Why are tags not in the advanced search?

Do you mean as a special search box? Or just in keyword search?

i didnt think the search used tags

Either/or, tags would be so much more useful if they could be searched. A dedicated box on advanced-search page would be a good start!

Exactly. At the moment, if I want to search for threads tagged with a word, lets say 'microsoft', I first need to find a thread that already has that tag - not always that easy if the tag is not a word in the title.

I find tags very useful (when used properly) and the ability to search for threads with a particular tag would be a useful adition to the site imho.

Edit - personally I think a dedicated tag search box would be more useful than lumping it together with the keyword search, but either would be good

Alternatively, you can add a "microsoft" tag to any thread, and then search it from that thread.
You then have to remember to delete it though.

There have been several threads with suggestions to make the tags useful though. I remember ducky had some good suggestions that included tag "clouds".

I also would like it if a member could see what tags they had used previously.

Another good idea would be having an auto-complete list appear when a user starts adding a tag (as happens when a username is entered in advanced search). Unfortunately this hasn't been implemented from the start, and with 75,000 tags there are no doubt lots that are very similar/redundant...

Well get the search bit fixed.

Agree that autocomplete would be good. We'd have to spend some time cleaning everything up though for it to work really well.

Filtering out irrelevant tags would be next to impossible I imagine - but you could start the 'autocomplete' with an empty list, which is populated with tags as they are searched for, added, or directly accessed...

Regardless, tag search will be very useful, thanks for looking into it

Excellent, thanks for listening.

I agree with jah on the autocomplete idea too

excuse me, while this is a great convo, what porpoise do tags serve now?

Porpoise?

if I create another thread and put the same tag as this one then the two threads will show up when I click the tag.

say a thread is about Tesco, someone will put Tesco as a tag, you click the Tesco tag and all threads about Tesco will be displayed.

a problem arises though when Tesco, Tescos or Tesco's is used