Imported tags are case-sensitive, creating duplicates

[Alex_Pasternak]

@Erica, I’m glad you’re thinking in-depth about this implementation. I think there’re lots of ways to explode this feature to make it more complicated, such as allowing some preference to control display, allowing user to rename tags for custom display and storing that, etc.

But from looking at my (rather large) list of real tags, I would be 100% fine with them being all lowercase. None are longer than a few words, and this would not lose their readability. The huge win would be combining dupe ones. I obviously don’t know about others’ data.

If you do go with the “1st usage sets display” approach, clicking the tag already shows you its instances (well, kind of), so a user would see right away where the top hit came from.

Another easy approach I can think of is a hover tooltip over the tag that shows found variations. This is more informative without a lot of new UI. You could do this both for lowercase and 1st use approach. E.g., I hover over #codecoverage and it shows me that it found #CodeCoverage, #codeCoverage. These could even have their own sub-counts, so the user could decide which one should “win” if they do manual cleanup (though I wouldn’t care about this).

[Alex_Pasternak]

Just to echo what I said on another thread, a good guideline on hashtags is “What would Twitter do?” There, tags and mentions are unambiguously case-insensitive.

• Linking to #sharesomegreatnews still finds the common tag (just to pick a random trending one)
• Twitter is not confused when I mention @eriCA instead of @Erica, and will go to that person

[Erica]

Yeah I agree, we never thought tags should be case sensitive, it was somewhat from the laziness when implementing tag pane. We went through the thought process above and decided to just show them separately.

So yeah, they should’ve been case-insensitive if we had sorted out this issue back then.

[Alex_Pasternak]

Are you saying it’s too late now? It doesn’t seem so! And also, tag auto-completion seems an even more important area than tag pane for daily use.

[Erica]

No that’s not what I meant, I meant that we knew tags should be case insensitive from the beginning (we use Twitter too and we know how it should work), but because we didn’t sort out the issue we discussed here back then, it wasn’t properly handled. It’s an explanation for the status quo, if you want to think of it that way.

[Morgan_Newall]

Exact same issue I’m still asking about (with no reply), here: New Tag Pane feature seems to have broken autocomplete capitalization of previous tags (Bug on ticket fixed, yet the same issue as here, was not).

Pls update - what’s progress and position on this issue at Dynalist HQ?

EDIT: For clarity, here’s the latest I added on other ticket:

New Tag Pane feature seems to have broken autocomplete capitalization of previous tags

Heya, I’m still seeing this issue.

EDIT: as in the Capitalised Tags vs lowercase tag duplicates:

Tags list shows:

#CONTENT

#content

There was discussion about fixes, any progress?

It’s actually broken the use of tags for me in DL, since coming from Workflowy, and I’d really like to use again.

You mentioned above examples like PhD, and how to handle.

IMHO lowercase should be standardised, i.e. ‘phd’ in tag list is correct, as it’s a tag.

Yet in context should have whatever caps u choose, as per Workflowy.

[Erica]

Pls update - what’s progress and position on this issue at Dynalist HQ?

Sorry for the late reply, we have been in the middle of an office move recently, and started replying to the piled up forum threads in the past few days. The order is a little random, and I’m sorry it hasn’t gotten a reply yet.

I’ll reply to the issue under your own post.

[Morgan_Newall]

Pls keep it here/merge - this bug is the exact same issue (other was not)

[Erica]

“other was not”?

Would you prefer me close the other one as a duplicate?

[Morgan_Newall]

Yes, detail here, you already closed other ticket.

[Morgan_Newall]

On top of the details listed, the search results don’t even return the Case-Sensitive tags, they return ALL case-insensitive tags. So, cleaning up the mess of tags that I’ve needed to clean up for over a year now just got even more painful .

Can we please get a confirmation - is anything happening with this?
If so, eta?

[Erica]

rename

Do you mind telling me what you’re trying to clean up here? Are you trying to merge “#msg” and “#Msg”?

[Morgan_Newall]

That’s right, along with many other tags.

It occurred to me that a case-sensitive find and replace would also resolve this issue.

As an aside, not a DL issue, any suggestions on deleting duplicates?

[Morgan_Newall]

merge “#msg” and “#Msg”?

Am I missing something, is there existing merge functionality?

[Erica]

Something like that – for tags under “Document tags” (not for “All tags” yet), you can right click, select “Rename” and rename it to another case-sensitive tag.

I tried renaming “#Msg” to “#msg” and it seems to work.

[Morgan_Newall]

Right, didn’t know, yet mine are over multiple lists.

That does cut down some time though, thanks

Any updates in other regards, perchance?

[David_Eiffert]

Hi there! New pro user here. Any update on this? I tag keywords inside sentences, and sometimes the tagged word is at the beginning of the sentence so it’s capitalized - “Tag” vs “tag”.
I know I can rename the tag to make them all lower case, but then those sentences will begin with a lower case letter, which is problematic when exporting.

[Shida]

I believe the biggest difficulty we encountered in the past (if you read up the discussion) is that we’re unsure how to display the merged tags.

For example, if you have #someTag, #someTAG, #SOMETAG, and #sometag, which one should be shown in the tag pane?

[David_Eiffert]

I would think showing them all lower case would be fine for the majority of users. Unless someone is using “Tag” and “tag” for different things (which seems odd), displaying them however would be fine. Just nice to not have duplicates.
Appreciate all you guys do!

[Shida]

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen quite a few that use multiple words in #TitleCase format, such as #SomeProjectName. We’ve been discussion if the best way would be to find the highest occurrence format and use that one instead, but we’re also concerned about any performance impacts for doing so.