tags have been reworked

[Istvan Albert]

Hello Everyone,

Tag handling has been reworked completely. As it turns out this is a
functionality where free text input is allowed and people have been
using widely different approaches to express their intentions. The
most important change is that to remove a tag you will need to add !
as the suffix, for example

blast+tutorial!+protein

will select all posts tagged with blast and protein that are not also
tagged as tutorial.

The tag list page is now ordered alphabetically and is also searchable:

http://www.biostars.org/tag/list/

hopefully this will help with finding relevant tags.

Other considerations
----------------------------

Some of the old tags may have invalid characters left in them, these
will show up as dots (.) in the tag. It seemed difficult to fix these
automatically, if you are a moderator and you see such a post, edit it
and change the tag as needed. The new tag validator will not permit
invalid characters anymore so this problem will not propagate anymore.

Merging similar tags: the alphabetical sort will place very similar
tags next to one another. If you are a moderator you can help by
editing incorrectly tagged posts, edit and correct the tag. Usually
there is one main tag and a few very similar orphans with similar
spellings. There will be tag suggestion added to the post creation - I
expect that this will mitigate but not remove the problem.

Future deleted posts will have their tags removed, and will be tagged
with the special tag: deleted-post. This has not been applied to
existing deleted posts though. To restore the tags for a post that was
deleted you will need to look at the revision.

Tags are automatically converted to lower case. This may or may not be
ideal, perhaps the tag selection search needs to be case insensitive,
but this would also mean further propagation of similar tags.

best,

Istvan

--
Istvan Albert
Associate Professor, Bioinformatics
Pennsylvania State University
http://www.personal.psu.edu/iua1/