Here are some news.yc discussions about this topic:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5303

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33322

Perhaps we need the ability to tag discussions?

Definitely - I put that in feature requests a couple times, but it vanished in the traffic there. It would be a huge value to all the users as you could focus on the topic your interested in, and hopefully some of the great comments would not get lost in time.

PG: If you're interested, we have an excellent model for classification developed for http://www.streamfocus.com that is simple and powerful that we could let you (but only you) have gratis (written in lisp of course with a mysql back end - cached with hash tables)

Am I alone in finding tags to be solving the wrong problem? The problem tags solve is, "How do I let contributors do extra work adding meta-data to their contributions?"

Making search that works is the right solution to the right problem, in every single case where tags have been used that I'm aware of. Oh, actually, that's not true...flickr tags are extremely useful (when used by large numbers of people to indicate a particular theme or event). But tags at News.YC or at Reddit would be a pointless complexification of the submission and browsing experience. Give me nicely working search (which Reddit didn't have last time I tried it, and News.YC doesn't even try), and I'll never want for tags.

In short, I'm very strongly in the camp (assuming I'm not actually alone) that believes tags would be bad for News.YC usability. Search, on the other hand, would be fantastic.

The problem with text match search is that it misses on a step removed concept search. I'm advocating classification with hierarchy, so that if you were to click on Legal, it would give information on lawyers, on trade marks, on patenting, etc. I think the answer is to limit the hierarchy to startup related issues, and then users select from this list to classify posts if they want to. Then we can have a very helpful semantic tool for finding things that search just cant.

Yep, I know the reasons for tags. I still think they're a truly bad idea in this context.

A limited selection of tags solves one problem, but then creates new agonizing moments for contributors where they try to figure out whether they ought to select one option or twelve. And a few users, the very ones I probably least want to pay attention to, will assume that their latest blog post about their new GTD web application crosses boundaries in unique ways and would be relevant for all fifty-eight tags. It takes a strikingly small number of bad results to make tags worthless...and I've seen very few occasions where the tag features of a website are not just that.

I could be wrong...but I'd like to see an example of a site in the vein of News.YC that uses tags effectively, before I'd even think about admitting it.

Thats a good point. If you remember the good old days, Yahoo was a hierarchy of classified links administered/edited very carefully by humans after user submissions. You would need to have that layer of edit control by the system admins to prevent abuse, and I'm guessing the resources for that are not here.

(I sure wouldn't post my GTD web app in non-relevant classes though! :)

Tagging would be an enormous improvement here, it's been a long standing request for reddit, too.

Pay $20 a month and get Paypal Payment Pro. It will let you integrate the payment collection directly into your site. Paypal will process the authorization in the background (your backend sends something to Paypal and process the response). This way, through out the entire process, the user stays on your site. Paypal acquired Verisign's PayLink and Pay Flow credit processing, and those are available as options too (albeit more expensive)

Try WorldPay! www.worldpay.com

Authorize.net?