Feat Req: Adding keyword tags to posts and ability to filter forum by up to X tags?

[Poll_Blind]

DU's General forum is both the highest-visibility spot for posts and also (unfortunately) a pretty crowded place where hard news items mingle with still-newsworthy yet more sensational articles.

Suggest:
:bluebox: Moderators/Admins create 30-40 standardized tags for the various types of articles, such as Taxes, Presidency, WarIraq, WarAfghan, WarOnTerror, CivilRights, etc. Temporary tags, like WikiLeaks or LameDuck could also be created and decommissioned as necessary. Those are just examples though, I'm sure you folks could do a much better list.

:bluebox: When posting, users click up to 2 or so tags which they feel reflect the article's content, much like a person alerting on a thread has the ability to check one or more reasons why they're alerting. Or they could choose not to use any tags, and be "untagged" which would also be filterable in the bullet point below. Moderators would be able to change the tags for a message if they felt it was mislabeled.

:bluebox: Allow users to filter General (if not other forums as well, but it would be very helpful in General) to include messages containing all the tags, or selectively omit undesired topics down to just 1 tag/keyword.

This would allow DUers to more quickly find the articles related to subjects they're interested in and also filter out topics they don't care for, at least to some extent. In this way, DU would act as a customizable "information matchmaker".

Just a thought. I realize that some of the different forums essentially represent this sort of classification system, and that moderators already move some topics (for instance, state-specific topics) to their more appropriate forum.

But functionally, the DU user base does tend to dump a lot of various topics in GD, which are still appropriate for GD, and this would help users tune DU more to their tastes- and alleviate the feeling that DU is being "taken over" by a particular topic.

Thanks for your time!

PB

[Skinner]

1. We are currently redesigning the software from scratch.

That is a function that we intend to provide in the new version of DU.

[Poll_Blind]

2. That or anything like it, that's great. Is the ETA any time in 2011?

Thanks.

PB

[Skinner]

3. Our hope is to have it ready sometime next year.

Not sure if DUers will be willing to accept quite so much change, though. We'll see.