adding a tag - how long before it appears in a tagmash

Hi, I use my initials as a "unique" tag for all the books on my tbr, so when I am looking for something to fit a theme, I can use my initials + the theme in a tagmash. (Not as unique the past couple of years, as someone else is now using the same three letter combination! But I can still easily pick mine out.)

Anyway, I have convinced a few other people to give this a try. One of them has added her unique tag, but the tagmash isn't finding anything for her.

Does it take time for the tag to register before it will find it in a tagmash? If so, does anyone know how long it takes?

She has confirmed the tag has been added to her books.

I do know that it takes time for a book to disappear in a tagmash once the tag has been removed (I've noticed this after I've read the book and removed my initials tag).

So, I wondered if this was why nothing has (yet) come up when she tries her tagmash.

Thanks so much!

Can you give an example of what's not working? I can find books with the csw tags when I tagmash csw with things like memoir. What tagmash is your friend trying and what is it supposed to find that it's not?

I think it depends on when tags are indexed site-wide, which isn't done often, every few months or so.

>2 reconditereader: csw is fine! Those tags have been in there for years as I use this trick. (I was just mentioning it here as an example of what I've suggested she do to find what's on her tbr using her unique tag + whatever other tag she is looking for.)

It's a friend's tag. I think she just joined in the past few days and added her tbr with a unique personal tag.

I've given her instructions on using a tagmash. I think she said she can see the tag on her books, but a search isn't bringing them up. I will double check but she said it's not bringing the tag up individually or in a tagmash.

I will check what the tag is.

>3 SandraArdnas: Thank you. That makes sense, but hopefully it's not quite that long (for her sake!).

What's the use-case for this that just searching your own library for the relevant "theme" - or looking at Tag Mirror for tags you don't use - doesn't fill?

I'm do many monthly challenges with various themes.

So, maybe a monthly theme that I am reading for a challenge is YA mysteries. I can do a tagmash for mystery, young adult, csw to find out what's on my tbr that fits, since I've set things up so csw is a tag on all books on my tbr.

I still don't see how that gets you anything different from searching your library for books tagged "young adult, mystery, csw". What does using the tag mash formalism add?

>7 lorax: The other 2 tags don't need to come from the user who set the "csw" tag. :) So they are essentially looking at what books they have tagged with csw and which had been tagged also as YA and mystery on the site by other users.

>7 lorax: I don't tag my books until after I've read them (for the most part). So, looking at my own library isn't going to help if I haven't read the YA mystery yet.

"csw" is the tag on my shelf; "mystery" and "young adult" are tags on other people's shelves for the books I'm looking for.

>8 AnnieMod: Thank you, yes. That's exactly it!

>2 reconditereader: Hello! I am the friend in this situation. I used the tag AnitaPom to label all of my books (read and unread). So right now, I'd like to find all the books on my shelves that are prominently tagged "friendship" by others.

AnitaPom doesn't work at all, lol.

But I have found a short term workaround by searching my shelves using "all fields" and that gives me a good number of the tagged books (but not all of them). For example, The Book of Goose is on my shelf, and it is prominently tagged friendship, but it doesn't get pulled with a search.

I think the response regarding indexing makes total sense, so I'll just wait and see what happens! Having fun exploring here in the meantime.

>10 Anita_Pomerantz: But YOU have not tagged it friendship. Searching your catalogue only searches what you have entered.

>10 Anita_Pomerantz: A quick check whether new unique tag has been indexed is if it appears among the work tags. Once you see AnitaPom among those, site search will find them too

I just use "owned but unread" as a tag to find those books. At least, if I understand what all of you are talking about. :-)

>13 krazy4katz: The advantage to using a unique (or near-unique) tag in this situation is that you will increase the chance of meaningful/useful results in a tagmash. Variations on "owned but unread" are used by a bunch of people on the site, so in the tagmash list you may (probably will) end up with results that are in your library, but that you haven't actually tagged that way.

>14 shadrach_anki: OK, I understand now. I use the tag on my own books. If I do an LT-wide search, I guess I would not use a tag, then just see which ones have checkmarks, which would indicate that I have it in my library. Does that make sense? I apologize if I still don't understand.

>15 krazy4katz: The problem is with the bigger tags and tag mashes - “ya, fantasy” for example. The usage of a user specific tag and then using it in the tagmash allows the page to show your own books on the first page of the mash (or at all - the tagmash shows only a limited number of books and yours may end up under the fold).

So yes - you can look for the colored check marks - if you are willing to check all pages on the tag mash and if your book does not end up too rarely tagged to be on thes. The custom tag gets ALL your books that mash on the same page thus essentially answering a question such as “show me all my tbr books other people had tagged with “ya and fantasy”.

What we need is the ability to show the books from your catalog on the tagmash page - but that again will run into the “tag mash shows only limited number of books” sooner or later.

Hope that helps explains the usecase a bit better?

Thanks to all who understood what I was asking and why I like to use tagmashes this way. :-)

>16 AnnieMod: Thank you! I understand now.
>17 LibraryCin: Good luck!!