Topic: Tags in Userscripts.org

I've added removal of tags (if you own the script there is an [x] that appears next to the tag when you view scripts).

The tagging system needs revamping - fixing the case sensitivity, counts, ... I'll get to that soon

Topic: Tags in Userscripts.org

I think maybe you are aware of this, but Tags are case-sensitive. Is that really necessary? Is it faster code to convert to lc or to have duplicate words in the database?
Some words may naturally be ucfirst like...
http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?q=deutsch
http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?q=Deutsch
which gives different tag results.

Topic: Tags in Userscripts.org

@Lior Zur: I would also like to know how to remove a tag from your own script.

Topic: Tags in Userscripts.org

Jesse: Great! Thanks for all the hard work, both on tags and looking into the server problems.

P.S. How do you REMOVE a tag from your own script? I can't figure this out.

Topic: Tags in Userscripts.org

Tagging is re-enabled but is still very broken:

1) existing taggings needs to be cleaned up
2) tagging something foo, Foo will result in multiple tags

Also only script authors can tag their own scripts right now. As with feeds, we are going to slowly re-enable full functionality.

Topic: Tags in Userscripts.org

it isn't you, it's me - I'm not deployed tagging yet - in the middle of a server update, then will push a code updated (that will partially restore tagging)

Topic: Tags in Userscripts.org

Please help somebody, I cannot find on this new interface (for me it is still new, since a year I wasn't here) that how can I add a tag to my recently uploaded user script. Thanks in advance.

Topic: Tags in Userscripts.org

Wow was that long.

Topic: Tags in Userscripts.org

Feedback!

1. Removing "." is unnecessary: I agree with Johan that machinetags are the way to go here. They're a clean, scalable solution--rather than a hack. They also open the door to other interesting functionality for the future.

As for legacy issues, why not just purge the existing tag database? Active scripts will get retagged, and inactive scripts won't. Is there really a downside to this?

2. Fuzzy Suggest: Excellent idea, but we'll have to watch CPU load on this one. As the tag database scales, running a complicated RegExp across ten thousand entries for each proposed tag in a new script could make us sad, sad pandas. (Especially if we let users as well as authors do the tagging. The problem scales exponentially.)

3. Mistagging: I feel we'll improve data integrity better by relying on user behavior rather than policing (see my suggestion below). As a note, moderation might be a good stopgap if we don't want to wait implement more advanced features before rolling tags back out.

4. Moderating: I don't especially like admins removing bad tags, but I really, really don't like admins removing "unpopular" tags. A pruning process removes some of the *best* information in the database. (See the end.)

So I gave this a little thought. Here are some suggestions.

Suggestions!

My idea has two parts:
5. Tag Ratings: The goal would be to generate a value representing how useful and relevant the tag is for the script. I can think of two ways (which I like) to generate tag ratings:

(A) Users (and the author) would tag the scripts themselves as they browse them. I envision the UI working similar to the del.icio.us FF Add-on interface, where you start with a blank line and a few lists of commonly applied tags. You can either click or type. Each these would be tallied up like a vote, giving us a rating for each tag.

We can get super-fancy here in the future, weighting users differently based on all sorts of things (like, say, being the author of the script, being a frequent contributor, or some sort of user-quality algorithm). Note that this would give us a kind of moderation without distorting or eliminating the data.

(B) Let users "vote with their feet". Whenever a user clicks on a script they found through a tag search, the system would add a vote for that tag on that script. I feel this is by far the best solution, since it scales well and requires practically no maintenance. This obviously requires some sort of bootstrapping mechanism to get started (like A). It also requires some sort of tracking control to prevent malicious users from gaming the system. Logins, cookies, and some rules of thumb would work 90% of the time here, which should be good enough.

6. Searching, Displaying by Tag Rating: Once we have tag ratings, we should use them to help filter and sort searches, much like Google's pagerank. We'd want to sort results based on rating and offer the option to filter them based on a threshold.

In fact, picking the right default for the threshold is what would eliminate the need for moderation. The filter would exclude those "bad" tags from the search results by virtue of their unpopularity. But the benefit over moderation is that the data remains--if the user really wants to see those outliers tags, she can set the threshold to zero.

Problems!

The biggest issue is clearly Overhead.

The tag database (or tables) could quickly become unmanageably large if we don't set them up correctly. Further, there's an inverse relationship between required storage capacity and data integrity: The best way to prevent a user from inflating tag ratings is to store every tag they enter attached to those scripts. That could get costly. (Note we don't have to do that when they "vote with their feet"--we can use server-side session information or some such.) There are algorithmic ways around this, but it could get tricky.

The other major problem is development time. The old system is probably still around and the other changes we're considering are much smaller.

I don't think this is a deal-breaker, though. We can mitigate development time by coding it in phases. We start with the simple model we already have, and keep an eye to extending it in the future--split up some tag information into different database tables, ensure functions take objects and not fixed parameter lists, etc. Later, we could revisit the tag-system after we got the simple version up and running.

As a post-script, I came to this by thinking about tagging conceptually.

