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Tag System Brainstorming

Note: This is all in addition to the basic features of any sane tagging system; Pinboard or lobste.rs is a decent starting point.

Note 2: These desiderata are not necessarily all compatible; some may be contradictory.

  • Tags may be harvested from the content itself, via special markup, or via an out-of-band input method
  • Tags should be stored as metadata, separately from the content
  • Any chunk of content should be taggable (post; comment; media asset)
  • Optionally (to the server operator), users should be able to suggest tags
    • User-suggested / crowdsourced tags should be stored separately from author-applied tags
    • Whether crowdsourced and author-applied tags are displayed separately should be up to the operator of the { server | forum }
  • Optionally (to the server operator), a set of pre-supplied suggested tags should exist
    • Whether users are limited to the set of pre-supplied tags should be up to the operator of the { server | forum }
  • Tag names should be case-insensitive but case-preserving

Tag Character Rules

  • No commas or semicolons in tags
  • No whitespace except common spaces
  • More rules enforced by regular expression that is provided through the API to clients