Mailing list tag team

Purpose

The Mailing List Archive is a remarkable resource, but one with little structure. That makes it hard to explore in a systematic way.

Over the years, some messages have been tagged by their authors, with codes like CGI or Parse or Patch

They are easy to find in the mailing list topic index But not all messages were self-tagged in that way.

But the tag team is changing all that!

How it works

Any Library member can join the tag team: just ask (use the Feedback form)
Team members see some extra fields when viewing mailing list archive messages
They can alter the tagging or add tagging to a thread that has none

Notes on how to tag

To be able to tag, you first need to join the tag team. Send us a Feedback message if you want to give it a go.

As a team member, whenever you are looking at an individual message or an entire thread, you will see a form at the top of the page that shows the current tags.

To change the tags, simply over-type the existing tags and click the Update tags button.

The small print

Tags apply to a whole thread, not an individual message
Each tag is enclosed in square brackets, eg [CGI]
If a thread has more than one tag, they are each enclosed in square brackets, eg [CGI] [parse] [patch]
Tags are folded to lowercase, so [CGI] is the same as [cgi]
A tag can include any characters except square brackets. These tags are all valid:
- [cgi]
- [<html>]
- [object!]
- [bug in parse ]
- ['load/all]
Badly formed text in the input field will be ignored. Thus: [cgi] ]text] help [end] [stuff is treated as [cgi] [end]
A few words are ignored as tags. These include [REBOL] and [ANN]

Multilevel tags

A tag can have more than one level. This adds structure the to tag index
Use // to separate levels of the same tag, e.g.
[cgi//bug] (a tag with two levels)
[View//1.3//documentation] (a tag with three levels)
[open///direct] a two-level tag, the second part being /direct

Tags and star ratings

There are three special tags you can add to a thread: [*], [* *], and [* * *],

These let you flag the significance of a thread. In approximate terms:

[*] -- one star: the thread contains useful or interesting information on the topic(s)
[* *] -- two stars: the thread contains valuable or perhaps unique information
[* * *] -- three stars: the thread is a crucial read.

Star rating is not used by any part of REBOL.org just yet. But it will be soon.
We will be adding a tag search feature. That will return threads sorted (in part) by their star rating. That should mean the stuff someone really needs to see will come near the top.

Self-tagged messages (ie those tagged by the sender putting tags in the message's subject line) will not be star rated even if the submitter adds a star tag. The only way a star tag counts is if a tag team member adds it.