NOTE: The whole point of the Development Updates forum is to bring potential site enhancements to the community to collect feedback. I can't guarantee every feature will be implemented or everyone's request will make it in, but I'll strive to include as much feedback as possible. If a feature makes it beyond the "idea" phase and I start working on it, I'll provide updates here, as necessary.

It would be handy to be able to tag games, so you could quickly find certain genres, themes, etc. The big question is, should tags be for each individual user or shared globally or both?

Right now I'm leaning toward global tags since I think they provide some nice benefits, mainly in that you don't necessarily have to tag EVERYTHING in your collection because someone else may have tagged some of the games. The downside to this is you potentially end up with tags you don't want or don't care about.

If tags are placed globally, they could also be used when accessing the Browse Games menu option, so you could filter games with them. Obviously, your Collection page will have a new filter for tags as well.

So any thoughts on whether or not global tags would work for you? Also, how important is a tag system for everyone?

I'm a fan of the tags idea. I think there is definitely a downside to them as you state above, but I don't think it'll be enough to worry over. I almost wonder if maybe it should only be added if 2 or more agree to the tag for the game?

Tags would be great! Global tags would be great and benefit all. But I also like the idea that you could have your own weird tags. You could argue that you have lists for that, but I always think of tags as unstructured metadata and lists as structured metadata. Lists are also more restricted as you use them in dropdown lists which cannot be too large. Tags don't have that restriction.

So I guess my vote goes to 'both' :)

If the feature launch of tagging on steam is anything to go by, global tagging could end up messy. People were tagging games with a lot of nonsense. In many cases it was admittedly funny, but not helpful at all like giving Dark Souls a "Casual" tag, etc... but others were negative such as games being tagged with "Crap" "Indie Hipster Garbage" and worse. Having to police the tagging would just add more work for you and that's not ideal.

As for individual vs global implementation? I would like to see a hybrid of both. A person adds a tag to something in their collection, have it count as a "vote" for the same tag globally. Once a threshold (like jwcooley mentioned) is surpassed, that tag is then displayed on the global game entry. Something like that perhaps.

Off the cuff ideas:
- A toggle option to choose whether to display global tags or individual tags when viewing your collection?
- Default to showing global tags for any collection entries a user hasn't tagged yet? Vary the text colour to indicate the difference. Black for user tags vs grey for global tags.

As for importance? I love categorizing my collection, and I'm planning to do so whether it's with tags or Lists, but hopefully a tagging system will be a clean and fast way to do it, which is really what's important for me individually.

@agree with dhobo completely after reading his post.

I just deployed the first version of the tagging feature, so take a look and let me know what you think! For now, there's just individual tags, but I do plan on adding global tags in the future. I figured we wouldn't have enough data to escalate tags to global tags for a while anyways, but I wanted to get SOMETHING out there. Here are some potential changes / enhancements for the future:

• Global tags - I liked the ideas you guys threw out, so once a certain number of users have tagged a game with a particular tag, it would be escalated into a global tag. Within your collection, global tags would show up (assuming you didn't have it as an individual tag) and would be a different color to distinguish them. There would potentially be a toggle to include / exclude global tags (maybe in the Settings dropdown?)
• Clickable tags - Right now, the tags show up for each game, but they're read-only. I thought it might be handy to click on one to filter the list with that particular tag. My only concern is what to do if you've already entered a tag filter. Should the previously entered filter be removed? What if you click on two tags, should they stack or be replaced?
• And vs. Or filter - We have the same issue with the new tag filter as we do with the lists filter. I see the value in having both types of filtering, but for now, it's an AND filter, just like the lists. I'd like to make this a toggle-able option at some point.
• Auto-complete when adding - Right now, you have to type in a tag every time you want to add it. It'd be nice if there was an auto-complete feature so as you type, it would show tags you've already added.

