Remove suggestion to add tags and categories

[joostdevalk]

Right now, in the pre-publish screen, we suggest users to add tags and categories to their post. I'd like to make a few changes to what we do there, and I'll explain why:

• If no tags and no categories are selected, we could suggest adding either a tag or a category. But:
  • If a site doesn't have any tags, we shouldn't suggest adding tags.
  • If a site doesn't have any categories, we shouldn't suggest adding categories.
  • If this leads to not suggesting either, then that's fine.

Right now, we suggest adding tags and categories to every page. Every time someone creates a new tag that way, we create a new URL on the internet that needs to be crawled, when really that page might not be very useful at all.

In my ideal world, if a theme has no support for tags (many don't show tags on post pages), we shouldn't even have an interface for it. We might consider adding something like an add_theme_support feature for tags, where we default to it being on but allow themes to remove_theme_support for tag pages and then not show tags in the interface, or something similar to that extent.

[joostdevalk]

The current suggestion to add tags and categories

[jonoaldersonwp]

I love this. Thin/empty/purposeless tag and category pages are a disease on the web, that we've inadvertently caused. Let's not continue to encourage propagating it!

[matveb]

My impression is that suggestions are more of a symptom. If it's not coordinated with whether tags and categories are shown in other places (post settings inspector, admin menu items, etc) it seems like a poor user experience regardless. So while maybe suggestions exacerbate things, I agree that ideally we can look at the presence of the features more holistically if something is not relevant on a specific site.

I'm not sure the theme use heuristic is deterministic enough—I personally don't list tags on post pages but use them for specific navigation.

I like the idea that if the site doesn't have tags or categories in use at all we could avoid showing the corresponding suggestions UI. That seems like a practical step to look at.

More broadly, I think part of this falls in the same bucket of customizing the features that are relevant and reflecting that across the admin UI. If I have a site made just of pages, or have disabled comments, I shouldn't be bothered with that part of the interface, etc.

[joostdevalk]

I like the idea that if the site doesn't have tags or categories in use at all we could avoid showing the corresponding suggestions UI. That seems like a practical step to look at.

Let's do that then? And maybe also introduce simple filters to disable the suggestions from within a plugin?