Tags, the best way to use?

[TheAdminMarket]

Hello,

I'm wondering which is the best way to work with Tags. It's not vBulletin specific but for all scripts, that's why I'm posting it in this forum.

At least as I know there 2 types for using Tags.

1.- First the user can adds any word he thinks that is more important to work like tag. This has the advantage the freedom of choice, the disadvantage of the big amount of tags. In addition is a common problem when there are typos in the tag.

2.- Admin adds the tags and the user selects one or more from those predefinied tags. The advantage is a compact amount of tags, errors free. Disadvantage that is almost impossible for the admin to add even 70% of the words that a user maybe wants.

Does anyone has experiance on what method other scripts (Forums or CMS like WP, Joomla) etc are using?

Thank you

[HM666]

There is also a tag mod on here that automatically selects tags for the thread based on the content. So that is another way of doing tags.

[Princeton]

if you go with option #1 or HM666 option you will end up with a lot of crap over the years ... to clean up this crap you will end up with 2 options: 1) delete all tags or 2) manually go through 30,000+ tags and remove the crap tags

if you use Tags appropriately it can help with SEO - if not, you will end up hurting your SEO efforts

[RichieBoy67]

Yeah, I never do auto tagging. They end up being crap. Just add them yourself when creating threads or let mods do them. otherwise you get crap tags that are worthless.

[HM666]

Hey now guys did not say I was doing that or even going to do that He wanted options, its one of them.