Notepad++ forum articles FAQ tagged vs the FAQ category

mkupper

I had been confused at times as to why the lists of articles that were FAQ tagged did not seem to be the same as those in the FAQ category.

Here are the results when I compared the two lists:

These two articles are FAQ tagged but not in the FAQ category

Please Read This Before Posting - Pinned to the top of General Discussion
Please Read This Before Posting - Pinned to the top of Help wanted · · · – – – · · ·
I suspect an article can’t be in two or more categories leading me to wonder if there should be a third Please Read This Before Posting article that would be pinned to the top of the FAQ category.
The two existing Please Read This Before Posting articles are identical other than that the one in General Discussion has one more paragraph containing “This General Discussion section is a place to talk about Notepad++ in General.”

18 articles in the FAQ category are not tagged as FAQ

17 articles are both FAQ tagged and in the FAQ category

PeterJones

@mkupper ,

Tags are up to the original poster who creates a given Topic, and are thus not guaranteed to be accurate – they are self-selected, self-reported, uncontrolled, and free-form. There is no way to prevent users from using inaccurate tags, nor of enforcing that they use only a controlled, limited set of tags, so it’s rather a free-for-all. As such, the moderators have chosen to not “police” the tags in general.

For the “FAQ” tag, I agreed with you that it shouldn’t be on posts that are not in the official FAQ section (with the two “read before posting” being the intentional exceptions), so I did clear out the few extraneous “FAQ” tags that you pointed out to me in chat.

Regarding tagging posts in the FAQ section: at various times, I have gone back and forth as to whether or not I should bother with them on the FAQ entries. I have never found tags useful in general (because of the free-for-all nature, and the fact that a search for contents of a post usually matches more and better posts that I’m looking for than does relying on the randomness of tags), and am not convinced that more people would find the various FAQs if only I’d tag them better. Adding a “FAQ” tag to them seems especially pointless because they’ve already been collected into one Category, which seems an easy enough way to make that grouping and to easily find them. If you feel strongly that the other half of the entries should have “FAQ” added, I can do that, I just doubt that it will be truly helpful.

Regarding “Please Read This Before Posting” – I don’t like that I couldn’t use the same post in both categories, but the forum doesn’t allow that, so I’ve got two copies. And since there are two copies, the one-paragraph difference is intentional, because without it, some people have taken “General” to mean “talk about anything, even if it has nothing to do with Notepad++”, and that’s not what the Forum or that Category is for. And I don’t really see a point of a third copy, because if people don’t see it pinned at the top of General Discussion and Help Wanted, they aren’t going to see it in the FAQ Category page, either.

update: additionally, every Topic is limited to 5 tags, so on some, I have to remove other tags to make room for a “FAQ” tag.