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

Joker: 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?

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 :-)

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).

Thanks for the feedback Russell Cooper! 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.

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.

Thanks for the thoughts Dan Leveille! 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.

Sarah Hum: Sounds really great! 👍🏻

Drew Libin: 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.