[Tinhte] XenTag 3.2.5

[melbo]

tag search (advanced search) is broken. I tried to reinstall xentag to see if that would re-create the proper templates and lost all my tags

edit: I imported the 2 xentag tables from a backup made earlier that day and the tags show on domain.com/tags/ but they aren't associated with the threads anymore. Is there a way to fix?

 

[NeoCHI]

Any recommendation on how to fix my tag listing pages? They're still not listing all the threads I've tagged with the corresponding tag...

 

[NeoCHI]

Any recommendation on how to fix my tag listing pages? They're still not listing all the threads I've tagged with the corresponding tag...

Please can someone help? I know the page is cached but it's been several days now and they're still not show up on the tag pages.

From what I remember at one point they were working though, but now are only working for a few threads....and I have no idea whats causing it...

 

[NeoCHI]

It works for new threads and some very old threads of mine....what happened to the rest though? They're still tagged but just don't show up in the tag page

 

[NeoCHI]

I've noticed if I the tags of a thread thats not showing up, it somehow reactivates it and makes it show up again.

I haven't however been able to reproduce who caused it stop showing up in the tag page yet but I have a feeling it has to do with the thread thumbnail addon because I recently added thumbnails to all my threads.

 

[KeVo]

I am using Arty's Black Responsive theme, and when I type in something the font color remains black like the rest of the theme. Is there a way I can edit the text color as I am typing in tags?

 

[Alpha1]

Feature request:
This month's popular tags. (Widget)

This would show whatever tags are popular in the last month(s) or week(s) and would therefor rotate tags instead of always showing the same tags.

 

[BassMan]

When I enable debug mode and visit some thread I can see this error:

Template Errors: thread_view

1. Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/.../public_html/forum/library/Tinhte/XenTag/ContentWrapper/Abstract.php, line 23:
   22: ';
   23: $this->addRequiredExternal('css', 'cta_featuredthreads');
   24: $__compilerVar1 .= '

- - - - - - -

Brogan already confirmed it has nothing to do with his Featured Threads add-on.

 

[Brent W]

Has anyone given this a whirl with 1.3 yet?

 

[agison]

Has anyone given this a whirl with 1.3 yet?

Andy did. https://www.quantnet.com/tags/

 

[ForestForTrees]

I think that XenTag is an essential addon for forum SEO, so I wrote several detailed posts about the plusses and minuses of tagging it in a thread entitled "XF SEO Tweaks."

The core issue, as you know, is that most forums have some really amazing threads and quite a few weak ones. Unfortunately, once the amazing threads fall of the first page of threads for any subforum, they have almost no inlinks with any pagerank. By tagging our best threads, we can create a network of links between our best content. By adding a tag cloud to a high pagerank page, we can send pagerank to the entire network of "best threads."

Of course, this is just a starting point for thinking about the SEO aspects of tagging, so I provided our strategies for maximizing the benefits and avoiding possible pitfalls in the following post:
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/xf-seo-tweaks.67500/#post-710064

I'm a big fan of "curated" lists of tags, like are used on Stack Overflow and Wikipedia. You can implement this in XenTag by setting the permissions so that only certain user groups can make new tags. This is exactly what Stack Overflow does and based on their SEO performance it seems to work. Panda made it clear that Google is concerned about thin content on a site-wide basis, so curating the tag list can be key, especially in small and medium forums. I think that using XenTag's description field can also help to avoid thin content issues.

I describe the research I've done in how the smart people at Stack Overflow and the entire Stack Exchange network use a curated list of tags to improve their SEO in the following post:
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/xf-seo-tweaks.67500/#post-710068

 

[Alpha1]

I completely agree. XenTags should be expanded with functionality that makes tags much more functional for users and SEO. There is so much that can be done:

1. Automatically remove single use tags more than 6 months old
2. Tag synonym system (with voting)
   
3. Tag wiki (for example by connecting Vaultwiki)
4. Pluralized tags
5. Trending tags
6. Report bad tags (will be in the next release)
7. Merge tags (automatically after users report bad tag)
   
8. Post to tag
9. Follow tag
10. XenTags for popular addons (Better Blogs, VaultWiki and XenMediaGallery, Xenreviews, etc)
    
11. Trophy: user has tagged X threads
12. Sitemap submission for tag pages

I would really like these functions to be added to XenTags. @Dinh Thanh please let me know if you are interested in the above.

 

[TheBigK]

I've talked about Tag Subscription Facility with @xfrocks , and I think @Dinh Thanh will allow it. It's complex and may take time to develop.

PS: But I, so , very, much, want, it.!.!..

 

[ForestForTrees]

I absolutely agree that I would love to see more development in XenTag, but my priorities would be somewhat different. There are three features that I feel are essential for XenTag and that I would be happy to help fund. Those ideas are logging of changes, renaming and merging of threads (similar to Alfa1), and BBCode in the Description field. I also have another idea that I'd love to get feedback on, but I hope to post it later. I will put each idea in a separate post.

