Create and use tags

With the growing number of topics, we need to organize them properly. Right now we are using categories more than tags. However, in my opinion,

  • Some topics can fit in multiple categories and users will struggle to decide the proper category
  • Some categories (such as our group) have many topics with various contents and it is difficult to look for specific things.

I think tags are more flexible and suitable for organizing topics, at least for the early stage of this site, as stated in this article:

It’s certainly a good idea to start with a few key categories when you launch, but don’t overdo it. Instead of adding yet another category, ask yourself if a tag would, perhaps, be a better and more flexible starting point? If a tag gets extremely popular you can easily graduate it to a full blown category later – and the natural popularity of user-entered tags might help you decide what categories you need and don’t need.

In addition, if possible, it would be better to allow all users, instead of just admin/moderators, to create and add new tags when writing a topic.

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Discourse set the default of trust_level 3 to be able to use tags. I just lowered it to trust_level_2, which implies a user needing to reach silver contributor level to be able to create new tags. When there are already many tags, we will change back to trust_level 3, gold contributor.