I decided to get rid of freeform tagging at MacMegasite because it was becoming too unmanageable. Since members can create their own tags by simply entering names, there were many duplicate tags with misspellings and lots of unique tags that were only assigned to a single post.
Drupal lists all taxonomy terms from different vocabularies together, so you can’t easily distinguish user-defined tags from primary topics. If a tag has the same name as a topic, a post with that tag won’t appear in the listing for that topic, which can make it more difficult to find content and can be confusing to users.
To make up for eliminating tags, I added several new topics, including iPhone and AppleTV. I’ll continue to refine the topics in the next few days to make it easier to find articles.