Ask yourself: why we want tags in the first place? They're a great organization tool--not because they perfectly categorize things--but because they show relationships between ideas. In this light, we don't want to moderate away so-called "fringe tags". They represent relationships between ideas just as well as any other tags.

Sure, sometimes they're on the fringe simply because it's a mis-tag. Actual mistakes--malicious or not--might be worth removing... But I actually think ratings and filtering provide a better, low maintenance solution.

In all other cases, though, fringe tags can be some of the most useful tags. They could represent very specific ideas about the script ("gmail-for-os-x"), obscure-but-relevant search terms ("hebrew"), or just a minority view on what the script could be used for. The important point, though, is that moderating away these tags is just removing information that is outside the mainstream. (I'm not squawking "censorship!"--we're just talking about metadata here--but it's still not very encouraging that there's a parallel.)

I think the major issue with "tag creep" is actually a usability one. When a script gets too many tags, it becomes difficult for the user to grok the relationships between ideas. This is a built-in tension: tagging works best when scripts have as many tags as are relevant. Two people looking for the same script might type in totally different queries. Our system should be agnostic as to which query is "right"--we should want to provide the best results possible for every search.

Topic: Tags in Userscripts.org

Instead of, or in addition to, tags, are there any plans to simply categorize scripts, like the way it's done on Mozilla's "AddOns" pages or something? At the very least, we could categorize by website--Facebook scripts in this clump here, Gmail scripts in this other clump year--just with links to smaller pages, and then sub-categorize from there--Facebook skins here (of which there are many), cleanup scripts here, speedy scripts over yonder. Maybe?

Topic: Tags in Userscripts.org

You could have some automatic tag-fixing for things like gmail.com vs gmail

Topic: Tags in Userscripts.org

Will the tag system be used to flag bad/old scripts? If you allowed users to tag scripts with things like "duplicate", "out of date", or even "malicious", this would help cut down on the cruft that you get from a random search.

Mostly I'm just annoyed at always having to scroll past the 12 or so entries for "Facebook Red" =D

Topic: Tags in Userscripts.org

Prakash, sorry they aren't added yet, we are actively working on the site each day as you can see from the timeline. There are lots of issues we are working through. I want tags done as much as anyone!

Topic: Tags in Userscripts.org

Has there been any progress in bringing the tags back? I don't see any way to add tags to uploaded scripts.

I want my tags please!!!

Topic: Tags in Userscripts.org

1: Stripping '.' could be a good idea, but then are tag variations using '.' being abused often enough to punish everyone who might legitimately want to use a period? I'm kind of in the middle on this one.
I'm not sure the TLD issue is that big of a deal, if someone is looking for a script for a certain site, it should be pretty easy to tell if something is for .de .com or anything else. Then again, I'm american so I only really use one tld (.com).

2: Seems like a great idea as long as there's a "Use my spelling" button also.

3: I'd welcome the feature. I find flagging very useful on Craigslist.

3b: Sounds good but the script author would need to be alerted when their tags are being edited so that they could argue the legitimacy of the tag.

Topic: Tags in Userscripts.org

Wrote at http://userscripts.org/forums/3/topics/14?page=... about how it'd be nice to have a list of sites, generated from @includes. This would lessen/remove the need for periods in tags. It'd be nice to add the ability to filter per TLD as well, to e.g. browse scripts for .se domains.

About Britt's thoughts #2-4, this is pretty much what folksonomies are. If domains are handled as described above, perhaps free-form tags for the rest isn't so bad?

Topic: Tags in Userscripts.org

I would like to give some input from the tags-maintainer point of view. I maintain a few scripts used by a rather "marginal" audience: mostly Israelis and Hebrew-speakers. My use of tags is geared mainly towards allow my fellow countrymen to locate scripts relevant to Israeli sites. Thus, most Israeli scripts (not mine alone) are tagged both as "hebrew" and as "israel", and this creates two redundant categories -- but I'm not sure it's a good idea to delete either tag. The concern (at least for me) is the "searchability" of my scripts. Perhaps we could have an "additional keywords" field for entering spelling-variations, etc., but which will not be seen by users at all, and be used only for searching? This concern is real, because, furthermore, most Hebrew names don't have an established transcription in latin letters, and so you may find variants such as "Haaretz" and "Ha'aretz". Or -- "z", "tz" or "ts" for a phoneme that is pronounced like the German "z".

These thoughts are relevant only if there is no good support for actual Hebrew characters -- which I have yet to ask.

Topic: Tags in Userscripts.org

Another thought that struck me: also borrow flickr's idea of namespaced machine tags, allowing more structured folksonomies using ad-hoc namespaces. (Machine tags are namespace:key=value tags, such as site:hostname=userscripts.org.)

Topic: Tags in Userscripts.org

1: -1. With tld:s there are too many collisions for sites that are less one-site-rules-all than gmail.

2: +1. Very good. Slightly challenging to come up with a good UI for (with a tags field you can add multiple, space-separated, optionally "quoted multi-word tag" -- which happens to be the best possible UI base), but certainly doable. I might be up to the challenge of the front-end UI code, if someone else does the back-end code.

3: +0. Might be good.

4: Copy flickr's constraint on allowing a maximum of 75 tags for any user script.

Topic: Tags in Userscripts.org