Forum specific tag clouds

Evil Phil

Could we have forum specific tag clouds? In that when you view a forum it has a tag cloud which consists of tags on that forum only.

It would be cool

Evil Phil

Rightio. Guess Cult's time can't be wasted on work only justified as being 'cool' by one user. So there's two benefits here, one is the enhanced user experience the other is revenue streams:

So the benefits to boards.ie ltd would be the ablility to target advertising at choosen tags to increase the revenue returned. This ability would also be a selling-point to would be advertisers.

For the enhanced user experience: I think a frontpage cloud would be too broad for any particular subject. For the forums I use and moderate, and I'm thinking specifically of Programming and Web Development & Design, it would be great to see what the active topics are. Tags like PHP, Asp.net or Joomla would give instant access to a specific topic.

For Instance: C# and Asp.net are my particular areas of expertise so I could browse all the posts to provide advice.

Php is fairly new to me so I could browse to see if somebody had already found a solution to my problem OR I could browse looking for problems to work on as a learning exercise (which I do anyway).

Another example, Outdoor Pursuits, gets a great many questions repeated over and over again. Late summer gets loads of questions about festival tents, early summer its all about learning to rock climb. A tag cloud would provide easy access to previous discussions and it would fit in easily with current footer.

Its a great navigation tool to provide to users as they each have their own unique way of navigating the site anway - it enhances the experience.

The only con I can think of is resurecting old threads, but people coming through the search engines do that anyway.

aidan_walsh

Yes. Yes indeed. I can see it working better on some forums that others (imagine the size of the Yore Ma tag in AH ), and it is a bit specialised, but it would work brilliantly where it would work.

+1.

Evil Phil

I guess we could switch the cloud on or off in the mod utils.

CuLT

I don't like tags in their current context at all myself, I think the userbase is too broad to care about/understand the concept, and the muppet ratio is too high for the classic tagging approach to not be abused.

I can see it being useful per forum alright, but I think it'd be some major work on my part to completely revamp how tagging works in vBulletin, so you're right in that it's not me you've got to convince, it's the people who pay me