quoting Nessari:

can we not...or at least is there a good reason that isn't 'because 2014'?

go back to the dark ages barbarian scum what do u have against Progress

post-level tags would be good for making natlang discussion more searchable. like if you are comparing features in lepcha, limbu, and kiranti, you could tag it #tibeto-burman. theoretically this could be done without hashtags but if there is not a feature for it people will probably forget

or when i post images of pdf pages talking about aslian incopyfixation or w/e i can #morphology #nonconcatenative_morphology #aslian #semai #reduplication #infix

It is in Anthologica that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence, by which we today are founding #Hashtagism, because we want to deliver the internet from its gangrene of forums, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries.

The internet has been too long the great second-hand market. We want to get rid of the innumerable forum architecturess which cover it with innumerable cemeteries.

Forums, cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of bodies that do not know each other. Public dormitories where you sleep side by side for ever with beings you hate or do not know. Reciprocal ferocity of the painters and sculptors who murder each other in the same museum with blows of line and color. To make a visit once a year, as one goes to see the graves of our dead once a year, that we could allow! We can even imagine placing flowers once a year at the feet of the Gioconda! But to take our sadness, our fragile courage and our anxiety to the museum every day, that we cannot admit! Do you want to poison yourselves? Do you want to rot?

What can you find in an old forum architecture except the painful contortions of the coder trying to break uncrossable barriers which obstruct the full expression of his dream?

To admire an old forum architecture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of creation and action. Do you want to waste the best part of your strength in a useless admiration of the past, from which you will emerge exhausted, diminished, trampled on?

well, u can collect post-level tags into thread-level tags

hashtags are probably a good way to manage them, too

quoting Pthagnar:

well, u can collect post-level tags into thread-level tags

hashtags are probably a good way to manage them, too

right, so a large thread forms its own index / table of contents through hashtags. this would be useful for e.g. the larger ZBB L&L threads.

now all you need to do is make people tag things

step 1: purge the capitalist roaders above whom hate #hashtagrevolution

quoting Nortaneous:

post-level tags would be good for making natlang discussion more searchable.

But how? You haven't answered that yet...

take as an example this post: http://www.incatena.org/viewtopic.php?p=944466#p944466

under the primitive and un-2014 system of phpbb, i either have to remember which page in the thread that is on in order to find it [thus necessitating that i know of its existence] or approximate hashtags by putting a size=1 string like "aslian nonconcatenative morphology infix infixes infixation reduplication incopyfixation" at the bottom of the post, which 1) is Effort 2) is an ugly hack — and from these two points we may surmise that it will be uncommon, and therefore pointless to do.

however, if there is a system in place that directly encourages tagging, it will presumably be used for search, and therefore it will be worthwhile to tag posts. if i want to find everything on the zbb about nonconcatenative morphology, i have to have the entire board memorized; if i want to find everything on atlas-plus-hashtags about nonconcatenative morphology, i just hit the #nonconcatenative_morphology hashtag.

Okay... I'm tempted to do this and I've already got the implementation planned out, but since there was some resistance on IRC I'm gonna wait a day or so for general public comments.

do it faggot

Post tags are fine. But DEATH TO HASHTAGS

Okay—what do you want instead? A separate tag field like on Tumblr? (We can just leave the # signs out; they get added in later to make it look more Twitter-y for reasons I can't fathom.)

Something like that, but I think it should appear before the thread title like on some subreddits.

And the hashtag styling should be optional.

That's not nearly enough real estate—look again at the kinds of tags they were suggesting. The primary utility would be in digging through large threads with a lot of different kinds of information in them. Think more like the index of a reference book and less like general categories of conversation.

A Tumblr-style tag field is another possibility, sure. (The hash just is the symbol of tags these days, just like links are blue, so 'hashtag' just means 'tag'.) Tags would be per-post, not per-thread, so it wouldn't be possible to fit them into the thread title anyway — maybe you could get an index of the tags used in each thread, but it couldn't be listed on the forum page, since there wouldn't be enough room.

Inline hashtags have one advantage — it'd be slightly easier to add them in long text posts. If I'm writing a post like the first post in the non-European phonologies thread on the ZBB, I can write, say,

The #uvular_nasal almost never occurs contrastively*, voiced uvular fricatives are uncommon, and holes in #uvular stop series are frequent: #Georgian only has /qʼ/, #Avar has only two short uvular consonants, #Uyghur has /ʁ/, and #Chechen, one of the few languages with both uvulars and a large vowel inventory, is missing /ɢ/. According to #WALS, it's slightly more common for a language to have uvular stops and continuants than only uvular stops, and a bit over three times more common for a language to have only uvular stops than only uvular continuants.

...instead of having to remember to add the #uvular_nasal, #uvular, etc. tags at the end.

But on the other hand, that'd be ugly — doubly so for tags not used in the post text.

I'm not sure which option I prefer. If I'm writing a long post, I can just add the tags as I write.

(I briefly imagined an option to type a hashtag in the post field and have it automatically transfer down to the tag field — so if I type "...holes in #uvular stop series...", it automatically erases the hashtag from #uvular and throws a #uvular tag into the tag field at the bottom — but that'd be way too much Javascript magic and it'd probably lag my shitty-ass browser to hell. There's a tradeoff between the minor inefficiency of having to enter tags and the major inefficiency of having to load down the post box with JS and Firefox crashing every five seconds.)

Actual fancy JS for transferring not strictly necessary—just gotta (a) replace underscores with spaces and (b) hide the # signs in a post-processor.

the argument against it is basically <that is such an ungentlemanlike thing to do>

you could be a special snowflake and have %tags for the pleasure of the interweb oxbryggjians but duplicating an existing system has the advantage of <new users will pick it up>

The other flaw in the scheme is that many people, such as me, will give less than one tenth of a shit about tagging things in their posts.

What is wrong with the existing search feature? Instead of """"going to hasthag #Uyghur"""" you can just search for that word and OH HEY, everything everybody's ever said about Uyghur is right there. Whether they thought to tag it or not.

that actually is a flaw, and a p serious one

the benefits of tagging lie in collecting posts where the word in question is not contained or encapsulated in a string that is not conducive to search, but that is relevant to the topic (example: posts on physics often do not contain the string "physics", and posts on e.g. Kalmyk are about mongolic languages even if they will tend to not include this word)

also it can help if you want to find actual treatments of the subject and not just a billion posts where somebody mentioned the thing in passing (this often happens with languages famous for one thing exactly, where there will be one post explaining it and a flood of others that only reference it)

tl;dr these two things work well in tandem