patrick.net

Patrick says

richwicks says

Patrick - are we ever going to meet up?

If we can get four people, including you and me.

You always meet up close to you, that's the problem. And close to public transportation. We could host in wine country or even pick a nice outdoor area/winery. Otherwise I would probably only do north of SF on the west side and north of Oakland on the east side.

Patrick says

BTW @apex
You seem new here. How did you run across patrick.net? I'd like to greatly expand the readership, but the media and search engines are no longer good for that like they were in the great housing bubble days.

I used to be on Patrick.net way back, around 2005-2006, was referred here by a cow-orker at that time. I kind of drifted away for a while, but remembered this site and came back recently. I don't remember my old account, so I created a new one.

(apologies to the board, I couldn't figure out a way to contact Patrick directly. The "contact" link seems to go to a tip-jar instead.)

Patrick says

How can I make a hierarchical index as above to make them easier to search?

Making it so any user can add any tag to any post/comment, and then any user can up or downvote each tag would IMO give a layer of info that could be used to make searching much more effective. Or just browsing by tag(s).

How to get users to actually add tags and vote on them it is a tough part. Most users hardly vote as it is.

@Hircus Thanks for the suggestion. I did have hashtags at one point, and maybe should bring that back.

I used to auto-link hashtags included by the author with the text of a new thread or comment so that a click on a hash tag in any thread or comment would do a search for that tag. But then I thought "People can just do a search anyway for any word, so what's the point?"

Maybe the point is in grouping threads and comments by user-identified topics, and then building an index by those. So these would be tags entered by users on other people's threads and comments. (I'm trying to avoid the term "post" because so many people use post and comment interchangeably.) I think I even had that at one point, but didn't like the extra UI box for entering a tag.

Searching both threads and comments is kind of hard too, since they are separate tables and there are far more comments than threads. Searching more than a million comments is pretty slow. I know I could expand into a separate search process like Elastic Search, but kinda learned to hate Elastic Search when I used it at work for a few years.

So I still lack a clear search direction in my mind.

I think a benefit of dedicated tags is, assuming people actually tag things, you end up with much better search targets and categories because people will add tags that are mild abstractions of the topic, and I think it would often be words that aren't likely to appear in the text itself, so it adds value, especially on posts without text (media only). Think of how many posts this year fit the tag [Vax Mandate] but wouldn't actually have that term in it. I also think people tend to learn from others by observing popular tag choices for certain topics, so there's a bit of community equity that gets built and this results in better tagging. While people could just add psuedo tags to each of their posts right now by adding some keyworks to the bottom of each comment, which would allow those keywords to be effectively searched, but nobody actually does that. When you actually had tags here, I recall people did use them. On more popular threads I think people will put more effort into tagging, but I think most one-off comments probably wouldnt get tagged much, and would unfortunately be invisible to the tag system then.

The reason I said anyone should be able to add tags to any post/comment is so that adding tags isnt restricted to the orig comment author. A certain author may make a golden post, but if they dont tag it, then it would otherwise be invisible to the tagging system. Allowing others to tag things would solve that problem. And voting on the tags is so that not only can highly voted tags be weighed more heavily, but it also allows the community to police bogus tags by downvoting them, and maybe even some special behaviors could happen if the net score got too negative, or had too much negative consensus / ratio etc...

But you make a good point about searching though. You would then have kinda dual search systems - one for text, and one for tags. Although, this is kinda how stackoverflow works, and the dual search system is very functional. But they dont vote on tags and thus dont do any ranking by tag - they just rely on volunteers with high rep gaining moderator status and donating their time to remove bogus tags, and otherwise assume each tag has equal weight. But they do allow users with moderate reputation to add tags to other peoples posts.

I think it would be nice to have, as it allows for very flexible user driven categorization possibilities, but not sure if its worth the effort.