Tags

"Tags" are a concept that helps to make information in places like websites, more easily sifted-through and found. It links particular descriptive words for the main content of a page (or thread, in our case), which allows softare to sift through and find content of interest to people later on.

This "forum"-based arrangement works well in many ways for creating the feel of a Community -- but it has the drawback of causing certain events to trickle to the bottom of our unfolding history, out of view to new folks that settle here... And that's a shame.

By using short, economical, accurate "tags" for threads won't seem productive at first, when there are only a few. But if we tag most discussion threads appropriately, before long the software we're running now will track things like finding threads with certain tags, keeping track of the popularity of various tags and graphically showing us what people in our community care about -- it can be powerful stuff.

So, please use just a handful of concise, accurate tags for the things which a thread pertains to, and please find that the author of a thread (and moderators) can change the tags of it as it goes along, since they often meander quite interestingly!

If you're interested in the concept, discussed by brighter folks than I, here's a search.