[drupal-devel] Schema Changes for a Shared Taxonomy OTF/Folksonomy

[Julian Bond]

Ross Kendall <drupal at rosskendall.com> Thu, 10 Mar 2005 12:54:29
>The whole thing with a Folksonomy is that it's not 'controlled', good 
>terms float to the top because of popularity.  I don't think it's a 
>great idea to mix 'controlled' vocabularies with 'uncontrolled' ones, 
>as they are completely different approaches to organising content.  If 
>it's possible to get them working along side each other then great.

Two questions that arise.
- What should happen to terms that are no longer used anywhere? Should 
there be automatic garbage collection or perhaps Admin pruning?

- There's a fundamental difference doing folksonomy within Drupal from 
del.icio.us. Probably, only the author (and admins) can apply terms to a 
node whereas lots of people can apply terms to a bookmark. So bad terms 
don't get submerged in quite the same way as in del.icio.us.

There's a potential issue here with "tag spam". A malicious user might 
tag a node with all the most popular terms. That node will then appear 
(perhaps briefly) at the top in the pages for all those terms. There's 
quite a few scenarios where this will encourage the stupid to repost 
with thousands of tags repeatedly to keep their node at the top of every 
list. My solution to this is an admin variable "Max terms per post per 
vocab" of say, 10. Combined with spam controls to prevent creating 
identical or nearly identical nodes from one or more users.

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