Automatically filling tags

[Merkuri]

It looks to me that now when people don't add tags to their new posts that it adds all of the (uncommon) words in the title as tags. This is nifty, but can be annoying, too, because it takes the tags exactly as their written, with punctuation and all. So you get tags like "elephant!" and "something,".

Is there any way that feature can be modified to strip off the punctuation before it adds the tags?

 

[Merkuri]

Okay, this is starting to annoy me again. I hate seeing tags with little bits of punctuation. I think MM put this feature in so that we didn't have any "tagless" posts, but if a tag has punctuation in it it becomes just junk.

If I start reporting posts where I see punctuation in the tags are the mods willing to fix them? I don't want to start doing this if it'll just annoy the mods, but the punctuation in the tags is annoying me!

By the way, this thread is an example of what I'm talking about. One of the tags is "everyone?", which is completely useless. Even if "everyone" were a useful tag (which it's not) "everyone?" with the question mark on the end isn't going to help anyone find the thread - which is the point of tags.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I agree that it isn't at all useful. I'll see if there is anything that can be done about it (I personally don't know at the moment).

Cheers

 

[Merkuri]

At one point MM made it so that if somebody started a thread with no tags it would try to add all the words in the subject as tags. (Well, I'm guessing MM was the one that did it since he was very gung-ho about people using tags, and it definitely didn't do this from the start.) It was a good effort, but honestly I think it introduces more garbage into the system than it does useful tags.

If somebody could find where he added that piece it would probably be easy to remove it. Or if you post the code snippet where it's done and let me know the language I could probably come up with some more code to use a regular expression (assuming the language supports regular expressions - which most do nowadays) to strip out the punctuation before submitting the subject words as tags.