Tagging Along
Introducing the Tagalogue
2026-03-29, by DrFriendless featuresusers
I’ve recently been writing some pages which help users to discover new games, or rediscover old ones. The Discover page, for example, but also the Designers page can remind you of old games you’d like to come back to, or new games that you’d like to try. We currently have two nieces who live nearby, and I’m on the lookout for games that I can play with them, or games that I will be able to convince my wife to play with them. When I’m reminded of such a game I’d like to be able to tag it to be able to find it later, e.g. in preparation for a games session.
This led me to the concept of a convenient popup to tag games. This popup would not ruin the visual simplicity of the site, but would be available when I needed it - in hindsight, it would be something like Spotify’s “Add to playlist” feature. But then the next question would be, where would such a list of tags come from? And so was born a new page called the Tagalogue.
This is of course a play on the name “Tagalog”, which is a native language of the Philippines. As the page is some sort of catalogue I could have called it a “Catalogue”, but I like dogs better than cats so it could have been a “Dogalogue”. But the page contains neither cats nor dogs, it contains tags, so the Tagalogue it is. Yes I know it’s silly, but it’s not like Philip II of Spain did much to deserve having the Philippines named after him either.
The Tagalogue is the place where you define tags, and where you can see what tags are on what games. Of course the next thing you would like to do after that is to retrieve a list of which games have which tags, but that opens up a whole nuther problem - you’d also like top constrain that search to games you own, or maybe you’d like to find games which have two particular tags. That’s the problem that selectors solve (as blogged about in the distant past), and indeed the ability to search using custom selectors is a problem I need to solve.
So I realised there were two pages involved, and that the searching page should use tags and other selectors, and that page will be called the Catalist. Because “dogalist” isn’t even a word. As of writing this post, the Tagalogue is working and the Catalist is not yet started.
The Users Menu
These pages appear under the Users menu. So at this point, let’s go over what’s in the Users Menu, as it keeps evolving.
The Users page (accessed by clicking on the word Users, that’s not just a menu name) is where you can configure your buddy groups and default games, as well as view what data I store about you. I think maybe next time I add some more configuration options I will split that into two pages.
The Privacy page is just my privacy promise to you guys - not because I think you want one but because I think all sites should have one!
The Advice on Passwords link is a link to a blog post where I tell you why it’s bad that you reuse passwords, because that’s an important message that cannot be repeated enough.
The Updates page is where you go to tell Extended Stats that it hasn’t downloaded all of your data properly, or that you went back and added a bunch of plays from last year that it hasn’t found.
The Tagalogue is where you go to manage your tag groups, and thus what tags you have. You can also quickly turn on / off tags for games.
The Catalist (which doesn’t exist yet) will be where you can create customised searches and (hopefully) manage the contents of the selector combos on the feature pages. It will be like SQL for board games, won’t that be fun!? 🤨
The Tagalogue
This is a screenshot of my Tagalogue page, now that I’ve been doing some tagging for a few days. At the top we have a selector combo, then a tag group section, then a tag group editing section. I have 3 tag groups, called “Play with”, “Why own?” and “Misc”. Their headings look like buttons because you can click them. When you click a tag group name, that tag group is placed in the tag group editor.
Note that some of the tag names are emojis. I discovered by accident that that sort of worked, and then I made sure that it worked properly. How cool is that?!
You can see the box and button there to add a new tag group. When you create a tag group it will be put into the editor and you can add tags to it. You’re allowed to add the same tag to more than one tag group. You can remove a tag from a tag group if:
- no game has that tag (in which case the tag will be grey)
- some other tag group has that tag.
When a tag group is in the editor, the tags from that group will be displayed for all of the games in the game list.
The games in the game list view are chosen by the selector at the top of the page. In this view, you simply click on a tag to turn it on or off for the given game. Your changes are saved immediately. And that is really all there is to the Tagalogue.
The Tag Pop-up
So that is very nice, but the objective we started with was to be able to note games found elsewhere on the site (whilst not disturbing the Spartan style). To that end, once you’ve defined some tags, you can start to use the tag popup. This is a feature that I have to add to pages, and currently it has only been added to the Designers page and the Discover page. I haven’t yet made integration of it as simple as I’d like! But anyway it looks like a little tag that appears to the right of a game’s name when you hover the mouse there.
If you click on that tag, you get a list of all of your tags, and you can choose one to turn on or off. Note that each tag only appears once even if it’s in multiple tag groups, because it’s the same tag.
Well, that’s all there is at the moment. Stay tuned for the next exciting feature, which had better be the Catalist!
