Allow certain tags to be made public | Feature Requests

Allow certain tags to be made public

under review

Sarah Hum

Currently, tags are only available for team admins. Users should be able see them as well.

Weekly Worm

Hi Sarah Hum we would love certain tags to be public facing mainly as a filtering mechanism. We use Canny as an internal facing tool only at this stage, and would like a way for our staff (non admins) to be able to filter requests according to the different customer groups (in our case retailers eg. grocery or department stores) that they represent. Obviously a request can have more than one customer group asking for it so Categories don't work in this instance (plus we use these for our product areas). Votes don't quite catch it either as staff don't always represent just one customer group and similarly can only vote once. Tags is currently they only thing that makes sense and is what we are using on the Admin side for this purpose.
Problem: As a non-admin Canny user, I want to see all requests submitted on behalf of x customer group so that I can report back to them on the status/progress of their requests. 
So it would be great to expose certain tags for requestors to be able to add to requests and/or be able to filter requests by certain tags in the public facing Canny
Alternatively, a mechanism for public votes to be made on behalf of someone else who is not a user of Canny....

Sarah Hum

Hi Weekly Worm, we don't actually recommend using tags for this use case. I would suggest taking a look at our user segmentation feature. You would be able to send in custom fields about each user and segment feedback based on their customer group. Hope that makes sense!

Emerald Whippet

Just to add my voice to this. Often we group feedbacks into some supplemental categorisation associated with company projects. So whilst the category for a feedback may be: Data Management (talking to overall systemic position) it may be part of collective grouping (Super Project 2021). Allowing Users to be able to see that a feedback covers both the Data Management section of the system AND is part of Super Project 2021 will really assist searching. At the moment my only approach (as search doesn't cover comments) is to edit to main post with this extra grouping that I need.

Average Rabbit

Yes please!

Sarah Hum

Hi Average Rabbit! Can you elaborate on why you want public tags and why our Categories feature doesn't fulfill your needs?

Square Crane

Sarah Hum Is it planned to implement public-facing tags eventually, or is this request considered satisfied by Categories?

I would personally like to have public-facing tags as well as categories. Categories are exclusive of other categories, but tags may overlap. That functional difference is pretty important for me :-)

Sarah Hum

Square Crane: We haven't heard really compelling reasons to go with public-facing tags.

The functional difference is true and we support that on the admin side. Since you are an admin, you can set tags on a post internally. Why is it important that your tags are public?

Square Crane

Sarah Hum: Making tags public would improve searchability for users. That's the primary need.
Secondarily, it would allow users to do some of the work of managing tags themselves, rather than relying on us to decide how posts should be tagged, and what they mean.
Thanks for the reply :-)

Convinced Planarian

Sarah Hum: Hi Sarah! I just saw this thread and it is a potential solution to a request I just made here: https://feedback.canny.io/feature-requests/p/relate-feedback-to-objectives
Essentially, Tags can be used for all sorts of things, some of which I'd like the person submitting the feedback to at least be aware of (like Objectives). Ideally, the submitter would help me by choosing at least one! 
Another problem for which this could be a solution is "group". If I can't determine the group that a submitter is in from their metadata, I'd like for them to specify which group they're in so that I can filter on this. A group could be anything but in my case, I'd like to know which department within the organisation they work in. 
The point is, allowing the ability to make certain tags available (in some cases mandatory) to the submitter will cover a range of problems that you don't need to develop specific features for - at least in the short term! 
Over time, you could add "proper" support for Objectives, Groups and whatever anyone else is using "Public Tags" for. But in the short term, we can use these public tags to work around limitations in the product.
For me, an even better solution than public tags would be to allow custom fields on posts - with the option of exposing each to the submitter. That would be extremely powerful. Although I do agree that we need to keep the process of submitting feedback simple.
For reference, I'm using Categories to determine the type of feedback the person is submitting (competitor information, upcoming regulation, usability issues, feature request, etc).

Sarah Hum

Thanks for the feedback Convinced Planarian! Re: your "groups" problem, I want to make sure you know about custom fields on users. If you have this information stored somewhere else, you could pass that into Canny via our SDK. Then you can build segments based on that info and filter that way.

Happy Cricket

It would be good to include the ability for user to be able to filter by tag once they have been made public.

Sarah Hum

Hi all, we're considering releasing a different version of tags we'd call "Categories". They would be completely separate to tags and would be public facing.
– Categories are created by admins on a board level
– Users can optionally specify a category when creating a new post
– There is a limit to one category per post
– Admins can change a post's category at any time
– Admins can subscribe to the categories they care about to get those posts in their admin report
We'd love to hear your thoughts. Would this be helpful for your team? Please leave a comment or message us directly!

Ivory Mockingbird

Sarah Hum: Yey! Exciting to hear that a form of public-facing organization is coming! I'm really looking forward to this! I've tried to use tags, but just never really felt the value in doing it since it wasn't public facing. 
Almost all of my tags are features of my product. Personally, I'll probably stop using tags and just move all my tags into categories, since I prefer public-facing categorization. (Though I'm a one-person team, so maybe other teams find use in admin-only tagging.)
I think it will work pretty well for my use case, but I do see some minor issues I might run into with categories being public rather than tags. For example, I tag everything with a feature, and in some cases, I'll tag it with a platform too, such as "Web" to make it clear that it's a web-only feature request. This would be helpful for people who are wondering what features are coming to web. I might just put "[WEB]" in the title since the majority of posts are not platform-specific. 
There might be some posts that would fall under two features, but the majority should be fine fitting into one. I can probably fit them into the the more logical one if that happens.

Sarah Hum

Thanks for the thoughts Ivory Mockingbird! We're leaning towards one category per post for simplicity for your users. We find that the more complex we make it to give feedback, the less you'll get. We want to keep potential confusion to a minimum.

Lime Constrictor

Sarah Hum: Sounds really great! 👍🏻

Lime Constrictor

(Updated) This would be very appreciated. Categories and that admins is the only one being able to creat them sounds exactly what we need!

Teal Possum

I don't have a problem with this SO LONG as there's the option to do so. We do not want our end users seeing tags.

Andrew Rasmussen

Teal Possum: Hey Drew, definitely not to worry. If we do make improvements here, we won't all of a sudden make all your tags public. They'd stay private.

Fuchsia Cod

Would love to have this. It'll make things easier to group together for our clients.

Ivory Mockingbird

Would love this!

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