Replies

Results

• Gavin Bell

  04 April 2008 | 19:27

  Hi Jennifer

  It is possible to enter tags which span more than one word. You don’t need to run the words together or hyphenate them, just simply enclose the words you want to make a tag in double quotes eg “nature network”

  thanks
  Gavin

• Jennifer Rohn

  15 April 2008 | 09:27

  With all due respect, Gavin, I am aware of how to create multi-word tags. This is not what I am talking about. Hyphenated words are not the same as separated words – they are entirely different things. (For example, the expression “earth-shattering” would be incorrect if written as “earth shattering” or “earthshattering”.) Why can’t you just provide the functionality so that people can use proper English if they so choose? Is it really that impossible in this day and age?

  Sorry to be a pedant, but I’m a writer, so these things bug me.

• Henry Gee

  15 April 2008 | 09:35

  I agree with Jennifer. Hyphens serve a vital purpose in sentences. Their misuse can lead to all sorts of unintentional hilarity. Hmmm. I feel a blog coming on.

• Jennifer Rohn

  15 April 2008 | 09:49

  As another example, the tag on this thread is incorrect without the hyphen.

  Thanks for your support, Henry, but I suspect we’re whistling in the dark here.

• Maxine Clarke

  15 April 2008 | 10:16

  Henry — bit like when you quite rightly hauled me over the coals for camp followers of science (as opposed to camp-followers of science).
  I am with both Henry and Jennifer — I went through all this when Connotea was launched ages ago, and I still feel just as strongly — the tagging system falls down if you can’t hyphenate, or if you use singular/plural, caps/lower case, or use constructions such as ’ ing’, etc, and get different tags for them all. In an ideal world, the tag system should be like Google search, more “all forgiving”. But I think this is like chalk and cheese, if I have understood it correctly. You can either have “fuzzy search” or you can have “tags” but not both.
  This is my incomplete understanding of the process - very happy to be corrected. I hate having to be ungrammatical for some meta-tagging reason. A bit like being asked to click “OK” on some computer instruction, and having to, before you can proceed.

• Richard Grant

  15 April 2008 | 10:39

  Yeah, why not. I’ll join this team.

  Give us our hyphens!

  (Mind you, I’d be seriously happy if you moved over to a decent weblogging system. Textism is doing my head in).

• Maxine Clarke

  15 April 2008 | 11:56

  Everyone is working on it, Richard, promise.

• Gavin Bell

  15 April 2008 | 13:14

  Sorry all

  I misread the main thrust of your complaint. The ability to have hyphens is legitimate. I’ll raise it at the planning meeting, this month

  Stemming, the ability to get to plurals and gerunds is a lot more complex to encompass. There are legitimate reasons to stick with the tags as entered by the person tagging. However a similar tags listing might work well.

  Tags also only really work in a single language, so they fail there too. However they do provide a useful means of navigation otherwise we’d not be worrying about how they can be entered.

  thanks
  Gavin

• Bob O'Hara

  15 April 2008 | 13:31

  Gavin, that’s dashed decent of you.

• Henry Gee

  15 April 2008 | 13:33

  I always thought a gerund was a kind of warthog.

Results