What about a 'standard tags' list with just a bunch of the most common tags in a standard format?

eg: 16x16,32x32,DB16,Tiles,Dungeon,Sprites, etc.

then an box for 'other'

Maybe I missed a FAQ or something, but i have it my head that they're is not a lot of guidance for what to put in the 'tags' field.   I think it'd be cool to have a list of common tags that could expand over time.

I think having users up/down vote tags on submissions is a neat idea, but to be honest, I'm not sure how much use it would get.  

Look out for case sensitive differences: I think "LPC" and "lpc" are separate tags at the moment.

Personally I don't think the tag system is very useful and I could live without it; I find it far more useful if the search picks up keywords from the descriptive text. The reason I find it less than useful is that it is entirely dependent on what the author thinks to put in there, so searching for "32x32" may or may not be useful. The ability for other users to suggest or add tags to a submission might be able to fix that, but it's extra optional work, so it may not get done (and you still need to find the art before you can think to add a tag to it); it also needs to be moderated.

I think it's a good idea to rethink what the tags are for. Why have them in the first place? I think there are two distinct use-cases: to categorise art ("2D", "3D", "tileset", "sprite", "animated", "isometric", "32x32", etc.) and to add key-words that don't necessarily show up in the descriptive text ("house", "futuristic", "fantasy", "LPC-style", etc).

The first feature is partly served already by the check-boxes, and I would suggest merging it with that/expanding that one so you can add more fine-grained categories. If you allow users to specify their own categories you eventually get the same problem you have now (too many/random categories to be useful) but  you know someone will have a legitimate use for something that's not in there, so the extra information needs to be both generic and useful. I think that's doable, but not easy. For thinks like tilesets and pixel-art characters it would be good to have the base size ("32x32", "16x16") as a standard input box so it is easy to unify across entries. Perhaps have things like poly-counts for 3D models so it's easy to search for models up to a particular count (I don't know if this is too useful though).

The second idea, I think, is basically how tags work now. It's probably best to keep that as-is and simply accept that the usefulness might be limited, although if these are simply extra terms that the search looks for (as opposed to something that you can filter on) it's probably ok.

Ah, aren't ontologies fun?

To add my two cents, allowing spaces to separate tags is a mistake: sometimes you really do want a multi-word tag. Sure, you can smash the words together or use a dash... but that just makes things look less natural.

As for how to help people use relatively consistent tags, the way Ive seen it done elsewhere is tag auto-completion. That way you're invited, but not required, to share a common vocabulary with other users. All the advantages of folksonomies without any of the downsides.

Either way, keep up the good work, and thank you.

Improving the tagging system is certainly a good thing. Another art site recently moved to hashtags, though, quite the opposite direction as OGA. I think, given the growing popularity of hashtags, it might be a good idea, to hash all tags. But eventuall it doesn't matter at all if there is a leading hash or not (the site internals just can ignore leading hashes, the UI always show leading hashes).

Tag trees are a good idea, but most likely without a database that contains such semantics, difficult to curate. E.g. it's easy if you have a database that already has the "is a" relations. Entering them by hand will be very tedious. It's a good thing to have though.

Same goes for synonyms, but there should be databases readily available for that.

I'd say, for the time being, keep it simple. A well working search is top priority IMO, and once that is in place, tag trees and tag synonym handling can be thought about. So first, a good search, then, an elaborated tagging system.

now it seems ,that the comma does not work as separator anymore.

look here:

http://opengameart.org/content/game-concept-art-subland

As somebody that does use the tags these ideas sound good to me. The order of priority in the bullet point list sounds good, but I'd move the last two items up the list by a couple, or few, places.

Case ignoring seems like a good idea, as would be testing for, or just plain stripping, spaces, hypens, and underscores, and then testing if a tag is unique. 8bit, 8Bit, 8BIT, 8-bit, 8-Bit, 8-BIT, 8 bit, 8 Bit, 8 BIT, 8_bit, 8_Bit, and 8_BIT should probabl all be the same tag. (Not that all of the above tags exist, but they could, and probably shouldn't.)

They put quotes around the list of tags.  I removed the quotes and it worked fine.

 

that happened to my alien texture pack, i used spaces as seperators (i have edited the tags now).

but there is still the issue, that the textures are not shown in the "textures in this pack" area.

Great list of ideas. I might just add 'suggested tags' like in Youtube. E.g. if the submission is named 'dungeon tileset' then it'll suggest 'tiles' and 'dungeon' tags to the submitter. And if the text contains word music/tune it'll suggest 'music' tag.

> I think there are two distinct use-cases: to categorise art...and to add key-words

I think this is a pretty good point.  

Another way to phrase the same idea would be that tags serve to categorize submissions in two ways: 

1) technical specifications ('2D', 'sprite sheet', '16x16', '3D', 'Model', 'texture', 'png', '.blend' etc).

2) subject matter ('dungeon', 'sci-fi', 'town', 'characters', 'vehicles', etc) 

I'd say that for '1' you want a more uniform/consistent set of tags.   Whereas for '2', you very much want to take a more wide open approach.  

>  For thinks like tilesets and pixel-art characters it would be good to have the base size

> ("32x32", "16x16") as a standard input box 

This would be a 'sub' category field?   I do agree that something which presents a standard list of common formats (and palettes?) to submitters would be useful.