bender83

1 hour ago, vetmode said:

It's not confusing unless it's shoved into newbie's faces. Putting/enabling it somewhere not easily accessible such as the settings would prevent new users from getting confused. That's why many other programs hide their more complicated features and settings in an "advanced" or poweruser expandable tab. Programming wise, an alias for tags would be extremely simple to implement. I'd do it myself if evernote was open source.

Exactly this.. seems to be this tendency in software development since the mid 00s to emulate Apple in every way, and by that I mean 'KISS' -making things accessible to the masses. Most startups bank on this because it's the only way to pull the revenue they need to stay afloat - problem is we end up with a bunch of programs forever catering to the lowest common denominator. I miss 'smart' software. What you've said I can't agree with more, hide it in an advanced section - enable 'advanced' mode and add all the (VERY EASILY IMPLEMENTED (programatically speaking)) features for those who want/need it. 

6 minutes ago, jefito said:

...But I decided to upvote anyways, because it is an interesting idea, and one I'd not thought of before. 

Appreciated

5 minutes ago, jefito said:

Now why haven't *you* added your vote yet?

Because OP can't upvote their own idea it seems!

4 hours ago, gazumped said:

Would Parent/ Child tags help sort that out?  If you stack the variations under one standard definition?  Then choosing the parent tag will (subject to settings) turn up all the child tags.

I'm also not against hierarchical tags, the downside is, as opposed to synonyms, they are, well, hierarchical - for searching purposes, a system that equates two tags would be better rather than ranks them - you still want to get the children from the parent and vice-versa. That said, I LOVE the idea of hierarchical tags - so then when I tag something "Pizza", it also gets tagged as "Fast Food".

9 minutes ago, jefito said:

I'm not wholly against this, and I kinda see the use case. I do like to use tags-as-vocabulary to describe how tags work, and languages certainly have synonyms. Hence the "meh", Now where do I register my "meh" vote?

Case in point, Jeff. You're an engaged user, and your vote is "Meh". How "Meh" do you think the non-engaged users are (positively OR negatively?). The vote system's a good start, but it still only engages a fraction of the user base, one that has mostly, for as long as I've lurked on the forums, given 'meh' responses to frequently requested features by more casual users (who tend to only show up when they feel like the product they regularly use, and increasingly fork out for isn't meeting their needs).

 

14 minutes ago, jefito said:

I want my tag vocabulary to be as small as it can be to describe my note content. Less is better than more sometimes. But that's a personal preference.

It certainly is: to me, more is more. I like to slap a lot of different labels on things, that's the benefits of tags over notebooks, that said, it means I end up tagging two different words with the same meanings, or plural/singular variations on two different notes. Let me search for one and get the other.

17 minutes ago, jefito said:

How is this handled in the case of shared notebooks? If I have a synonym for a tag that exists in my notes, is it also a synonym for the same tag in a notebook that's shared to me? I can see cases for both yes and no. Is a tag that's a synonym for my notes also a synonym for someone I share notebooks with?

Simple: Synonyms are local, they apply to all notebooks you have - if you share a notebook you have to define the associated tags - what the user does on the other end is their business. eg. Bob shares a notebook and has a note with "building" as a tag (the verb, for the purposes of this example), on his end "building" is synonymous with "construction". On your end, you see "building", but you may or may not have "construction" as a synonym - it doesn't matter- but 'building' will inherit the same synonyms that you have for "building". Not if you use 'Building' as a noun, you may get some odd matches - but it's not a hard thing to add an option for whether users inherit synonymous tags or not.  

 

Herein lies my problem with the 'upvote in a forum' system:

1) The majority of Evernote users don't visit the forum frequently.

2) The average engagement of those who DO occasionally visit, is minimal

3) Even when you find people, such as those who have commented in this thread, who 'don't mind' your idea, or like an idea similar to it, they still don't 'upvote' the idea.

To any E/N staff reading - search 'synonym' and you'll see this is not the first time this topic has been brought up. 

Just now, DTLow said:

I rarely type a full tagname; I start typing and a dropdown list appears and I select the right tag

I think some of my erroneous tags come from mailed in notes... which granted, won't help with synonymity, but at least can be sorted with things like plurality.

21 minutes ago, gazumped said:

Would Parent/ Child tags help sort that out?  If you stack the variations under one standard definition?  Then choosing the parent tag will (subject to settings) turn up all the child tags.

Yes - and I've brought this up before (prior to the new upvote system), that works too. Essentially it boils down to the specific 'unfuzzy' nature of tags as they currently stand in EN - there needs to be a more forgiving nature regarding tag names, and relationships between those tags. 

17 minutes ago, jbenson2 said:

To avoid confusion, I find it easy to follow my rules of tagging..

• singular case only, never plural
• lower case characters
• no space
• multi-words joined with a hyphen

 

 

I've heard people's rules mentioned numerous times, and although I'm sure it works,  I personally prefer to have the software work for me, not the other way around.  

Because it hasn't been mentioned since the new Product Feedback instructions, I'd like to bring up tag synonyms, as per Stack Overflow, it would be invaluable to define tag synonyms for words with a similar meaning, or plural/singular variations. It doesn't need to be an automated thesaurus, just a manual means of linking tags.