This is similar to the suggestion I made for off topic discussion (i.e. labeling things as off topic, although this would be a special label that could be toggled in and/or out of user preferences: i.e. choose whether or not to view messages labeled off topic).
How much do people actually use Gmail labels, anyway? I understand that some people would use this more than I would. I'm not exactly sure what other labels a person would want, though, in a forum. What did you have on mind? Knowing that could help me know how useful this would be to me (I'm not an admin here; just a user like you).
Child forum posts seem kind of like they're labeled, with the names of the child forums. This is also kind of like my suggestion to allow one message to be posted to multiple forums (not just child/parent, but also sibling forums, cousin forums, and such). Editing the one message one place would edit it in both places (i.e. there would only be one post, and it would show up in multiple forums).
Most of the labels I have on mind require extra functionality.
Hmm - I think labels would be a nice way to reduce the need for child forums, actually (and posts in multiple forums). I mean, you might have a post that really seems like it needs its own forum, but you only have one post for it. A label there would be more efficient than a whole new forum. Labels could be nice for Nuzmo in this respect, too. Other forums could actually act as labels (viewing all posts with a certain label would be like viewing a forum with the name of that label).
One problem, though, would be to determine whether the labels were Nabble-wide, or forum specific. I tend to think they would be better Nabble-wide, but I can see how one might want it the other way. Actually, both could be done at the same time. (view all labels with this; view all labels in this forum with this . . .)
Anyway, labels could be cool, but I think the implementation needs to make them look simple, so people don't get lost (labels and child forums together could cause some confusion). Perhaps they would be invisible except when actually viewing the message, and you could add them while writing/editing the message. Average users don't edit messages often - so, they probably wouldn't get too confused. Now, if the labels were all strung about by the message from the forum view, that would cause problems, methinks (except with something like an off topic label, and the child forum labels).
If you're talking about personal labels that no one else sees but you, that's a whole different story. I don't see why it would be necessary, but if Nabble's up for it, that's fine with me.
