Here is just a short description, how it works, since I realised that even experienced members who are inscribed here since many years, seem not to understand. Dominique might put a link from the page « aide » (“help”) to this blogue entry.
One important information right at the beginning: nobody is obliged to tag own posts and you are usually free to delete or to change your posts or your tags, whenever you like!
If you leave the last field at the foot open, it will not cause that you cannot publish it. On the other hand, tags are one of those little things which make this forum work. You just need to understand how it does.
How to find existing tags on your phone
First of all, tags are not visible on the mobile version of this network, but if you use Ning with the browser of your computer, it should work. If you need the tags consulting Musicologie médiévale from your mobile phone, you need to switch to “desktop view”.
Whether the use of tags might be useful
Please think carefully about how and whether you would like to use tags!
Tags are particularly helpful, if you share an information about sources and resources available online (manuscripts, articles or those studies which might be consulted regularly over many decades doing a particular research, online).
They might be not so useful, if you just would like to get feedback about something very particular, but it is up to you to decide (especially if the feedback you got was very helpful), whether it might be also useful for others...
Tags must be commonly used keywords
In case you decide to tag content posted by you, please consider that a tag will not start earlier to work until there is another post which has the same tag. A tag starts precisely to work when you click on it and you have more than one entry with the same tag. As bad example which should not be followed, I used two tags here which are actually pointless, because there are no second blog posts tagged as “help“ nor as “tags”! Nevertheless, in exceptional cases where you are confident that content with a future tag might show up soon, you can use such isolated tags as a suggestion to other users who might look for a tag like this.
If this is understood, you will soon realise that url-links are not suitable at all to be used as a tag, since I have seen it many times. Please choose tags as keywords with respect to those already chosen as tags by others. You can also use RISM sigla (or any other common ones) as tags, if there is more than one entry about one and the same manuscript and it has been used by others. Hence, you might consider, whether certain keywords are too specific and these sigla should rather be used for libraries than just for one manuscript, unless such a specific use does make sense. You can also make tags work by adding tags to older posts made by others, if you have administrative rights. This works only, if you have founded groupes here and it works only there.
Which entries will be sorted by a tag
Another important thing: tags do not work here throughout the whole forum, but only within the same category. If I will use a tag for this post, it will only work within posts or entries made under “Blogue”. If you go to “Home” you will see, how Dominique has used tags to sort older entries at “Billets de blogue”. You can also check, how tags work in my groups about Byzantine or Beneventan chant, but if you post something there, you can also leave the trouble of tagging to me, because I usually tag most of the posts there, so that others will find it also in future. But you should understand that tags only coordinate discussions or posts made within one group, within “Blogue”, “Forum” or “Videos”. If you prefer to leave the choice to administrators who might know the common tags better, please do not hesitate to contact us.
How to use several words as just one tag
I also used in my groups certain tags as they had been introduced by Dominique such as “Manuscrits” for manuscripts online or “Articles en-ligne” for articles published under open access conditions. Please note that it cannot be always avoided that one tag has more than just one word. If you just type “articles en-ligne”, it will be understood as two tags “articles“ and “en-ligne”, even without having written a comma to divide these as two tags!
What do you have to do to make several words work as just one tag?
You put non-typographical quotation marks around them and you must also follow the use of majuscules of an existing tag, otherwise it will not work.
Within blogs posted at “Blogue” the tag “Articles en-ligne” will only work, if you type articles with majuscule and by the use of quotation marks you make both words work as one tag, like here: “"Articles en-ligne"”.
How to change existing tags
The better way to change tags is to choose the option "edit post/discussion etc.", because if you add a tag with the option “edit your tags”, you might discover that the former ones have gone after you had saved the changes. In order to prevent this you can still use “edit your tags”, but you first cut the former tags with CTRL+X and then you save the former post with empty tags. With the option “add tags” you copy again the former tags and add after a comma another tag which was still missing.
Technical problems
Note that there was also a period over more than one year, that one of those members with administrative rights made by accident a configuration which prevented tags to work any longer. I had to report it to Ning-administrators and they needed months to fix the problem. Please, if you observe something similar, do not hesitate to report it to Dominique or to post it as a statut to inform other members about a malfunction.
Thank you for your attention and happy tagging!
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