By mediafrenzy on

I'm considering introducing free tagging to my established site. I would like to have their submitted content categorized, as it is currently all jumbled together.

My concern is whether it is a good idea to allow freetagging, which will add potentially thousands of taxonomy terms. For example, their are already thousands of nodes of content, and this is continually growing. I would imagine that quite quickly there will be 100 terms or so, and due to the free tagging mode, this may continue to grow towards many hundreds, or a thousand over time.

Does this effect the performance of the site? I've only ever dealt with small numbers of admin created taxonomy vocab/terms before.

Are there other issues I should be aware of before enabling free tagging on a large site? Of course, I *could* try and create a set range of 20 categories for the users to pick one from.... but I feel this may be a little too restrictive.

Also - in regards to the thousands of existing nodes of content.... once I make free tagging "required", will these existing nodes have any problems? I'm assuming they'll be fine, and it would only be if they are edited at some point, that the free tagging requirement would be enforced to the user?

Thanks for any help.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

mediafrenzy’s picture

mediafrenzy commented

Any thoughts on this?

Cybergarou’s picture

Cybergarou commented

I can't really say anything about the performance issues of free tagging, though I suspect it can't be much worse than having thousands of nodes. I think maintaining the organization of the taxonomy would be a bigger issue. (Free tagging can produce a lot of variations of the same thing.)

Your assumption about the existing node behavior is correct.