I love the thread tags and feel that they work well and make searching much easier (although it's hard to get members to use them).
What would be even better is a drop down list of pre-existing tags to select from to keep them more consistent and encourage users to add them is this possible?

Not really. If there is a list of pre existing tags it defeats the object. the tags are meant to be unique to each threads summery. so if they are always selected from a list of keywords (tags) then your search cloud would look quite repeated...

I know what you mean about them not using them though... I think a lot of people are unsure of what they are for. a better placement of that box or a bigger more friendly description would be good. Even a javascript alert to suggest they use it if they post without entering tags. But some would say that would get annoying...

Yes, I know what you mean but I was thinking more along the lines of making them function like categories in a wordpress blog, so if say I wanted to find all the posts on "baby hamsters" I find them and don't have to worry about hamster babies and other variants not showing up etc. And all new posts about baby hamsters use this tag.

Whilst my site is still relativley small I am generally adding the tags myself, do you think they help that much in getting threads indexed, I thought they might and it might help compensate for the lack of search engine friendly urls in Eblah?

I'm 95% sure the tags are only an internal E-Blah feature, They don't have any effect on any search engines. Simply make a "cloud" appear under the search page.

You can enable more friendly urls in settings, but your right, a more "wordpress" style url structure would be better, where the catagory, subcat, and thread name are in the url.

like:

http://eblah.com/forum/computers/windows/issues/blue-screen-of-death/

would be great!

Any ideas on this?

The m-841238291 rubbish isn't great, But with the new features such as auto tagging and auto meta keywords, I don't think it would be too hard to put the title of the thread in the url?

With that, and mod_rewrite, our forums would look awesome.

Mod_rewrite alone makes the board look much more professional. But eblah.com only removes the blah.pl? ? My forum removes everything but the m-number.

have a browse around to see how it behaves on my forum. It's quite impressive.. or i need to get out more...  

Any thoughts on this? Any way to add the tags to the urls? Get rid of those useless number strings...