I'm sure you guys will have other thoughts / feedback once you use it, but that's a start. Unless there's anything major missing from what I've put together so far, I'll probably take a break from tags for at least a few weeks and let everyone use it before I start implementing feedback.

First of all: GREAT WORK! Enjoying the feature already and it really looks and works good.

• good choice to first focus on individual tags first. Later you can distill a set of global tags from the individual one's, and apply them as globals (I think). Global tags cannot be deleted from games, so a filter to include\exclude them would be nice. But what about when you want both a individual tag and a global tag that are the same (RPG?) . Display both or as one?

• First tought about the clickable tag is that it stacks and is added to an existing filter. You can always delete or change the other filters.

• I say 'YEAH' to an autocomplete function when adding tags. Perhaps supply a list of the 10 or 20 most used tags that adds them when you click on one. Saves some typing.

Also great that you can enter a tag and it is added by just pressing the enter key. Good for quick adding tags.

One small thing: when I have entered some tags, you have to click the 'save' button to save and close the dialog. Could you make it so that when you hit 'enter' and have nothing entered, the dialog closes saving all your changes? Hitting ESC works as expected as it closes the dialog and cancels the edits.

All in all great update! Thanks!

Wow, this is slick. I really like the implementation already from what I've tested. What I was using lists for previously, I will definitely be using tags for instead. I'll save list use for making playlists now.

• Clickable Tags - I like the idea of clicking a tag from a collection entry to add it to the tag filter for searching, that would be ideal I think. Agree with Marcelloz that they should stack since you can click to remove from the filter if need be.
• Auto-complete - This would be nice, definitely. Most of my tags are pretty short, but I can see the merit in this. Again, Marcelloz's idea of adding popular tags for click-adding sounds like a good idea.

Fantastic start to a great new feature, thanks for adding this.

Been trying to test the tag system for any problems, and I've only run into one so far.

If you have any number of tags on a game, then proceed to delete all of them, hit save, the Edit Tags window doesn't close. If you hit ESC/cancel/X you get a "loading" bar on your collection page forever or until you refresh. Manually refreshing the collection page shows your changes.

edit: Further testing shows that hitting save on an Edit Tag window with no tags followed by the cancel/esc/x will also cause the infinite loading message. Having tags beforehand is irrelevant to this bug.

Just noticed that when you have tages they get wiped when you Quick Edit a game, add a note or use the buttons on the right.

Yikes! Not sure how I missed that one during testing, but nonetheless, it's fixed now! I also fixed the issue @dhobo reported where nothing would happen when you don't have any tags entered and clicked on the Save button. Unfortunately, I don't have much time to test right now, but I think everything is fixed. Let me know if you guys see anything else weird and if so, I can take a better look at it this evening.

Great! Tested it and it works now as expected. Thanks for the quick fix.

I think I'm going to work on a few minor tweaks to the tag feature this weekend. Here's what I'm hoping to knock out:

• Clicking on a tag should set it as a filter
• When editing tags, if the textbox is empty and you hit Enter, it should save your changes
• Add a filter that will include / exclude games with tags entered (similar to how the rating and completion filters work)

I also had a few questions for you guys:

• I've noticed I use all lower-case text when entering my tags, should the system enforce all lower-case or leave casing up to the user?
• Does the order of the tags matter? Right now, it stores them in the order you enter them, but I could alphabetize them or give you the ability to drag 'n drop on the edit screen to put them in whatever order you prefer.

I haven't forgotten about auto-complete when entering a new tag, but it'll take a bit more work, so I'm going to start with the above items :)

Excellent!

To answer your questions :
- No enforcing of casing; the tags are personal so you should not interfere with that. If you want to re-use them for global tags, you then should make the global tags lower-case. But global tags are always generated from personal tags or entered separately by an admin. They will be 2 different sets I guess.
- My personal opinion: order them alphabetically.

I would prefer a drag-and-drop ordering for the tags, personally. Mostly because I would like to have more "important" tags listed first, say, game genres and such, with other tags for details able to be kept towards the back of the list. Would it be possible to appease both preferences with manual sorting implemented, but maybe add a button to quick-sort alphabetically?

