I'm really confused about how the whole "mojo" thing works here at DKos.  After a few years of commenting and diarying, you'd think TU status would be a given, but I've lost mine inexplicably.  Every day I comment.  Often I get a few 4s, and sometimes I get dozens.  Once in a while, I post a diary.  Just yesterday a single comment got 40-some-odd recommends.  Why am I not a trusted user?

Has anyone else had this happen?

[Update:  Hooray! I'm a TU again.  Thanks, everybody!]

It can't get much simpler than that, people.

Barack Obama, John McCain, George W. Bush

Note, also, the use of commas rather than colons or semicolons.

Coincidentally enough, the tagging tips are right there on the New Diary Entry page...

* does the dancing banana *


Okay, people.  Maybe I'm just extra cranky this morning, but I find myself blowing a gasket regarding site usage recently.  So my caffeinated self is going to lecture and admonish sternly below the fold. And you people had better listen!  

This is blogging, not Vietnam...there are rules!

; )

I just attended the annual Silverdocs international documentary film festival, an AFI/Discovery joint venture. Last year Al Gore attended with his film, this year in attendance were Wes Clark, Mike Gravel, Spike Lee, and Bela Fleck, among others. Great films, some reel(sic) eye openers i.e. Bulletproof Salesman, about an armored car salesman in Iraq, and IOUSA, about the national budget deficit. (Not to mention "All Together Now" about the Beatles/Cirque de Soleil Vegas production.)

The tag "troll diary" has been retired, for good reason. Why would you want to dig up garbage anyway? But like all good ideas, the banning of "troll" has created its own problems.

What do you do with a real, steaming pile of bs, the kind of thing that calls Obama a racist or HRC a bitch, for instance? Diaries have to have at least one tag. I've been tagging some of these "fantasy," but that is only a stopgap solution, since "fantasy" is as searchable as "troll."

So, to the admins on the site: can we have a tag that is by design unsearchable? One that will fill the tag slot, but not appear in any index, so that the garbage is not recyclable? Maybe "rubbish"? or "unspeakable"?

Help!  Help!  Help!

I have become walking wounded in the Tag Wars!

An annoying  trend has increased in these here parts that is pissing me off.  

It seems as if, when reading and commenting on a diary with which you disagree - either with the premise, with the way the premise is stated, or just with life in general - Tags have become the new line of attack.

Hi there!

I don't want to get anyone upset, and, yes, I'm a fascist, controlling, creativity-stifling SOB, (and sadistic, too, if anyone needs an unconventional dating experience...) but I'd like to ask that some of you pay a little more attention to tagging. Why? I'm glad you asked....

Tags are the kossian equivalent of the Index in the back of a book. Tags help organize the Daily Kos library. What's in it foru you? Tags help other people find your work. So, when November 5, 2008 rolls around, and [insert your candidate's name] wins, everyone can do a tag search, and find all the stuff you, and everyone else has written about your candidate!!! Or for all the machinations around the election, they can search 2008 elections, and see all the dirty tricks that [not your candidate] tried to pull. People writing diaries years from now will be able to find your wise counsel, in this most critical of times, if you take a moment or two to tag carefully.

My biggest problem with this site is it's lack of a tag search function so I set up a simple to use Campaign search engine that the front pagers should think about turning into a primary link on the main page.

Click here to start  

**UPDATE**  Please check back in tomorrow and give some love to the poor folks who could not make it during our little party here this evening.  Hi latecomers!  I saved you some cake.

As I said last week, this is for all those who are unable to chime in during the day.  I know many folks are at jobs that don't allow reading and or posting, but they would like to keep engaged in this community.  This is my humble attempt to give y'all a voice, feel free to use it for Mojo raves if you wish.  Today's topic is gratitude.  After the flip I will name some things I am grateful for, I'd love to hear yours.

If you are looking at this now, you are probably in the same boat I am in.  I work hard all day in my little cubicle, trying to put food on my family as best I can.  Some days I am pressed for time, some days are a little bit more relaxed.

But I do not feel comfortable participating in the back and forth that makes this site so vibrant.  Sure, I could probably log in and post something brief during my lunch hour, I don't think that is against the rules.  But it doesn't seem right to me.  

