Tags cleanup

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#1

Was curious if anyone had considered trying to clean up some of the tags on the forum? While it would be impossible/silly to restrict tags to very specific ones, it might be helpful to promote the use of the more common/better variant. An example would be “epicor9” to “e9”, or “APR” instead of “advanced-print-rou”.

This would be a lot of work I know, but id be willing to sort through some of that mess if someone could pull a list of all tags used, and i could propose/suggest back to an admin about which ones we could consolidate to?

#2

Here ya go, its a hot mess. We’ve considered only allowing specific tags, but that means we’d have to think of EVERYTHING

https://www.epiusers.help/tags

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#3

…Contemplates what i have gotten myself into

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#4

First pass. shortens it by a 25%. :slight_smile: :grin:
ReplaceTags.xlsx (18.1 KB)

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#5

Unless the tags are forcibly limited to a certain set of values they offer little to know value on the site for searching as they will always get out of line in due time. Updating them is a by hand process that can only be done in bulk per single tag. What would be the goal of cleaning them up?

#6

Making the searching more useful. If you search by tags, you can get more results if they are unified.

#7

What is the confidence level that after 4-5 years we have a majority of all possibilities of common topics come up at least once? Perhaps once a cleanup is done it could be restricted? And from that point if the regular users of the forum saw an additional need for a new tag, it could be added. Talking out loud here.

as @Banderson said, it would help with searching by tag. But I agree that this will just get out of hand again if we leave them open to the users to create.

#8

Looks like there is ability to add synonyms on tags, but it doesn’t look like it has a great way of looking at the currently existing ones and adding it as a synonym. The benefit of doing is that was is you could find 2 different ways to say the same thing (like UD-field, or User-Defined-field) and if the poster picks either one, it still groups them in the search. That removes the need to keep killing the same tag every time it’s created.

This would still take constant monitoring and adjusting and english is a fickle language so there’s always going to be annoying gray areas where sometimes things mean the same thing, and sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t think it’s something that would be easy to keep up with.

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#9

Assuming folks tag correctly. It’s impossible to police it’s 100% subjective.

#10

Just because it can’t be perfect doesn’t mean it can’t be improved… Just saying. (but not volunteering.)

#11

Sounds like a lot of backseat drivers here LOL

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#12

I’m willing to contribute to some cleanup. Just didn’t want to go changing at mass without others opinions. As well as to find if there was an easier way than

  • search by bogus tag
  • change to good tag
  • repeat for 8 posts
  • move to next tag

The url jose provided and the wonderful start from Jason is in the right direction i feel

#13

There is an easier way than post by post but regardless you have to be an admin to either edit someone’s post or bulk modify a tag across all it’s posts. At a minimum every tag would have to be touched.

#14

Honesty, if it is not useful for searching, I would say it isn’t useful at all. I would offer that it be removed (if possible). If we (meaning someone else willing to take it on) wanted it to be useful, then we should probably only have 20-30 tags that are pre-selected.

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#15

Looks like I hit the maximum edits for today otherwise I would do more lol. Got through abccodes to auto-invoice. didn’t modify all because some made sense, but most didn’t lol. I’ve been recording which ones I merged to get some sort of cleanup metrics in Excel.

Noticed that in @Jason_Woods 's list all of the tags were not in there. I’m assuming that is because you didn’t see a need to merge/correct? Like salesorder, dmr. Not sure.

One thing I also found odd is so phantom tags that don’t actually come up in the search, as well as duplicates on the link @josecgomez provided. Accounts-payable shows up twice, accounts-receivable as well. autoinvoice shows as a tag, but no post exists. Not sure what this is about.

#16

My $0.02 -

Tags don’t do much for me at all; I think searching is already pretty good. Keyword search and separation of the “categories” (e10, e9, off topic, etc.) work great for me. Especially if I dial in on the right keyword… for example if I’m working on a customer BPM I might search “CustomerSvcContract” and instantly get a bunch of great code examples to reference.

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#17

And sometimes when the std site search isn’t getting me there
I’ve been able use Goggle Advanced search.

In fact I just used to to find this old thread which I was reminded of by the current discussion: "Simple Solutions" Category

#18

FWIW - editing these tags appears to bumping those posts. Folks might start resurrecting old posts that shouldn’t be.

And I never use tags in searches. I’ll use free form text, topic (like #e10), and occasionally a user name (like (at-sym)ckrusen )

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#19

Ooh didn’t think about that. Perhaps its good I had to stop then. I tried lol

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#20

Yeah let’s let this be I don’t know the consequences outweigh the benefits

Thanks though @cfinley

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