Public Tags enable you to group topics together in order to organise content in a way that’s transparent to all members of your community. They differ from Moderator Tags as they can be seen by any member of your community. You can choose whether end users are allowed to add tags.
How To Add, Remove, Rename, And Merge Public Tags
You can manage your public tags via Control → Settings → Public Tags. From here, you’ll see options to add new tags, remove tags, edit (rename) tags, and merge two public tags together. They’re mostly pretty self-explanatory, but we’ve outlined some less obvious details below:
Adding new tags
- Public tags will be shown to end users on the topic creation page even if they’re not attached to any topics yet.
- This means that on a brand-new community, you can start with a predefined list of tags for users to pick from.
Editing (renaming) tags
- If you edit a tag by changing its name, then the tag will be updated across all topics where it’s been used.
- This means you can easily rename a tag used across hundreds of topics in a single second.
- Tags on inSided preserve casing when they’re created.
- However, if a tag has been created by an end user with some casing that you don’t like, then you can edit that tag to have different casing.
Removing tags
- This is a permanent delete of a public tag, removing all trace of the tag from topics.
- The tag will also not longer show in the autocomplete input for end users or moderators.
- Be careful when using this option, as it’s not possible to recover the data.
Merging tags
- Need to tidy up some duplicates? With our merge tool, you can merge a duplicate tag into another tag by pressing merge and choosing the tag you want to merge your selected tag into.
- This will automatically rename all the instances of the duplicate tag, and also remove the duplicate tag.
- Again, please be careful with this tool - it’s not possible to undo the action.
Tag usage counter - updates are not realtime.
One note on ‘number of topics’ tag is used in: this data is updated a few times a week, not in real time. I.e. if you remove a tag from some topics, or add it to a lot of topics, it will not immediately reflect in the number shown here.
How To Prevent End Users From Creating New Public Tags
You can prevent your end users from creating new public tags when they’re making new topics, and force them to select from the list of tags you’ve got in Control.
- Go to Control → Settings → Public Tags
- Turn off the setting Allow end users to add new public tags
- You’re done! You can change this setting at any time.
How To Add Public Tags To A Topic (as a moderator)
- Open any topic in Control.
- On the Details panel, select the ‘Public Tags’ input box.
- Add a new tag, or search for an existing tag that you want to reuse and select it. You can add as many tags as you’d like!
End user experience of public tags
Here’s a quick rundown of how end users can interact with public tags.
When an end user is creating a topic, once they enter a title then we run a search for other similar topics. If those similar topics have public tags, then these tags are automatically suggested to the end user below the tag input.
When an end user clicks on the tag field, then they’ll see a list of the most-used tags on the community.
End users can search through all tags on the platform, including those not yet attached to any topics.
Public tags are public to all members
Both community members and moderators can add them to topics (if you’ve allowed them to), and they’re always exposed to your community members.
