Stumbled upon a good conversation about hashtags on the NG labs page and I figured it would be good to add it in here. Also this kinda does go along with what JR siad about figuring out when #apple and #orange mean the same thing to different people. I feel this can be alleviated by having a central place to put hashtag definitions. I think the wiki would be a good use for this…
JR Can I put the Hashtag anywhere in the title or does the title have to start out with the hashtag?
16 Dec 2015
Omei Assuming that these prove useful and software support is added, I think we should stick to the de facto Twitter standard of limiting the # to the beginning of a word. But it wouldn’t have to be the first word. So instead of "JR_#CentralOpenLoop_IENG1Sub001, you could use “JR #CentralOpenLoop_IENG1Sub001” as the title.
In fact, I would go even farther in separating the hash tag from the rest of the title. For example, you might make the title “JR #CentralOpenLoop_IENG1 Sub001” or “JR#CentralOpenLoop IENG1 Sub001” so that the hashtag itself was either CentralOpenLoop_IENG1 or CentralOpenLoop, whichever one seemed most descriptive of you hypothesis. (i.e. is it limited to the ING1 puzzle, or mother puzzles as well.) The idea is to have the hashtag itself group together related designs. That way we could, for example, have a dictionary of hashtags, each on of which might describe some concept.
Also, Nando didn’t intend to limit each design to a single hashtag. In the previous round, I started adding multiple hashtags to my description for each design. Each of these tagged the design as having one certain characteristic that I thought might be useful in the future for finding designs with that characteristic. It was Eli’s idea to encourage the use of a single hashtag in the title to identify the primary “hypothesis testing” group for this round.
16 Dec 2015
JR Thanks. I use “_” the same way space is used so I will just drop the “_” separator in my titles for now on. You have around 80 of mine with the “_” in the title. If anyone wants to edit them out it is OK with me.
16 Dec 2015
Meechl Thanks again for the reply, Omei. Also, similar to the discussion with JR, I was thinking it could be very useful to indicate in the title whether the design is expected to be good or bad, perhaps just by adding a #good or #bad tag.
18 Dec 2015
Omei Yes, I think adding #good and #bad makes sense as a “secondary” tag where it is applicable. There is certainly nothing wrong with assigning multiple tags. And although one could mark designs as “good” and “bad” without using a hashtag, one of the hoped-for benefits of the hashtag concept is to develop a shared vocabulary for players who want to help, and learn from, each other. And the notion of controlled testing of ideas is important.
Building on this idea, perhaps #control would be good hashtag for experiments where there is more than one variation being tested, or where the experiment is simply trying something different, without any clear notion whether it will hurt or improve the switch.
18 Dec 2015
JR I was thinking of using #filler for any of my puzzles that I crank out for no other reason that it works and then guess with #good or #bad if I think it will actually work or not.
18 Dec 2015
Eli Fisker Hi Meechl, Omei and JR! I like the ideas with #good, #bad and #control. The #filler one is also a good idea. We need something to mark designs that are #denovo - made over from scratch. Trying out something new. I also miss a hashtag for when I make a minor change to something in a current working design, without following a specific hypothesis, just to see if it works. We need a way to highlight that too. When only doing minor changes that we don’t know if it is beneficial.
19 Dec 2015
Eli Fisker After I posted I realized that #mod will probably do in that case. 
19 Dec 2015
Eli Fisker And when thinking about it I think that my #mod is exactly the same as Omei’s #control hashtag is already covering and covering better.
19 Dec 2015