Perhaps start with the order in which you add them, and make it possible to manually change the order. That's when you are actually editing your tags, and they are also saved in that order.
When viewing them in your collection, they are displayed the order you have saved them (default). In the settings make an option to have them displayed alphabetically.

A button to sort them alphabetically on your edit dialog would be an extra of course.

You guys may have already seen the update, but I went ahead and added the drag 'n drop feature when you're editing tags. I love the idea of having a button to sort the tags alphabetically when editing tags and the settings option for sorting them alphabetically by default., so I'll try and add those in the near future.

Thanks for the feedback!

Bug: I've entered tags for two games that are sequential in my collection, in this case: Botanicula followed by Breath of Death VII. Botanicula had puzzle, indie, point and click, and adventure. BoD7 had RPG, indie, Comedy, and Retro.

I then added a completion for BoD7, and when I went to refresh my collection page, lo and behold, Botanicula now had the tags I had entered for BoD7 and the Botanicula tags had simply vanished.

I currently have zero clue how to repeat this, but this exact bug (with two different games, can't remember if they were sequential or not) happened when I was doing tag testing after it was first implemented as well. I wrote it off as user error thinking I wasn't paying attention at the time and trying to repeat it brought no errors. I'll keep messing around with it and see if I can get it to happen again reliably.

Hmm...that's definitely a weird one. I just tried to recreate it in my development environment, but was unable to do so. I'll try some more tomorrow when I work on the site.

Alright, so this time, I went to edit tags on the second game (Breath of Death 7), hit save, edit tags on first game (Botanicula), hit save, then clicked the quick-edit Note button for Breath of Death 7 and hit save.

Reloaded the page, and suddenly Botanicula and BoD7 had BoD7's tags.

I'm trying to be precise with my steps since I can't tell which ones are causing the bug. Maybe you'll make better sense of it than I will.

I reached a point where I was able to make this bug happen pretty consistently using steps similar to what I posted above. Then I had to restart my computer for a completely unrelated reason and suddenly the bug doesn't happen any more when I try to do it again.

Go figure.

Two tags I would love to see for game entries: Playstation Plus and Xbox Games with Gold. Perhaps the major bundle distributors too (Humble Bundle, Indiegala, Indie Royale and Bundlestars if I'm not forgetting any) to keep track of what you got in some bundle vs. what you bought on your own.

And for those who have forgotten which is which, there is an Indie Game Bundle Wiki out there that keeps pretty good track.

Now these tags would be slightly different as it would be the users entering the tags individually as they wouldn't apply globally to everyone who had the game.

Not sure the bundle distributors really need to be made into unique tags, do they? I mean, that's like asking for tags for every possible retail store (Walmart, GameStop, etc...)
I think this is a situation best suited for Lists. Make a Humble Indie Bundle IX List, and add whatever games you got from it to it. Repeat for all the bundles. This way it won't interfere with global tags.

The "owned, but not really" games from PS+ and Gold are another matter. Right now there's an "Status" field when editing entries that has "Owned" or "Previously Owned/Rented". Maybe add a third category for "Subscriptiowned" (or something less silly) to handle games you have access to via active subscriptions.

@dhobo Actually, I think the Games With Gold games are actually owned even if you stop using Gold, unlike PS+.

I could definitely add a new ownership status for subscription-based games, if that would help. I recently removed the Ownership Status filter since that field just wasn't being used, but it could be added back in (though I'm starting to run out of room :P)

For the various bundle sites, I could add in format providers (so equivalent to Steam, Origin, Desura, etc) for each of them (or at least the main ones?), which already has a filter and is hooked in throughout the site.

For the PS+ and Games with Gold, we could have multiple format providers, so there would be "PSN" and "PSN (PS+)" or something like that.

What do you guys think about any of those ideas?