So, the powers that be at BCUK decided they wanted to change the tag system in an attempt to make us use them properly.
They want us to use short, concise tags to enable other users to find our posts more easily. And to be honest, in general, I do already, so their tag massacre hasn't affected me too badly. I lost a couple on my music blog, where some artists or tracks have long names, and there's not much I can do to shorten those to make them "improve the searchabilty" of my blog. I'm going to have to truncate words, which is certainly NOT improving searchability. My tag "Florence + theMachine" will not be linked with someone else's "Florence+ the Machine".
However, a lot of people don't use short, concise tags for no other reason than they don't want to. They want to tag their posts however they like and are not particularly bothered about other people finding their posts. They just want to be able to find them themselves. These people are understandably annoyed that their personal contents page has been disrupted.
This was a badly managed PR disaster. There was a post on the.blog.co.uk telling us that changes were imminent, but I for one do not read that blog regularly. The post was made on the 2nd, just two days before the changes were implemented. If this was such a vital change, BCUK should have told us their intentions beforehand via PM, giving users time to get used to the idea, and giving them the opportunity to amend offending tags.
This site is "made by us". We should have been kept properly informed of big changes like this.