I can usually pop in and read the front page and a diary or two while on hold or waiting for a program to load up, I consider this place my substitute for the news sites.  If it is important, it will make it here pretty quickly.

So why this whine?  Why here, why now?  Meet me around the corner and I'll tell you all about it.

While processing a dump of historical dKos tags, I got to wondering if we have a diary covering every Senate and House office. To answer that I checked to see how many etags ("CA-12", "MA-Sen", etc) we have diaries for  and how many etags are missing. I threw Governors in the mix ("TX-Gov", e.g.) and found that of the 534 Governor, Senate, and House etags, we're missing diaries for only 16 of them. That's pretty good coverage, I'd say, greater than 97 percent of the races.

More...

Tags on Daily Kos are two years old today. They were announced by kos in this diary on Oct 10, 2005. Like all rambunctious little children given very free rein, tags have behaved very nicely and very badly, but on the whole it seems like a good idea to have brought them into the world.

So it's time to give them a little birthday present...

We - Markos and the site administrators - would like to introduce a couple of new features (or at least, new implentations of existing features) regarding tags, and also explain our new guidelines for tag usage and editing.

First, the new features. Ala Wikipedia, you'll now be able to see who has edited the tags to any given story. Scroll down to the bottom of a story and right next to the tags you'll see a link called "Previous Tag Versions." That will show you who edited the tags and what they modified. We think this transparency will help improve the tag system.

Also, we hope to soon swap out the "All Tags" link with a link to the Tag Search feature. Right now, the All Tags link shows you just the top 150 tags. It used to show all forty or fifty thousand tags on a single page, which wasn't especially useful, either. But the search feature lets you narrow in on exactly what you want, with ease. (Props to DKosopedia tag maven The Centerfielder, who built it.) Assuming we're able to integrate this feature properly, we'll make another announcement when it goes "live." But for now, you can use the search function by clicking the link above.

Now, on to the new guidelines. We know there's been some confusion and even unhappiness of late regarding tags, and in particular with how tags are edited. Part of the problem has been a lack of clarity from the site management, and today we aim to rectify that. It almost goes without saying that when you're exploring a new medium - as we've been doing every day for the past five years - there can be a bit of a learning curve. So without further ado:

1. Always err in favor of adding new tags, rather than deleting or modifying existing tags. Some folks have expressed concerns about the size of the tag database. In terms of server strain, we can assure you, there is no need to worry. (The tag db is comparatively very small.)

Our general principles behind this policy are two-fold. First, different folks have different ways of mentally categorizing things. That's the strength of a folksonomy, and by letting a plurality of tags bloom, we play to that strength.

The second reason is the flip-side of the first, namely, that individual tags have to be "allowed to fail." The tag system is not the Dewey Decimal System - it's not designed to be. On a site as large and free-wheeling as this one, it's almost certainly futile to try to enforce a rigid classification system. So it's okay if some tags only get used once. Other tags will "succeed' and be used many times.

If you would like to search for a particular tag, you can always check out the DKosopedia tag search tool here, or use the "Sort by Tag" feature found at the top of the Recent Diaries section of the sidebar.

2. Tags should generally only be modified when you see misspellings (eg, Gorge W. Bush) or obvious ambiguities (eg, George Bush instead of George W. Bush, to distinguish son from father). If an ambiguity is not clear-cut, please add a new tag rather than modify an existing one.

3. If a diarist chooses a particular tag that might be different from what you've chosen (say, "bellwether state" instead of "swing state"), please respect the diarist's choice, even if your preferred tag is in wider use. Feel free to add your suggested tag as well - just don't modify or delete the diarist's tags.

4. Tags should generally only be deleted if they contain abusive language (eg, "this diary sucks," "sh*t diary", etc.). We emphasize in the strongest of terms that these kinds of tags are completely unacceptable. The use of abusive language in tags will be treated as a bannable offense.

5. If you see a tag that seems to be completely out of place, please post a comment asking for clarification (there might be a good reason for it) rather than deleting it.

