I'd like the hardcoded areas of expertise removed in favor of an autocomplete freeform box, much like Stack Overflow's tags box. For example, I'd like to put that I'm a Drupal expert and I'd like to look for node.js help, but neither of those are options.
I'm not sure a tagging system is the best option though. It's very flexible indeed but it's at the expense of the simplicity of checkboxes. Especially when many tags mean the same thing. eg: rails and rubyonrails.
Since "hacker" expertise is a limited scope, perhaps expanding from there is a better idea?
The problem I see with this is it might not be all that limited. There are quite a few areas of expertise out there, which could make for quite a large form, where as defined "sections" with a free form tag style fill in would make for less clutter. Its "hackers" were talking about after all, most if not all are going to be familiar with a tag system.
As far as the duplicate tags there a number of ways to correct this. First and most prominent is community editing. The other option is to tie tags together with a backend system - for example ruby-on-rails === rubyonrails === rails === RoR
Maybe you could use the best of both approaches by presenting the most popular/important/broad tags (e.g. PHP, usability, CPC) as a suggested list while allowing users to add their own, more specific or less popular tags (e.g. drupal, memcached, adsense, appengine).
Or (as long as it's performant), an auto-complete as you type so that both "java" and "javascript" show up in the auto-complete's suggestion list when you type "java" in. In the above example, a person would type in 'rails' and see the 'rubyonrails' auto-complete, and (hopefully) choose that instead.
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Yep, mcrittenden recommended a tag system (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2176517) in the first thread. I'll just quote him:
I'd like the hardcoded areas of expertise removed in favor of an autocomplete freeform box, much like Stack Overflow's tags box. For example, I'd like to put that I'm a Drupal expert and I'd like to look for node.js help, but neither of those are options.
Oh boy. I totally missed that. Thanks.
I'm not sure a tagging system is the best option though. It's very flexible indeed but it's at the expense of the simplicity of checkboxes. Especially when many tags mean the same thing. eg: rails and rubyonrails.
Since "hacker" expertise is a limited scope, perhaps expanding from there is a better idea?
The problem I see with this is it might not be all that limited. There are quite a few areas of expertise out there, which could make for quite a large form, where as defined "sections" with a free form tag style fill in would make for less clutter. Its "hackers" were talking about after all, most if not all are going to be familiar with a tag system.
As far as the duplicate tags there a number of ways to correct this. First and most prominent is community editing. The other option is to tie tags together with a backend system - for example ruby-on-rails === rubyonrails === rails === RoR
Maybe you could use the best of both approaches by presenting the most popular/important/broad tags (e.g. PHP, usability, CPC) as a suggested list while allowing users to add their own, more specific or less popular tags (e.g. drupal, memcached, adsense, appengine).
Or (as long as it's performant), an auto-complete as you type so that both "java" and "javascript" show up in the auto-complete's suggestion list when you type "java" in. In the above example, a person would type in 'rails' and see the 'rubyonrails' auto-complete, and (hopefully) choose that instead.