What are tags?

Tags are short one-word descriptions of items on boardgamegeek. You can use them to help you group times of interest together, both for your own use, and for the benefit of the whole site. For example, you might tag your favorite filler games as "filler," or Spiel des Jahres winners as "sdj-winner." Be creative!

What can I tag?

You can add tags to games, geeklists, images, files, and threads, for now. Other things may follow.

How do I add tags?

Click add tag on the page for the object you wish to tag. you can add multiple tags separating them by spaces.

Can I tag a geeklist I don't like with "geeklist-by-a-total-loser"?

Please don't. The rules from the forums about personal attacks applies to tagging as well. While there can be a fine line between negative but useful tags and abusive tags, anyone who regularly tags in a manner that we find to be abusive will have their tags hidden or removed.

Why would I want to add someone else's tags to my tags?

Next to every tag in the popular tags section and the all tags section is a +. Click the + will add that tag to your tags for that item. This serves two purposes: first, it lets you (and others) see that tag in your list of tags, and it makes the tag more popular. The most popular tags (which we hope will also be the most useful tags) appear on the main page for each object.

Can other people see my tags?

Yes. Tags are completely public.

What else can I do with tags?

You can filter on more than one tag--for example, you can view games tagged with both "sdj-winner" and "dsp-winner." You can probably come up with all sorts of other uses for tags.

Also, you will soon be able to filter your game collection based on your tags.

Is there any tag naming convention?

Not really. We recommend keeping them as short as possible, while still being clear. Most people use only lower-case letters in their tags. It is better to separate tags rather than make compound words - for example, tagging a game with two tags, "chess" and "variant" would be more useful than using one tag "chess-variant." Using the same tags other people have used will be more useful for everyone; if most people are using the tag "wargame", tagging items as "war-game" would not be very useful to others.

Can I duplicate information that is in categories and mechanics?

Yes. In fact, if tags work very well, there is some argument for eventually transitioning categories and mechanics to a tag-based system. If you find it useful to tag wargames as "wargame", even though that information is available elsewhere, feel free to do so.

This feature was re-introduced to the public on May 22, 2006.