Tags for topics

It wouldn't have to be very different from how PunBB works now. In fact, maybe you'd only have to call the forums tags and allow multiple tags for one topic. But still it might be more flexible than the system most forum systems are using now. I like the Gmail system better than having folders like in most other email services.

Hm, the labels/tags could be shown at the front page, just like the categories are now. One page with all topics could be useful too, but maybe only if you click on the link for that.

Tags are cool but it adds another level of complexity.

You can see here a Nucleus implementation: http://www.ketsugi.com/

What happens when you have a very large board with dozens of forums where members might only be interested in a small subset of the forums. You would need a setting in user profile where they could set from which forums they wanted topics to appear. All that filtering sounds like it would involve a lot of work for the database. I've seen comments about vanilla which suggest that their system of displaying all topics by default is fine for smaller boards but not so good for large busy boards. Isn't the same going to be true here.

I don't see how that would cost a lot of work in the database. There might be one extra field in the users table ("show_labels") with for example the content "1,2,4" for someone who only wants to read about the topics with those IDs. Then that value could be converted to an array, and I guess it wouldn't be too hard to use it to select posts matching those labels ("SELECT * FROM posts WHERE label = 1 OR label = 2 OR label = 3").

Will it be possible to make such a thing with the upcoming extension system in PunBB? Can I modify the front page so that it looks like in my example?

I think that depends on what the forums are about. I'm hosting forums about Disney comics, and most visitors are interested in all topics discussed there. Putting them all in one category/forum would make topics hard to find, but using the 'classic' category system (instead of tags/labels) doesn't seem to be the best solution either. I understand that this is different when you have more general forums about various subjects, so probably it isn't a very good idea to use this tagging system in PunBB by default.

Adding the tag system to the current system, yes. Replacing, no.

Sometimes tagging on the web ('web 2.0') is a bit over-hyped indeed. But in this case I would think allowing multiple categories for one discussion can be very useful, when that discussion spans multiple topics. Then it would be more logical to call those categories tags or labels.

For the page I created there doesn't have to be tagging in PunBB. You can substitute the word 'label' for 'category' there if you want. What would you think about the design / functionality then?