Topics tagging like VBSeo.

[haerde]

Hello,
SMF now beats phpbb, and almost beated vb and mybb scripts, but still in one, just one feature those scripts have advantage on your great SMF - topics tagging with random and manual created tags cloud. Please make asap this as basic feature or just write good modification. Then we'll be victorious on forum scripts battlefield .

[Kill Em All]

Like this?
http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=579

I have not used it, but considering its from vbgamer45, it should be really good.

[haerde]

yea, it's really ... bugged and useless.

[vbgamer45]

You are going to have to explain how their topic tagging system works cause we do not know what vbseo does

[haerde]

It's really simple. Mod takes some strong keywords from topic name and put them into topic tags and into tag cloud which is available on mainboard.

[Arantor]

How does it determine what the 'strong' keywords are?

[TheDisturbedOne]

They are the tags that are used more.

[Arantor]

I think we're talking at cross purposes here.

Are we saying it would promote most frequently used tags, or would it try and guess the tags from the body of the page?

[haerde]

Imo both mate. Tagging is very important in SEO, and last advantage of VB over SMF. We must implement this feature in SMF.

[Arantor]

So, obvious question: how do you pick the right words from the text automatically?

Do you pick the most common? No, because you'll get "the", "of", "and" first.

The least common? Probably not, because it's unlikely to be relevant.

There is, AFAIK, no algorithm that can pick the most relevant terms for a page without doing some of it by hand.

[haerde]

Mod also can take each word from subject and some random from post message but w/o adding two same words. In this 'style' works phpbb tag cloud and topics tagging.

[Arantor]

I can't see that ever being reliable, to be honest. That would - to my programmer instincts - produce even worse results.

[stefann]

It's really simple. Mod takes some strong keywords from topic name and put them into topic tags and into tag cloud which is available on mainboard.

I'm not sure how well this could work either, you'd have to have either a massive array of ignored words ('the','and','but','I') etc or still require somebody to add these tags for this to work.

The concept of automatically assigning tags from an already existing list of tags is not incredibly hard to implement itself, it's just not something that seems incredibly useful to most people, and as Arantor said is likely to provide really poor results.

[haerde]

It's hard to describe how it works. Imo at start i should have showed you code from other forum script. In the attachment is modification from myBB but it works like VBSEO. Catch link to thread about this modification: http://community.mybboard.net/thread-55796.html?highlight=tag+cloud . The author has explained a little bit how it works much better then i did.

PS. It has been made by polish php newbie based on tutorials, we'll make better .

[Arantor]

That works off the most frequent words in topics, barring some very common words as far as I can tell. I doubt it would actually be that good in SEO terms to be honest.

[haerde]

Arantor bro, trust me it works.

[Arantor]

Oh, it'll pick out words but I can't see it being useful in a typical forum with reasonable length replies unless you already have a lot of posts for it to examine.

[haerde]

Yeap, tag cloud is usefull only on big and medium forums to improve position in Google. True is sad, all forum scripts have tag cloud but not your lovely and great SMF - it's time to change it !

[stefann]

Firstly I'm not saying either myself or vbgamer will be doing it, and I don't speak for vbgamer, but if we did I suspect we'd want to do a better job of it rather than just ignoring words that are 3 or less characters long which appears to be how vbSEO works.

To do this properly would also mean it's a lot more work as it'd probably need to compare against a predefined yet customisable list of ignored words, registered usernames, and preexisting tags. Then to make it automatic for the user would require AJAX to parse the user inputted text for the tags it may choose to add.

Yes, I think it could be handy to automatically pick up tags already added to the tag database when they are used in the topic and perhaps body text, but I'm not sure that anything more automated is useful to the majority of users at this point. So, it's something that may be considered, but I expect it is unlikely to be in the next couple of releases as there are more pressing issues to address first.

[Arantor]

Thank you stefann for saying what I wanted to have said.