Tuesday tips & tricks: How to keep tags in check

[Erica Moss]

While you may not give them much thought, tags are an important part of any community's architecture. Tags help organize content into buckets and ensure the most relevant information is discoverable by those who are searching for it.

As you can imagine, in a community like ours, where hundreds of posts are being created every day, the tag creation process, if unchecked, can become unwieldy and counterproductive.

In fact, the tags in our little corner of the internet had ballooned to 20,000 over time, including those with spelling errors, those not related to the question and those that could easily be merged. A group of our Community Champions decided to take matters into their own hands, forming a Tag Cleanup Crew, and declaring war on erroneous tags. The results? We went from 20,000 to 5,200, with a renewed commitment to keeping them under control moving forward.

Check out Champion @Thomas Schlegel's best practices for creating tags, and join us in our efforts to keep it clean & tidy around here. ✨

[Monique vdB]

Some good news: we have a new community intern, @Test User MR, who is going to join the tag cleanup efforts as well!

[Thomas Schlegel]

Welcome, @Test User MR to the Community (and of course to the Tag Cleanup Crew)!

[Carol Jones]

We've had this same issue with statuses.  Allowing projects to create their own has brought all sorts of interesting versions of the same status name resulting in ongoing necessary cleanup efforts.  Kudos to the tagging cleanup team, that's some amazing results!!