The blog.co.uk Blog: News, tips and more.

Dear bloggers,

UPDATE: The tool to rename your deleted tags and thereby restore them will be available beginning of next week (most likely Monday, November 9th 2009).

Firstly, we would like to apologise for the inconvenience caused to you by the recent changes to the tag system. We realise that simply deleting the affected tags was a heavy-handed way of approaching the issue. We would also like to apologise for the fact that many of you received a section of the mail in German -- we appreciate that such a clumsy oversight only adds to the frustration that you were probably already feeling.

Following the reaction of many users towards the changes, we have come up with a solution to the issue that we feel is a sound compromise between the necessity for the changes and your desire to have your own personal tagging method.

We are working on a new tool which will allow you to replace these invalid tags with new valid ones all in one go (ie, you won't have to replace them all individually). This means that you will be able to easily re-index your blog posts. When this function is online, you'll be notified on your 'My blog.co.uk' page.

The reasons for the changes are complex, but simply put, the changes will improve performance and allow blogs to load faster.

For example, every tag 'creates' two new webpages -- one on your blog, one on BCUK.

So if you tag a post with 'life' and 'love', this creates six new pages (because each is also a page for all the entries all over BCUK tagged with 'life' and 'love'). As you can imagine, when one factors in the variety of combination sites possible when a large number of tags are used, it very quickly puts our platform under strain -- even as few as fifteen tags creates around 500 new webpages. We need to make this change now, in order to ensure that your blogs can be accessed at high speed.

As for tags with more than five words being deleted, this was simply because statistics have shown that five words are not necessary, and only a minute percentage of the total tags on BCUK consist of more than five words. So if you had a tag 'eternal sunshine of a spotless mind' deleted, then you can simply replace it with 'eternal sunshine spotless mind' without decreasing its visibility to search engines in any way.

We hope that this explanation has made it a little clearer why these changes were necessary.

We apologise once more for the annoyance caused, and wish to assure you that in the future, we will make a much bigger effort to make forthcoming changes to the BCUK platform more visible to all users.

Thanks,
your BCUK team.

Dear bloggers,

You can tag posts, blogs, profiles and media, and in the very near future, there will be a few changes to the tag system to make it even better.

Soon tags will be completely 'international' - you'll be able to use characters from other languages in tags, as well as numbers and other symbols. Pretty much everything will be useable as a tag, except HTML code. Tags will soon have to be at least two characters and could potentially consist of up to fifty, as well as up to five separate words.

They will also be displayed exactly as you enter them, and to allow our system to process all the new tags, special characters will not appear alongside the letters, numbers and hyphens in the URL of the blog post.

User tags and Interests will be limited to 150 tags, and posts, groups blogs, normal blogs, friends and designs will be limited to a maximum of fifteen tags.

Unfortunately, old tags that do not fulfill the criteria mentioned above will be deleted. If the changes affect any of your tags, you'll receive a Private Message from us informing you which ones have had to be deleted.

As always, feedback is more than welcome.

Your BCUK team.