People often initiate threads about single ingredients - would be great to be able to filter those by an “ingredient” category - or failing that, tag.
For eg, searching for “squash” brings up every thread where someone mentioned squash - even filtered by cooking - rather than just the single ingredient idea threads(s) for squash.
There’s actually quite a lot of tags available on the site.
https://www.hungryonion.org/tags
With that said, there has never been any organized effort to sort out the tags, or attempts for the tags to be comprehensive. I think a few used and created tags. So they can comment more.
If anyone wants to take up the effort to organize what tags there should be (not too many, not too few) and how tags should be used on the site, we can improve how tags can be used to improved the site.
It would actually be more useful to create a category called Ingredients under Cooking Discussions. All the single-ingredient threads could be shifted under there, and it would be easy to use.
Re sorting tags - I’d be happy to take a stab at it, if you tell me what the goal is. Cut them down? Consolidate?
I will play devil’s advocate here. Right now, the subcategory is ‘Cooking, Cookbook, Ingredients’. What if there is two main ingredients in a dish. Then in that case, do we put the topic into the single ingredient category? How do we effectively search in that case?
I personally feel tags are probably more flexible in this case. Since there are more flexibility around how many tags you can use. The challenge with tags is organization. We’ll have to have some guideline around use of tags- when to tag, what to tag, etc. so that the tags don’t become messy.
I don’t tag myself, so I don’t know how its done currently. But I know some do. So I am hoping some of them can chime in and share how its done right now, and what its used for.
I think what @Saregama is suggesting is to tag EVERY thread that is focused on any single ingredient with the tag “Ingredient.” That way, people could filter by the Ingredient tag and then search ONLY ingredient-focused threads for a particular term (i.e. “squash”), which would cut down on the overall number of hits and increase the likelihood of finding a full thread devoted to squash.
That could work @biondanonima, but as @sck pointed out, tags are a mess at the moment.
TLDR: Could we just rename Recipes → “Recipes and Ingredients”? Most Ingredient threads are a combination of usage and recipes anyway.
Longer thoughts below; I don’t mean to overstep - just some thoughts of how to improve our experience, as a heavy (and very appreciative) user of the site.
Thanks!
TAGS:
I ran a pivot from sck’s link: 92% of all 567 existing tags have been used less than 10 times cumulatively (70% only once or twice). There’s also a bunch of overlap and duplicates due to typos (I can help if someone tells me how).
| # Times Tag Used |
# Tags | % of All Tags |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 305 | 53% |
| <=2 | 402 | 70% |
| <=10 | 527 | 92% |
.
CATEGORIES/TOPICS:
It may be more user-friendly for Cooking Discussions to be segmented slightly differently than it is at the moment.
The biggest category/topic - Cooking, Cookbooks, Ingredients - has a combined 1429 posts. That makes it hard to use (moreso with search seemingly broken at the moment, but even if it was working fine).
Cooking Discussions:
→ Cooking, Cookbooks, ingredients x 1429
→ Cookware x 401
→ Recipes x34
→ Baking, Sweets x200
→ Specific Diets x64
Ingredients could be part of Recipes - most recent Ingredient threads have both usage and recipes.
Based on usage, I would also suggest that (Home) Cooking be a separate category/topic from Cookbooks.
Specific Diets could switch to a tag instead if the concern is too many categories/topics.
Proposed: Cooking Discussions:
→ (Home) Cooking
→ Recipes & Ingredients
→ Cookbooks
→ Cookware x 401
→ Baking, Sweets x200
Oh wow. A mess indeed. What I found out from here is that one can organize tags by groups, so that is probably a good starting point to organize tags. What I am still looking for is some sort of guide of tagging best practices (for the users).
Let’s say if ingredient is merged with recipes, and cooking is its own category. Where is the line that separate ‘cooking’ and ‘ingredient’? Just want to make sure that its not confusing.
The feedback is great, please keep them coming!
Just to clarify, Recipes is for HO members’ original recipes, not links that one can find on food sites on internet or in books. Maybe rename the section to make this more obvious.
There are many times people find this confusing, i suggest “Cookware and kitchen tools”
True, especially each user has a different sets of criteria and tagging system. I think maybe it’s better to have a tag administrator with a guideline for all people to follow.
Not to neglect also the regional restaurants tags. I don’t know if @Saregama wants to involve on that after the cooking discussion. I can help on the restaurant tags if needed.
Well it’s very under-used, which is a separate issue.
But perhaps if it were Recipes and Ingredients, there would be a good home for those Ingredient threads and their related recipes.
I don’t think it’s going to change whether or not people are using Recipes for anything else.
I think it would be useful to have a single approach on tags.
Happy to work with you on it, @naf, across the board.
I think it will be pretty straightforward once looked at, then it’s just implementation.
I give some thoughts about the present recipes section. You’re right about it being under used. How about HO member’s original recipes, we create a special tag for that. All recipes whether online or member’s unique recipes will be merged together, the aim is for everybody to use them.
Actually, I’ve the same question here, tags seems to be a better choice than 2 separate categories.
I’ll have a look in other sites to see how things are organized.
I’ll volunteer again to help clean up tags…
Sure. We should come up with some system/ definition what should or shouldn’t be a tag.
Do you also want to volunteer to think about how we want users here to use tags? And what happens when there are inconsistencies, how do we clean things up?
I think maybe we can come up with some proposal and then get some feedback from everyone to avoid Chowhound 2015 
Sure, I’ll think about all of it.
Will take a look at the links when I get a chance.
I don’t think a lot of people use tags at the moment, but they could be so much more useful. Could be very helpful as threads and posts multiply with the influx.
It will be great if individual post can be tagged too. Not a tag fanatic here, but I think certain topic can be useful. Take an example the beer thread, it will be helpful if each post can be tagged by the country and the style of beer, this can be useful if someone will travel and want to have a quick look. It’s something maybe the programmer of discourse can think of?!
@sck Actually, I’m a bit confused who can tag in HO, I thought only mod.
Can you use tags, @Saregama?
I think everyone can use tags, but not create tags
(But then I’m confused why there are so many duplicative and typo tags…)
