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It has come to my attention that the blogs on Dakka are becoming increasingly numerous and it would be nice to have an easier method of finding blogs that interest me and I am sure that there are many others who feel the same way.

My idea was for an area where a member would be able to see a selection of blogs (and maybe even painting showcase) based on what they had already exalted/commented upon. It could perhaps be achieved by means of tagging an entire blog with either generic or specific terms ie: terrain, conversion or space marine. This section could even include a little picture of the latest image the owner of the blog had posted much like on the main page.

Now I understand that this is no simple little addition to the site but I always get the feeling that I am missing out on some really amazing blogs on the site simply due to there being so many of them these days and a way to filter through them would be fantastic!

Cain

I agree on this. Topic names can often be misleading as well.

Tags would be helpful yes, though I don't know to what extent such a thing can already be carried out through the existing search tool. I rarely gander at the sub forum just because there's so many 40k blogs that I can't be bothered sifting through them for something else interesting (*cough post apocalyptic stuff).

Ah yes the search tool is all well and good but its downfall is that it searches for posts and not blogs, thus resulting in the first three pages of results coming only from the 10 or 20 "major" blogs out there. Tags would give the smaller and less frequented ones to show up as well. Tags would also help to create mini sub-sections in the P&M area without splitting the whole thing up too much.

What I'd like if you could search just for separate threads. As far as I can tell the current system throws up every post from a thread. I'd like if just the first post from a thread could be shown instead, but yes, tags would be helpful (I seem to recall the matter being discussed in another thread here some time ago though).

 Commander Cain wrote:
It has come to my attention

This is how every thread should start

I agree with tagging. Specifically, I'd love it if there were a radio button style selection for picking your army, and having that automatically either append or prefix army name, like "Sisters of Righteous Indignation [40K SOB]. It would be neat.

It also would be sort of unworkable. I mean, Warmachine and 40K alone would mean you'd need, like, 30 tags; that's going to look super cluttered. Perhaps you have a different way of implementing it?

 Ouze wrote:

 Commander Cain wrote:
It has come to my attention

It also would be sort of unworkable. I mean, Warmachine and 40K alone would mean you'd need, like, 30 tags; that's going to look super cluttered. Perhaps you have a different way of implementing it?

Instead of choosing from a list you could add your own tags, like on pictures.

For the wide range of posts that are covered in P&M Blogs, I think a tagging system would quickly become rather unweildy.

What I could see being handy though is if the thread mouseover in the forum index could show a popup of the last image posted by the OP in the thread... That way you could just skim down the page looking for cool images to find the threads you're likely to be interested in.

That's a great idea! Annoyingly good actually, wish I had thought of that...

I'm not sure how tagging would be that tricky to control though, I imagine it working much like the gallery which must have a plethora of variety as well. For example, I searched Horus Heresy into the blog section and gallery and got very different results. The forums have either passing remarks toward the event or blogs that have the name in their title. The gallery however comes up with much more variety (including some of my pics which must have been tagged by someone else) and many of these pictures lead to blogs that didn't show up on my forum search.

In short though, it would just be nice to have a forum search that comes up with less randomized searches to make it easier to find new blogs that may be of interest to the average browser of Dakka.

 Commander Cain wrote:
I'm not sure how tagging would be that tricky to control though, I imagine it working much like the gallery which must have a plethora of variety as well. For example, I searched Horus Heresy into the blog section and gallery and got very different results. The forums have either passing remarks toward the event or blogs that have the name in their title. The gallery however comes up with much more variety (including some of my pics which must have been tagged by someone else) and many of these pictures lead to blogs that didn't show up on my forum search. .

The problem is that it relies on users actually adding tags. In the gallery, this is done partly by the people uploading their pictures, partly by other people adding tags while they view the gallery, and partly by the gallery mod as he does his rounds... and there is still a lot that gets missed. Adding the same functionality to the Blogs section would essentially just duplicate this task.

It does sound like a great idea but it would probably cause a lot of extra work.

If blog creators use simple searchable phrases in their titles then it isn't so much of a problem.

Perhaps a sticky at the top of the P&M forum?

 Medium of Death wrote:
Perhaps a sticky at the top of the P&M forum?

We have a sticky in 40K General telling people to post rules questions in YMDC, and stickies in P&M Tutorials and News & Rumours telling people to not post questions in those sections... and we still have to move threads that ignore those instructions on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, people just don't read stickies.