6. Don't use the "troll diary" tag, or any variant thereof, when you think a diary is trollish. Tags are designed to help folks search for information. There isn't a need to be able to search for alleged "troll diaries" - the administrators have many tools at our disposal to find trolls, and this one is not necessary. It also creates needless flamewars and thread hijackings when people disagree over whether a particular diary is, in fact, a troll diary. (Obviously, if a diary is discussing the issue of troll diaries, then this tag might be appropriate.)

We will do our best to answer any questions you might have in comments.

If you have ever wondered what a Tag Librarian is, how to become one, what we do and why, this is the diary for you.  Recently, a few diaries were posted by sardonyx trying to give some guidance on the ins and outs of tagging.  The comments in these diaries have sometimes diverged into the topic of Tag Librarians and their role and function on this site.  Since this appears to be a topic of some interest, I thought I would take it upon myself as a Tag Librarian to try to explain who we are and what we (try to) do.  This discussion came to me as a Socratic dialog between myself and a hypothetical user.  I'm not trying to claim that these are real questions posed by a real user, but rather I think they are representative of some of the questions and concerns I have seen that need to be addressed.  

To be clear: I am only speaking for myself, not for all Tag Librarians and these user questions are solely my own creation.

Kossacks delight in humor. Be it snark, parody, pun, satire, farce, or so many other forms, we can't seem to resist it.

I'm one of those who indulges, perhaps to excess, but there is one place where Daily Kos and I draw the line: cutesy tags.

Cutesy covers a lot of ground ("...say, you cover a lot of ground yourself: you'd better beat it, I hear they're going to tear you down and put up an office building where you're standing...")—in fact, it covers most of the forms of humor discussed above. And none of that ground should be in your tags: not that dread example in the tagging tips and FAQ explanation—"Hunterrific"—and not a tag like "Number Crunch A Go-Go", which is gone-gone as of yesterday. Why?

When you tag your diary here on Daily Kos, you are generally tagging in any of three areas: people, election races, and issues.

People should be easy: first and last names, plus middle initials if there are at least two people in politics with that name. We can all agree that there are far too many George Bushes, for example. Never, ever, ever use only a last name as a tag. It's the most common mistake in tagging.

Some taggers feel impelled to include a person's role in life or politics—their title—in the tag: Senator Ted Kennedy, Rep. Kucinich, Cardinal Roger Mahony, General David Petraeus, Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner.

Or they get creative: The Great and Powerful Kos, Lieberbunny, Falafel O'Reilly, etc.

There's a major problem with this: titles change. Rep. Bernie Sanders is now Sen. Bernie Sanders. If used as tags, both refer to the same individual, one who happens to have changed job titles in January 2007. The tag is about the person, not the role: that's why the tag should be Bernie Sanders.

2014 new users signed up for accounts on Daily Kos in the past week, and 1965 the week before that. That's a lot of people who are just now starting to write diaries and even more who will be eligible to do so as the week progresses.

Once you've written that first diary, you want to publish it—but there's this big Tags box you have to fill out first. It says,

Add keywords that describe this Diary (required). Separate multiple keywords with commas. Tagging tips.

Have you ever clicked on that Tagging tips. link? Why not? It has good information. If you haven't yet, do it now.

Tags are one way people reading the site can find your diary once it has scrolled off the Recent Diaries list. Whether you're writing about a House race, the economy, a tainted lobbyist, or domestic spying, a good tag is like a cross-reference in a card catalogue.

There's a bit more to tagging, though, and experienced diarists—even front-pagers—don't always get it right. Keep reading past the flip for basic tagging Dos and Don'ts.

The daily countdown to this August's YearlyKos Convention in Chicago is almost to single digits, and diaries are multiplying by the day. So, alas, are the tags for this event.  Here's the only one you should use for the convention itself: YearlyKos 2007

Never use YearlyKos by itself, or as two separate words with or without the year, or various odd abbreviations involving a Y and K and maybe other letters and/or dates. Nearly 500 diaries have led the way: please use YearlyKos 2007

If you're also talking about the city where this year's convention is located, add "Chicago"; I can't imagine "Illinois" is necessary unless you're talking specifically about the state as a separate entity.

More YearlyKos 2007 tagging goodness over the flip. Ready? Flip!