Tag page discussion (default sorting)

Migrated from forum topic #9127/p178.

MyrMindservant said:

Can someone explain why the default sorting order in Tags search was changed to "newest"?

I remember we had a discussion about it way back in 2013, when Danbooru 2 came out, and agreed that "newest" is the least useful sort order. Default was changed to "count" back then and remained that way up until recently.

evazion said:

Can you link this discussion? I changed it because on every other search form, the Order dropdown always matches the actual order of the results. On /tags it was inconsistent: it defaults to ordering by newest tags first, but the dropdown said it was ordered by count. IMO it's bad UI design for a dropdown to not match what you actually see.

If we agree that count is better, then it should be the default overall (i.e., when you first go to Tags, you see highest count first).

fossilnix said:

I think it's this one

I personally like both sorts (count and newest), but the sort by count as a default would be a bit wasteful IMO since you would always see the same 20 tags on the front page. As it is right now, you can always see the 20 newest tags just by the click of a single hyperlink.

"Newest" would also show mistags more often.
So if you mess up and create a new tag without noticing, it would be discovered much faster if "Newest" would be the default option.

I agree with newest being good for showing mistags. But I think the default for searching should be alphabetical or count, because when I search, I'm almost always looking for "what is the tag for this called."

Does the default for tag searching and the default for the /tags home page have to be the same view?

"Newest" probably is the most useful for the tag list displayed by default. But, at the same time, it is the least useful as a search preset.

So perhaps we shouldn't worry to much about consistency in this case and allow them to be different. "Newest" for default tag list and "Count" or "Name" for selected tag search option.

Does the default for tag searching and the default for the /tags home page have to be the same view?

It doesn't have to be, but I think it's bad design for it not to be. When you see that Order says the ordering is by count, but then you see the actual order is by newest first, then that teaches you "don't trust the form, whatever conditions it says don't apply right now". This is wrong. Even though order = count doesn't apply, hide empty = yes still does apply.

It's misleading for one condition to apply and one condition to not apply. It makes it unclear what the page is actually giving you when what you see doesn't match the what the form says you should be seeing. And when you can't trust one form, it makes you unsure whether all the other forms are to be trusted.

I think there are basically three separate use cases for /tags:

• You want to search for particular tags, often for gardening or alias/implication purposes.

• You want to see new tags, either for gardening purposes or just to find interesting new things.

• You want to discover interesting tags in general, with no particular aim in mind.

For searching, there's the meta search page, which is designed specifically for tag research. However it's little known and has some obvious deficiencies. Perhaps it could be integrated better. The /related_tag search is also useful, but inconvenient to get to.

For finding new tags, the current display is okay for finding mistags but not for finding growing tags. Growing new tags like nanamori_school_uniform get buried under 1-post tags. I really don't think many people care about correcting mistags.

For tag discovery, the top searches page and the trending tag list (the tag list shown by default on /posts when not searching a tag) both show you "tags that are currently popular/interesting", but these things are in totally different places.

I'm not sure how to meet all these needs, as they are somewhat in conflict. I think perhaps there could be a sidebar like there is on /wiki_pages showing recent activity (in this case, recently created tags), while the main listing could be divided into sections showing things like growing tags (new tags above a certain count), trending artists/characters/copyrights, popular searches, etc. When actually searching, aliases/implications/related tags ought to be incorporated somewhere too.

Agree that the tags display could use a bit of a refresh. It might be best to break things down by the use cases you listed, creating a submenu item for each use case. This will allow a greater focus on what display format works best for each use case.

After that gets settled, we can work backwards and see if any of the submenu items can be integrated into other submenu items, and removing those items that do get integrated where it makes sense.

+1 to a new tags display.

evazion said:

For finding new tags, the current display is okay for finding mistags but not for finding growing tags. Growing new tags like nanamori_school_uniform get buried under 1-post tags. I really don't think many people care about correcting mistags.

As one of the few people who cares about correcting mistags, one of the problems I've encountered when sorting by newest to find them is that it doesn't include old typos that have been remade. If it's not too server intensive, and not too much work for such a narrow use case, I'd love a mode to sort by lowest count and date at the same time. So it would show all the 1-count tags first, sorted by newest, and then all the 2-count tags, sorted by newest, and so on.

evazion said:

For tag discovery, the top searches page and the trending tag list (the tag list shown by default on /posts when not searching a tag) both show you "tags that are currently popular/interesting", but these things are in totally different places.

Both of those lists will show growing new tags, if they grow fast enough, but most of the entries seem to come from waifu of the month searches or contributors uploading 30-page galleries of whatever copyright. If the tags display is remade, I think there should be a way to filter the trending list by tag type.