Forum update: Tags are live! Go use them!

By Aaron Gertler 🔸 @ 2020-06-01T16:26 (+71)

April 2022 update: Note that this post is pretty outdated. You can find out more about tags on the EA Wiki FAQ page, and see all the tags on the "All tags" page. 

Tags are now live on the EA Forum!

They appear just above the comment section of each post, like this:

You’ll be able to select from any existing tag when tagging a post, but you won’t be able to create your own tag. For now, only moderators have that ability, because we want to make sure new tags don’t proliferate too quickly (lest we end up with separate tags for “AI alignment,” “AI safety,” and “AI risk”).

We’re thrilled to be introducing this feature; we hope it will make it much easier to find content that suits your interests.

You can see a list of all existing tags here. Each has its own page listing all posts which have been marked with that tag.

As with posts and comments, tags have their own “karma” values. These are post-specific; if a tag is especially relevant to a post, it will (ideally) gain more karma on that post over time. If you look at the page for a given tag, you can sort posts by tag karma to see which ones users have voted most relevant for that tag. (For example, see the “coronavirus” tag page.)

If you go to a tag’s page and upvote a post from the list, you’ll be upvoting that tag for the post (not adding karma to the post itself). This is a good thing to do if you want to help others discover the best or most relevant Forum content for a given topic.

Here are some ways you can help to make the Forum a more tag-friendly place:

• Go through the posts you’ve written and tag them.
• Go to pages for tags that interest you and decide which posts within should be upvoted (or strong-upvoted, downvoted, etc. for those tags).
• Submit new tag ideas to us using this form.
• Contact us if you think some of our tags should be renamed, deleted, etc.

Other updates

New filtering options

You can now use filters much more flexibly to determine the Forum content you see. For example, you can hide posts with a particular tag, or choose "reduced" so they appear less often.

Here’s what the new view looks like (you can add many different tag filters, but I’m just using one in the example, plus the “Personal” filter which appears by default).

Pingbacks for everyone

The pingback feature shows posts which link back to the post you’re reading (and might be good for follow-up reading). 

This has been a live beta feature for a while, but will now be visible to all users. As a reminder, you can see beta features by checking the “Opt into experimental features” option on the “Edit Account” page:

Section URL bugfix

If you click on a section heading in a post sidebar, the page URL will now be updated to match. This makes it more convenient to link others to a specific section of a post.

Metaculus link previews

For a while, links to other Forum posts have shown previews of those post. We’ve now added another preview option, for pages on the Metaculus prediction platform. Here’s a link you can hover over to see the preview.

Thanks for using the Forum, and happy tagging!