This is a suggestion for implementation, and as such, Bart is obviously the one best suited to judge if this has any merit. In theory, it sounds like a rather nice idea.

Or sounded. I'm tired, so I'll probably rant about a bit too much and make it needlessly complicated. Good thing I made this a new post, no?

Anyway.

The idea is to make the tag system more versatile. To begin with, we add a new class of "special" tags, which are hidden and/or treated differently from "normal" tags in many views, but are (maybe) internally normal tags. I'll mark them by prefixing them with a ":". Then we implement nesting, at least to a certain extent. For example, art would automatically be tagged with ":user/username", genres could be ":genre/action" and so on. User collections might look like ":user/username/:collections/mycollection". From here, two more things are needed:

• Tags can have a freeform description field and/or some other fields, which will be shown on the browse page.
• Tags can be subscribed to. Or rather, tag *rules* can be subscribed to. As an example, ":projects/* & :user/troll" would fire as soon as art made/contributed by user "troll" is added to any project (which would probably be very interesting to user "troll").

And that is all (heh)!

A few points from above still holds:

• Tags can have "Customized Browse Pages".
• Tags beginning with ':' are hidden and/or (preferably) treated in a special way, like being put under it's own heading etc). Nice, but not essential.

Then:

• Make it possible to subscribe to tag changes on a particular piece of art. Watching a tag itself might be useful, too.

Again, I have no idea how plausible this idea is in the first place.