Release

šŸ· Improvements to public tags now available

Related products: CC Moderation

Weā€™ve made some improvements to public tags, making them easier to manage and improving the UX for adding them to topics. Weā€™ve already rolled out tools for managing public tags in Control and an improved tag interface for moderators in Control.

Coming up next week (Thursday 2 July 2020, in the morning (CEST), weā€™llĀ rollout the new public tag UX to your end users. Weā€™ve done this release separately in order to:

  • GiveĀ you a chance to tidy up your tags before end users can choose from them on the frontend.
  • Let you inform your superusers or other members about the change ahead of time.

Whatā€™s already available for you to use right now:

:white_check_mark:Ā Tidy up your tags in Control: see all tags, add new tags, edit tag titles, delete tags, search tags (lightning-fast), and bulk merge tags.

:white_check_mark:Ā Better UX for moderators to add tags to existing topics, or when creating articlesĀ with a fast autocomplete/search.

:white_check_mark:Ā API endpoints for managing tags, so you can create/edit/delete tags and keep them in sync with external systems.

Whatā€™s rolling out towards the end of next week (Thursday 2 July 2020, in the morning (CEST)):

:white_check_mark:Ā Better UX for end-users to tag topics, with a fastĀ autocomplete/search.

:white_check_mark:Ā Improved quality and quantity of end-user tagging with autosuggested public tags based on topic title.

:white_check_mark: Keep control over tags by (optionally) preventing end users from adding new tags.

^ You can preview all of the above on the inSpired create new topic page.

Find more details about how the features work in our knowledge base article:

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And check out best practicesĀ on managing tags fromĀ @JulianĀ in this guide:

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Let us know any feedback youā€™ve got in the replies!

Also a shout out and thank you to @bjoern_schulzeĀ @cheriseĀ @nicksimardĀ @ZapierStephĀ @banthoniszĀ for your feedback during the beta! We hope you like the new features we added based on your feedbackĀ :grin:


I just shared a small guide which will help you with the process of organizing your tags, you can find it here. :)


Update (confirmed timeslot) ā†’ this update will roll out to all of your end users next week: Thursday 2 July 2020, in the morning (CEST).

Just a reminder of what that will include:

:white_check_mark:Ā Better UX for end-users to tag topics, with a fastĀ autocomplete/search.

:white_check_mark:Ā Improved quality and quantity of end-user tagging with autosuggested public tags based on topic title.

:white_check_mark: Keep control over tags by (optionally) preventing end users from adding new tags.


This is great news. Thanks insided team!Ā 

Iā€™ve got a couple of questions though:Ā 

  • Is there a way to sort by tag name and not by the default view?
  • Can we delete tags in bulk? (Iā€™ve got 12,140 public tags. Some of which are showing ā€˜0ā€™ that Iā€™d like to get rid of.)

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@daniel.boonĀ Hereā€™s what I experienced:

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I would have expected the 56 to become 59, adding in each of those other tags. Did I simply delete the tags and remove them from topics? Thatā€™s not actually more helpful, because now I donā€™t even know which topics needed fixing. And I donā€™t see how this would be a ā€œmergeā€. Please tell me Iā€™m doing something wrong!


Hey @nicksimard. Indeed, at first glance, I can see how that would seem worrying.

What youā€™re seeing isĀ a consequence of the fact that at the momentĀ the ā€˜Topics taggedā€™Ā number is not updated inĀ real time.Ā This numberĀ is updated a few times a week. I.e. if you remove a tag from some topics, or add it to a lot of topics, or merge some tags, it will not immediately reflect in the number shown here.

Of course (and this is unlikely) if all four tags were used for the same topic, then the total number of topics could be the same...but I doubt thatā€™s what youā€™re experiencing.

Weā€™ll look into adding some clearer messaging in the interface whilst we still donā€™t have realtime counter updates.


This is great news. Thanks insided team!Ā 

Iā€™ve got a couple of questions though:Ā 

  • Is there a way to sort by tag name and not by the default view?
  • Can we delete tags in bulk? (Iā€™ve got 12,140 public tags. Some of which are showing ā€˜0ā€™ that Iā€™d like to get rid of.)

