Lately I’ve noticed a lot of poorly-tagged images on CD-Media. Many of them seem to center around team numbers, folks tagging 1618 or “Team 1618” instead of the proper frc1618. However, a few of the tags that show up are “frc” and “1618”–indicating that the person who uploaded it probably wrote “frc 1618” without the quotes, which was then broken up by the tagging system since tags are space-delimited. Would it be possible to change the tagging box to comma-delimited instead?
Also, in a rough stab at curtailing the poorly-tagged photos, could the tag formatting FAQ be placed by the tagging box? Currently, it takes two or three clicks to get to–hidden by the box like the spoiler tag does on posts, one click could lead to the answer. (Or none, if you wanted just to dump it on there.)
Actually, how about (this will require a bit of AJAX coding) an auto-complete tagging field, like on Facebook. You start typing the tag, and it’ll start narrowing down the choices. When the PHP script goes and keeps fetching the tags, you can do a str_replace() to remove spaces and invalid characters as they are entered, so typing frc 228 will show up as frc228.
Then they either click on the tag in the AJAX-dropdown box, or they can hit the enter button on the keyboard. If there was at least one related tag result, enter will add the top rated result. Otherwise if there are no new results, it will add whatever the user typed in as a tag. And if the user wants to add a tag that is the same as an existing tag but shorter, in the dropdown box add in an extra spot for the currently typed tag that does not count in the results.
Here’s a screenshot of this exact same principle in action in the CMS I wrote for Team 228’s website last year:
Going into details, the data for all the tags are you see with the “remove” boxes are stored in a single, space-deliminated hidden text area. When the user has a tag they want to enter, either by clicking on the tag or hitting the enter key, it calls a Javascript function with the tag to add. It reads the text area, explodes the string into an array, adds in the new tag into the array, then puts an imploded string back into the text field. At this time, it also goes through the array in a for loop, and rebuilds a <div> element using .innerHTML to show the tags as <span>'s floated left.
It took me like four or five hours to fully implement this tagging feature, and I’m a lot more of a mechanical guy than a CS guy.
Art: that was (and still is) the goal for the tag box. It will have a list of related/similar tags somewhere (dropdown, like your screenshot … or a list below or something …)
7 months later … and about 2 total hours of work, there is an autocomplete for tags. It shows the 10 most popular tags matching what you have typed in. It works for multiple tags (ie: if i wanted to tag an image with both ‘Who Am I’ and ‘Brandon Martus’, I could have it autocomplete the WAI tag and then autocomplete the Brandon Martus tag … all in the same box).
Let me know if you run into any issues, or think of ways to improve …
It doesn’t work for me…but it might just be because I’m at work and they have a few things locked down. I didn’t try it when directly uploading, I was tagging someone elses photo.
There has been worse…such a 5 year revival. As seen here.
