Tags: help to make it easier to search the forum.

One of the great features of this forum is that over the years a huge amount of useful information has been posted. We need to make the most of this wealth of knowledge by making it easy to find just what we're looking for.

Back in January Conductor71, to whom my thanks, pointed out the benefits of tagging.

http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/sh...ing#post949739

We have three basic search mechanisms open to us:
- by word;
- by user;
- by tag.

Search by word comes almost for free - it helps if the title contains the important words in the post: e.g.
not "Good News!", but "Walking helps reduce my symptoms".

Search by tag requires a little work, either when the thread is created or later: tags can be added at any time, even long after the chance to edit a post has gone. This is useful if the thrust of a thread changes in later posts, e.g. our walking thread evolves into one on the benefits of cycling.

To use tags use:
Search this Forum/Advanced Search

Tags are applied at the thread level. If you want to link posts across a number of threads, vBulletin (the software used by the forum) provides no support. You can do it yourself by adding your own tags to your posts, e.g.

Post tags johnt:tags johnt:search

Alternatively, you can give an internet link to the post, as with the link to Conductor71's post given above.

I'll be interested to hear other people's views.

John