Tags are a powerful way to sift through content by helping people dirll down iinto the content they want to find. A tag has much more weight than any word or words being used, and can be searched with more accuracy than just searching text.

For example, let's say that the word "guitar" is used as a tag for a thread in this forum. Another thread has the word guitar in it, but is really just talking about mandolins. Standard full-text searching will have a harder time distinguishing the difference because it's only looking at the text. Using tags allows the system to distinquish, and will help people find the right content.

You can also do things like subscribing to specific tags, which will alert you when your subscribed tags are being used. You can do this in the forum by searching for your tags and then clicking the RSS link and pasting the link into your RSS reader.  We'll be enhancing this feature as we move forward.

Thank you for this explanation, i now understand the importance of tags.