We’re giving the Tags feature of 3D Warehouse a facelift as we evolve into the #Hashtag era. We’ll be converting tags to hashtags and doing a bit of cleanup along the way.
Phase 1:
We’re announcing the change from Tags to Hashtags, and giving 3D Warehouse users a chance to make changes to their details pages before we turn the robots loose to automatically do this for you. The details of the robots actions are listed below, and if you’d like to change any Tags before that happens, you’ll have a week or two to complete that task.
Phase 2:
We’ll temporarily disable the ability to add, edit or delete old style tags (circled in the image below) while our robots go to work converting tags into Hashtags.
What you should know about the conversion process:
- Single word tags (e.g. Car) will be turned into hashtags (e.g. car).
- Multi-Word tags will be joined with underscores (e.g. Car Door = #Car_Door)
- Any tag exceeding 30 characters will be deleted and not converted to a hashtag (e.g. This stupidly long tag phrase about race cars = #Gone #sorrynotsorry)
- Any duplicate tags will be removed (e.g. Car, Car = car)
- All non-alphanumeric characters will be removed (e.g. ca$hmoney = #cahmoney)
- The set of all Hashtags will be appended to the description field (see Phase 3 below).
Fig 1. The model shown above has been given the tags “Play Grow, Playground”. Our migration scripts will convert the tags to #Play_Grow and playground
What should you do to your models before Phase 2?
If you’re happy with our automatic conversion rules, then nothing.
If, however, your preference in the example above would be for the tags to be converted to #Play and grow instead of #Play_Grow, then you’d need to edit your tags to be “Play, Grow, Playground” so that each word is separate.
Note that when editing your tags during PHASE 1, you SHOULD NOT include the ‘#’ symbol (caveat: unless you’re feeling frisky and want to go ahead and append #hashtags to your description text as seen in Phase 3 below).
Phase 3:
When the migration scripts have done their thing, we’ll push an update that will make the newly migrated Hashtags visible in their new location, appended to the description field; they’ll be clickable too, like they are now (see below). The old Tags box will get nuked.
Fig 2. The model shown above now displays the clickable hashtags #Play_Grow and playground appended to the text in the description field. The old Tags panel is gone.
Phase 4:
Users will be able to add/edit their own #hashtags (anywhere) in the description field! When you type the ‘#’ character, we’ll even have an autocomplete suggestion box that will appear and provide folks with hashtag suggestions which will hopefully help folks from making silly misspelling errors, etc.
Happy #hashtagging!