 

[ForestForTrees]

Basic Logging

Currently, it doesn't look like there is any way to tell when someone adds or removes a tag from a thread. Someone could easily go through and delete hundreds of tags in an attempt to silence someone else or because they didn't like a moderator and we wouldn't be able to check to know who did it. Likewise, for tags to be helpful, both for SEO and for UX, I believe that you need some sort of system for applying the tags. If someone applies the tag indiscriminately or otherwise incorrectly, we have no way of knowing who it was in order to help them get with the program. We also can't figure out where they did the damage to correct it.

Ideally, I'm just looking for extremely basic logging of changes to tags. Whenever a tag is added or deleted from a thread, simply append a line with the following to a text file:

1. a link to the user's profile page,
   
2. a link to the thread,
   
3. the tag, and
   
4. whether the tag was added or removed
5. the time

If the XenTag code is modular enough, this may only involve editing a few methods.

The people who would tend to be interested in a function like this would tend to be those who are more linux savvy. My bet is that people would just use tail and grep or ftp to access it. (I would.) However, if you wanted to add a page to the AdminCP and put the last 200 lines of the file in there, that might be easy to do as well. The file could be stored in community/data or community/internal_data so that write privileges are not an issue.

The idea would be to keep things absolutely as simple as possible, but to make it so that people who want the data can get the data.

 

[ForestForTrees]

Renaming tags

It would be terrific if XenTag had the ability to rename and merge tags.

Just to be clear, by renaming tags I mean changing the actual text that is displayed for a tag. (Let's call this displayed text the tag_text - I think that this is what it is called in the database.) By merging tag A into tag B I mean setting it so that all threads that have tag A now have tag B instead.

After the Panda search algorithm update, Google is very concerned about "thin content." In the context of tagging systems, this means only allowing a limited set of tags so that your site isn't filled with tag pages that have only one thread listed. Such pages are very thin content SEO-wise and also clearly are a waste of the user's time, teaching them that it isn't worth it to click on tags and thereby undercutting any UX benefits of tagging.

Fixing this by limiting the set of tags is very easy to do with XenTag because there is a permission for creating new tags, and you just turn that off for usergroups who aren't allowed to create new tags that aren't part of a pre-approved list. Of course, if you are going to choose a curated list of tags like this, it can take a log of time (I know this from hard experience) to choose the pre-approved list of tags. And what if you want to change the official list of tags, afterward? This is where the merge and rename functionality is crucial.

Consider the following screen from the Admin CP:


View attachment 66473

It looks like the "Tag:" field is editable, and that one can rename a tag here. However, the grey text below warns you of the danger that lies ahead if you do this. If you attempt to change the tag_text, it can actually break the tag completely, according to both my tests and the following thread:
https://xfrocks.com/other/threads/xentag-renaming-tags.133/

I think that this would be a great upgrade. Merging would also be nice, but as someone who has a curated list of tags, being able to rename tags like this would save us an awful lot of time.

 

[ForestForTrees]

BBCode in the Description field

When I read the following, from Google's official Webmaster Central blog, it really got my attention regarding my tag pages:

One other specific piece of guidance we've offered is that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content. (source; emphasis mine)​

This is Google flat out telling us that if it finds thin content on some of our pages, that can impact our entire site's ranking. Well, tag pages accumulate pagerank because of all of their inlinks, so they are likely to be some of the first pages indexed. They also don't change often (not fresh) and they are also very thin, as they barely have a complete sentence on them (if Word has been able to estimate the "reading level" of your documents for a decade, I would bet that Google is using a similar signal in Panda). Tagging still seems to work wonders SEO-wise, but what can we do to avoid thin content/Panda penalties to our whole site from the tag pages.

Luckily, XenTag has given us exactly the thing. By adding a couple of paragraphs of text to the description field of our most popular tags, we solve our thin content problem. As indicated by the graphic in my previous post, users with appropriate permissions can even do this from the front end.

.... but they can't use any formatting. It's just pure text. No character formatting, no links, no lists, no graphics, no indents, no videos. Nothing. None of the BBCode or HTML goodness that we are used to.

It would be awfully nice if we could use BBCode formatting in the description field.

 

[vkams]

Sorry for my request, but I don't see tag cloud at sidebar on main page, although both options in XenTag Mod are on and tags are working. I cannot undestand what is wrong.

 

[leksi]

Hi.
Accorfing to the description the addon cat

Add tags to threads, xenforo pages, forums, resource items (Resource Manager), wiki pages (XenCarta).

I cannot find how I can add tag to wiki page. Does anybody know?

 

[Stormlilly]

Sorry for my request, but I don't see tag cloud at sidebar on main page, although both options in XenTag Mod are on and tags are working. I cannot undestand what is wrong.

Same. How do you get the tag cloud sideblock to work? I must be missing something. I've checked options.