Ā 

Hey @freydrew, thanks for your feedback! We currently donā€™t have a way to sort by tag name in Control, or have a delete tags in bulk option (sidenote: we do have API endpoints available for managing public tags, e.g. delete a public tag).

What would you like to achieve by sorting by tag name? :)


I love this! Great job!Ā :cowboy:


@daniel.boonĀ Ah...perfect! Thanks for clarifying 🙂 Iā€™ll do a more in-depth test by finding the topics that have the tag I want to merge, to see if it does get changed. I totally believe you, but Iā€™d like to see it with my own eyes (for my own peace of mind haha). This feature helps us SO much since we have several tags that have multiple versions. Thanks for adding this!


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HeyĀ @freydrew, thanks for your feedback! We currently donā€™t have a way to sort by tag name in Control, or have a delete tags in bulk option (sidenote: we do have API endpoints available for managing public tags, e.g. delete a public tag).

What would you like to achieve by sorting by tag name? :)

Itā€™ll be a lot easier to merge fields if I can sort by tag name. For example, I could merge ā€˜cyber securityā€™ AND ā€˜cybersecurityā€™ into one. Theyā€™d be easy to find since those two terms would be next to each other if able to sort by alphabetical order.Ā 

Ā 


Weā€™ve made some improvements to public tags, making them easier to manage and improving the UX for adding them to topics. Weā€™ve already rolled out tools for managing public tags in Control and an improved tag interface for moderators in Control.

Coming up next week (Thursday 2 July 2020, in the morning (CEST), weā€™llĀ rollout the new public tag UX to your end users.

@daniel.boonĀ What time today this went live to end users?Ā :slight_smile:


Just to confirm - these improvements rolled out to all customers as scheduled last Thursday.

@daniel.boonĀ What time today this went live to end users?Ā :slight_smile:

Sorry for the late reply @AnninaĀ - this was deployed between 10:25-11:25 CEST.


Thank you! I have a few concerns/questions:

1. Spam post tags are included

Tags from old spam (posts that have been marked as spam) are showing up. Could tags connected to spam postsĀ be suppressed?Ā 

The two tags here are only attached to spam that has been removed from the community :(Ā 

2. Tags show multiple times

The process of cleaning up tags is confused by the fact that sometimesĀ (only sometimes) the exact same tag is showing up multiple times in control:

Why is ā€˜technical problemsā€™ appearing twice?

3. Community members select irrelevant tags

An unfortunate side effect in our community is that people are simply selecting tags that auto-populate when they start typing. Often these tags are totally unrelated to their topic. For example:

Caveat: this isnā€™t my best example, because here the community member is asking a question.

It would be helpful from a community health standpointĀ if we could makeĀ certain tags only available for community admins.

For example, we use ā€œCoursera community eventā€ and ā€œQ&Aā€Ā to tag posts about events that we are offering and that we curate through a custom HTML sidebar link.

Iā€™ve seen multiple community members select this tag for their unrelated posts. Then, posts get curated as Coursera community events when they are very much not.Ā 

4. Fragments of text from actual posts are showing up as a tag when theyā€™reĀ not ā€“ and theyā€™reĀ showing up multiple timesĀ :open_mouth:

Yikes! Each time I go in to manage/merge public tags, I see things like this and then leave again because I donā€™t have time to sort through the stuff that isnā€™t actually a tag.

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Thanks for the detailed feedback @LPortalupiĀ !


These two seem like bugs - thanks for reporting them:

  • Tags show multiple times

  • Fragments of text from actual posts are showing up as a tag when theyā€™reĀ not ā€“ and theyā€™reĀ showing up multiple timesĀ 

These other two requests make sense and I agree they would be good improvements. Weā€™ll consider these when iterating on the feature:

  • Spam post tags are included

  • Community members select irrelevant tags

Which one of these is more problematic for you @LPortalupiĀ ?


Hi @daniel.boon, thanks for your reply! Community members selecting irrelevant tags is more problematic. I can easily delete the spam post tags and then theyā€™re gone for good. But it takes much more time to manually remove inappropriateĀ tags from community memberĀ posts.