Not all forum software options have the ability to add tags to threads. In most cases, this is an option you can set for all members in your community or just for staff members in your community.
Do you allow members to add tags to their threads in your community? How do you find it works out if you do?
If you do not, what is your reason for not allowing members to do so?
Usually not because most of the value in tagging is when it’s done consistently to classify content. Most people don’t get this usefully correct - best if you’re going to do it, to let the moderators to do it so there’s a hope of it being consistently applied.
I don't have this option on my board, but I did have it added to the resource forums only at one point and later removed the code to produce the topic tags due to such little usage. That's right, topic tags are not a default option of Jcink, so I created topic tags and a post tags code.
I would say that about 80% of forum users are not familiar using tags because even in forums where tags are allowed to be used, so many of them don't use it. So, I would say that it doesn't make much sense to be used in forums.
Have thought about adding tags for threads but, figured in that many people wouldn't be thinking about adding tags. Those that would, would be adding all many tags that are close to each other or be different spellings. Poisoning the well.
In most cases I think micro-categories like tags and prefixes are superfluous, and forums/sub-forums are the right level of organization for most discussions. You should only dip into tags if you have an additional layer of topic that spans multiple forums. Take for example a photography community. Say you have a forum for sharing photos and a forum for discussing gear, you might want to tag a discussion in each of those forums with the specific type of camera used/discussed. Owners of a Fuji X-T5 might like being able to pull up all discussions related to that camera, including both photos showcases and discussions about gear.
Prefixes serve a similarly small purpose imo, where the discussions in a forum need to be *very* tightly coupled to justify not just splitting a prefix out into its own separate forum. If the activity is too low to justify a full forum/sub-forum then you probably don't need a prefix anyway as the volume is low enough to browse by title. Most communities also don't enforce a prefix when creating a new discussion, which negates a lot of the use as an organizational structure.
