Description of your request: Item genre and content tags are a potentially robust discovery feature, but are currently under-utilized, which limits their usefulness in practice. This request is broadly for changes to the tagging system that will increase the overall tag coverage throughout the catalogue, reduce friction for users contributing tags to items, and improve usability for users navigating items by tags (that aren’t already covered by another tag-related request).
If you have ideas for making item tagging less burdensome or more helpful, or can identify weak points in the tag system that you want improved, please share them here!
The number one change I’d like to see in tagging items is being able to add more than one at a time. It’s currently a huge pain to thoroughly tag something I’ve read with all of the tags that might apply, because the “Add tag” dialogue box is cumbersome and has to be re-opened and re-searched for every single tag added. Being able to select all of the tags that apply to an item and apply them at once would instantly make me more willing to contribute tags to what I’ve read.
My other big barrier to both assigning and searching with tags is just the sheer number of them available. The long list makes it daunting to try to find relevant tags, and as a search tool, the larger the library of tags is, the more detailed the coverage of the catalogue needs to be in order for them to be useful. I’m not really sure of the best way to handle that, but I’d love to be able to narrow down the list to just the tags I’m personally likely to use somehow.
My main reason for not adding tags is that the “add tag” dialog is unusably bad. There are a ton of tags, and the dialog makes you look at them through a tiny letterbox. This is a screenshot from Firefox on Android tablet:
Even with the onscreen keyboard, there’s a ton of wasted screen space both below the dialog and to left and right, and so you can see just four or five tag names at once, depending on how much description they have associated with them. It’s just really painful to do the simple action of “look at the available genres and pick the one that best fits this book”. So I don’t.
Totally agree about having a way to bulk tag an item
You could always keep a notepad doc with frequently used tags. I actually have the opposite problem, I’m frequently frustrated by a tag not existing. Sometimes I add them
If the tag form auto suggested 5-10 tags that you use frequently/recently, maybe that would help a little?
I like this idea, 10 of my most frequent tags at the top and then alphabetical/searchable would make me far more likely to engage with the tagging system, as well as being able to tag a list and have the tag then apply to every item in the list
For the cumbersome tag entry box, I feel you all! I am thinking about using something like the “Custom Tag” entry field that is on the Dashboard’s “Basic Info” dialog - would this sufficient for y’all regarding bulk addition of genres and topics?
Also, we would try to make the descriptive text take up not so much space, so you can see more entries at once.
Sadly it will still take some time until we can implement this because the item page is not the top priority at the moment, but we’ll try to get up to speed!
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