Tags

Tags are text labels you can add to a story that help categorize stories by content or category. Clicking the tag icon will open a text field for tagging. Type in a tag, then press the space bar. Repeat for all tags you'd like to add to the story.

Note: Adding the same tag more than once does not increase its weight; once is enough. You might, though, tag a story about Western Digital hard drives "wd," "westerndigital," and "storage," or a story about an MIT programming contest "programming," "competition," and "mit." Tags help sort stories, and help you search for related ones. More tags help!

Everyone can see them! Tags are public and flexible (rather than private and permanent). So one day, we might consolidate and change all "canine" tags to "dog," say, or define new system tags and usurp more namespace. (Don't say we didn't warn you!) Because tags on Slashdot are public, and are used to inform the moderation system, tag abuse can hurt your karma. Please tag in good faith.

• Tags should be all-lowercase; leave out punctuation and spaces—a space is used to enter multiple tags. So use "bigbrother," not "big brother."
• Numbers can appear but can't be first. Smoosh them together: "usb3," not "usb 3."
• For the opposite of a tag, prefix it with "!," e.g. "!funny" means "not funny."
• Keep your tags brief (64 characters max).

Certain tags trigger alerts to the editors, which means there are a few cases where we poach the namespace a bit. Just a few, for now:

Dupe

Use "dupe" when a Slashdot story is an actual duplicate of a previous story, offering no new information. This alerts the editors, but is generally only useful when the story is in The Mysterious Future.

Typo

Use "typo" when a story writeup has spelling or grammatical errors, or bad HTML (like a malformed link).

You can see some of the most popular tags at slashdot.org/tags. (You can see your own tags by visiting slashdot.org/my/tags.)

For any tag, you can see the stories it's been applied to by going to slashdot.org/tag/$tag (replace "$tag" with the term you're curious about). It's fun just to poke around!