creations" tag, as well as tags like "cossplay", "music", and so on.

If I want to see all fan creations I'd search for all posts with the "Fan Creations" tag. "Hotness"of a thread would be determined based on the upvotes on the "Fan Creations" tag on each of those posts.

However I might only want to see fan music so I'd instead set my filter for posts tagged with both "Fan Creation" and "Music." Now Hotness would come from a combination of the upvotes on both tags.

But wait, there's more. If I want to see fan creations but have no interest in cossplay I could filter for "Fan Creation" and "NOT cossplay." Now I get a list of all posts that are tagged with "Fan Creation" but do not have "cossplay," thus avoiding my hated nemesis of an art.

So to use your example, having a post that is "Annie" +200 doesn't make it more or less relevant than a post that is "esports" +200 in general but it is more relevant to somebody looking for posts about Annie. Heck, "Annie" +100 is probably more relevant to somebody searching for Annie than the "esports" +200.