Guide to the Tagging System

written by Ondo, update by SoulLink

Tags are a quick way of organising your world's articles and, unlike categories, you can have multiple tags in a single article. However, tags don't appear in the homepage like categories do, meaning they can't replace categories.

Usecases for tags

Tags are a way to organize articles and other resources within your world beyond categories. When starting out just using categories for your organization is more than enough.
You should be using tags when you are trying to find a group of related articles which are not in the same category in your world. This can also be the case for your readers or players.
However, it makes sense to take some time to plan out your tags if you use them. It is easy to get lost or add tags with typos. The best way currently to maintain your tags is to use an interactive table, some kind of sheet, or your World Anvil Notebook.

Creating Tags

A list of tags is always separated by a comma. In the shown interfaces the comma can be inserted with the ENTER key as well. Tags can be added to most other resources on World Anvil like Timelines, Historical Events, Maps and Images. This way they can be found with the same searches as the articles.

Conventions

Conventions are useful to make sure you can remember your tags and that they work properly in all situations. Keep in mind that these are not requirements.

• A common convention is to use a hashtag (#) prefix for all tags. But it is not necessary to do so. Just make sure to either always add a hash or never. However, when the tag is present it is always needed in any BBCode that require a tag as input like the [tagged], [taggedblock] and [diplomacy] BBCodes.
• Do NOT use spaces within your tags.
• Use a common writing convention:
  • CamelCase
  • hyphen-case
• Avoid any special characters and diacritics.
• Tags are case insensitive.

Using Tags

Tags can be used in several different ways. How you plan on using them will affect how you create them and apply them to your articles.

List of Tagged Articles

However, the [tagged] BBCode offers an easy and flexible way to create a list of articles in your world. The syntax of the tag is:

[tagged:TAG|TYPE|HEADER]

This is how each parameter works:

• TAG: this is the tag you want to list.
• TYPE: use this to choose whether you want the list to be plain links or formatted article blocks. Type list for the former and block for the later.
• HEADER: type the header of the list here. If you don't want to display any header, type none.

For example, [tagged:water-spell|list|Water spell book] will generate a list of plain links with all articles tagged as #water-spell, and generate a h1 heading with the text Water spellbook.

NOTE: Tags are matched to any tag that is the same or just contains the tag as long as it is an exact match. For example, the BBCode [tagged:train|block|Trains!] includes all articles with any of the following tags: #train, train-station, #trains and monorail-train.

User search

The search bar on the cover of each article can search tags in addition to titles. One search can always only match a single tag and the full search phrase must be present inside that tag. Don't search using the # prefix character.

Author Search

Any resources with a tag can be searched in the global search bar (Guild members only), in the Articles & Categories search bar and on the World Dashboard. This search works the same as the user search with additional functionality designed for the world author.

Diplomacy Web

Organizations can be displayed in a common diplomacy web using tags.

Special CSS Class

All tags are added as CSS classes to each article they are used on. The CSS class is prefixed with tag-. You can use this to apply a set of special layouts to specific articles. This does not work if the tag contains any spaces.

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FAQ

Is it possible to search an article with several tags?

No. You can only search for one specific tag. An article tagged with #humanoid and #dwarf will not show up if you search "humanoid dwarf".

Is it possible to use boolean logic to combine tags?

No. Every BBCode element which uses a tag as input can always only process a single tag.

The tagged & taggedblocks BBCode can at most return 150 articles.

Using tags with statblocks

You can also use tags with RPG blocks. While editing a block, go to the bottom of the page. There, you will find a Tags field that you can fill with your tags of choice. Then, you can use the [taggedblocks:TAG|TITLE] tag to create a list of blocks with that tag. For example, [taggedblocks:humanoid|Humanoid Creatures] will create a list of all blocks tagged as humanoid with a Humanoid Creatures header.
For more information on RPG blocks, read the guide to blocks:

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