hear hear! lets just do away with all internet anonymity and we'll all go back to being "normal" :/

First, I strongly disagree that the "influx of jackasses as well as a mass exodus of useful folks" has anything to do with tag quality, even though I have witnessed (and even contributed to) said sad trend.

Second, it is anonymity that allows me to be normal, free from all the stupid restrictions I follow in society otherwise.

I "shitcock" is the right word to be said, then I am ****ing relieved to be able to ****ing say it.

Nice leap of faith there; bad assumption. Let me make it clearer.

The tags are representative of the influx of jackasses. The useful people post less. The tags are the indicator. The exodus of useful posters is more true than false.

Simply put. If this were a vintage coal mine, the birds will have flown away, the poisonous gases are mounting, people are oblivious to that and are too ****ing busy paying attention to semantics and other banal observations instead of looking at what is truly happening.

Tags are not the cause. They're the indicator of what's here now.

Savvy?

Just because you don't use them and/or don't know how they can be used doesn't mean it that every jackass should be allowed to use them for their own agenda.

Thank you all.
This thread did not disappoint

yeah, tags should be reserved for "better" people who have more important things to say! Like you, right? Get off your high horse.

Wrong.

Humor tags don't affect your searches one bit, as long as there are also relevant tags as well.

We've already had this debate, anyway. The sourpusses lost.

Better still,
an enumerated glossary on each profile showing the tags
each profile has used and in what frequency:

99 BrickFactory
15 cynic
13 cr@p
9 useless
2 @b0rtion

have a sense of humor anyways

I've commented about this before deep in another thread. Here's my opinion in TL;DR version:

Shitty and anal tags can be a problem. I've seen plenty of times when they're just indicative of someone self-righteous and oh-so-superior feeling like it's appropriate to voice something mocking/insulting. And as far as I'm concerned it is never good for unproductive dickery to be acceptable, no matter how little harm it does in that instance, because it's accepting a mentality that causes issues both in the real world and on the internet.

However, the degree to which anal tags are a problem varies with the usefulness of the post. There's plenty of times when these tags are mocking and self-supperior, but the OP/thread is really deserving of it, and/or the thread contains nothing useful. In practice, I realize that the above ideal of countering needless dickery doesn't actually gain much of anything by forcing significant tag moderation. The underlying problems (people being dicks when it's not a poignant way to express something, but just for the sake of it or for their amusement; the growing ratio of snide and hostile members to truly helpful ones), still remain.

I would be in favor of non-anonimization of the tags - you still have your nickname to keep you truly anonymous, and your IPs aren't publicly visible anyway. And if that's not enough there's Tor and being able to route your traffic through remote servers, etc. If someone has the skill to find you past that point, you're probably dealing with someone who's not interested in what you tagged a thread with.

But ultimately, I think it's really only an actual problem when threads with useful information get tagged with only uselessness indicating tags. And contrary to what Texrat's comment suggests, that does happen often. Not enough people add useful tags.

But I don't view it as enough of an issue to require admin attention. There's plenty of forum members who can edit the tags themselves (You get that ability after some post amount). Indeed, I've seen it in action on some threads, which I'm guessing wasn't all moderators/admins.

OMG people... Why are you digging too deep into it? They're just tags - how come some of the comments in this thread are longer than 5 lines?

Btw, I was concerned about the amount of funny tags this thread might have when I first read it, but was relieved to see that there is a sufficient amount of them