Introduce per-device tags

Feedback
1

Hi, what I miss here is discussion tags for devices, e.g. Flint 3|BE9300, so users would not resort to a full-text search to find relevant info.

Thank you in advance.

1 Like
2

Hi

Thank you for the suggestion.

We have considered this approach before. However, since some users may not add tags when creating new topics, relying solely on tags for searching could cause relevant discussions to be missed.

For now, we prefer to continue using full-text search, as it is more likely to find useful information across the forum.

We are also exploring ways to improve the search experience in the future, such as introducing features similar to Google's AI Overviews.

1 Like
4

As long as “Flint 3” considered an alias of “BE9300” by the full-text search, sure. But it isn’t at the moment, amirite? So if in a certain topic BE9300 is called one uniformly, users searching “Flint 3” will not see these topics, correct? Just did a quick test and that seems to be the case.

5

Yes, for now we will likely still need to search twice: once using BE9300 plus the relevant keywords, and once using Flint 3 plus the same keywords.

1 Like
6

Precisely. So, unless you’ve got means to tweak FTS to make it treat BE9300 a synonym to “Flint 2” etc., tags seem like the next best solution.

7

Hi,

We understand the improvement you're suggesting. By adding tags such as Flint 3 | BE9300, users could search using either name and find the relevant information.

However, as we mentioned previously, this still doesn't fully address the underlying issue:

  1. Existing threads do not have these tags, so users would still need to search for both BE9300 and Flint 3 separately to find all relevant results.
  2. Even for new threads, some users may not add the appropriate tags when creating a post, resulting in relevant content being missed.
  3. In some cases, users share findings or workarounds within broader discussion threads, such as Firmware v4.9 Preview: What to Expect. These posts cannot be fully covered by tags either, so users would still need to search for both BE9300 and Flint 3 separately to discover them.

For these reasons, we believe adding tags would provide only limited benefit in this case. It could also create the impression that searching by tags will find all relevant content, causing users to overlook other useful information.

At the moment, searching for BE9300 and Flint 3 separately is still the most effective approach.

We are also internally testing a feature similar to Google AI Overview to see whether it can help address this issue in the future.

8

What if tag suggestions worked when posting? Like, if someone mentions BE9300 in their post, suggest adding the Flint 3 tag. Doesn't fix existing threads but might help future ones without forcing people to remember.

1 Like
9

Hi,

It looks like Discourse is planning to add a search synonyms feature. However, the priority seems to be relatively low and the development may be more complicated, so it has not been released yet.

We will also evaluate internally to see if there are any better approaches to address this issue.

Thanks for your suggestion in anyway.