I just deployed one of the most exciting Spawning Pool updates ever. Well, most exciting to me, that is: hierarchical tags. Previously, to tag something on Spawning Tool, there were a few heuristics applied to the replays on upload, but the rest were manual tagging of categories and tags. Now, there is structure behind the tags so that a whole tree of tags can be applied when you apply only a single one. This is probably best explained by example.

The primary use case for this feature is build orders. Let’s say you open “15 Hatch, 17 Pool”. That itself is a tag. This build, however, is also a “Hatch First” build as well as a “Fast Expand” build. Previously, you would need to enter all 3 of these tags to get the replay to appear under all 3 types, and if you uploaded another “15 Hatch, 17 Pool”, you would have to do the work all again. Now, the backend knows the structure that “15 Hatch, 17 Pool” is a type of “Hatch First” build, so it will implicitly label the build for browsing. Check out http://spawningtool.com/replays/?tag=309 to see it in action. Continue reading →