Couldn’t find a clear answer on this from googling Discourse, so I turn to the community: what’s the difference between a tag and a category? As far as I can tell from a user perspective, it seems like it’s this way:
Tags
Can be created by a user
Official tags cannot be applied by a user, only by an admin
Unofficial/newly created tags can be applied by a user
Posts do not need to have tags
Can be used to filter posts
Categories
Can also be used to filter posts
Exactly one category must be applied to a post
Users cannot create categories
Used to delineate topics/subtopics on the main page
Pls correct me if I got anything wrong here, just trying to figure out how best to participate.
Categories are like folders or subforums. They’re nested, and every topic is in exactly one category. Think about categories like the file system of the forum.
Tags are more like metadata. Each topic can have any number of tags, and certain tags are limited by a user’s permissions and certain tags can only be or must be used in certain categories. They organize across the entire forum, but they’re more flexible than categories.
From my understanding, categories are really just a special kind of tag that serves not only the purpose of helping categorize and label your posts, but also as a way to represent what the community is centered around or what it finds important (as you see in the sidebar, categories get a special menu to help you get around)
Ehhh, it looks like I’m actually not able to create new tags – the interface for tagging the post looked like I’d be able to type in a custom tag but when I tried it, it didn’t let me apply it to the post.
User-created tags are disabled in most categories to prevent tag bloat and to keep things tidy. Tags are organized into groups and those groups are assigned to categories to be specifically used in them, so having user-created tags would not make sense.
If you would like to request a tag group, feel free to make a topic for it in Meta!