What can I add to Favorites and how?

for instance, I can add a plant from the database to my Journal but there is no link to adding it to my Favorites. Isn't Journal supposed to be for MY OWN plants? And there is no way to link directly back to the plant in the database, one has to view one's own journal entries from which there IS a link back to the plant. Even from there, there seems to be no way to add the plant to Favorites.

So every time I want to go to a plant page I have to search for the plant by name.

Overall the navigation of the site is very 20th century, not that I don't appreciate the greatness of the site itself...

The favorites function was replaced by tags. If you want to save individual Plant Files pages you can create tags for them, then if you go to your member page ("My info") you can look at the tags that you've created and find it that way. Or you can make tags for your journal pages too, when I go in my journal I see the little folder icon in the upper right corner so although I've never tried it I'm assuming you can tag them too or else the icon wouldn't be there. Or if you don't like the tags here and just want bookmarks for certain Plant Files entry, you can use your browser's bookmark/favorite feature and save it that way.

Thanks. Well, obviously, the fact that the favorites fcn was deprecated, should be noted on the page that tells you that it exists.

A bigger issue is that IMHO the tag feature is seriously misunderstood by DG. A person should tag his/her own entry into a "cloud" and that is how others will group and find entries. I can do it with my blog entries, and it is fine. But to tag existing entries such as a plant file?

As it is now, I can tag a plant file, with any word, with many words, I can even tag several plant files with the same word, e.g. my name, or the word "parallelepipedon" or "yo, que pasa?"and it will create what is essentially a plant files favorites list for me, without any use for anyone else. I can even tag the main page! What's the point?

If you're tagging things just for yourself and they have no use for anyone else, you can make the tags private rather than public. And yes, people could make random nonsensical tags that wouldn't make sense for anybody but themselves, but I like to think most people here wouldn't do that, I imagine most of the time people tag things with something that relates to the content of the page.

I do a lot of tags and make them private just for my eyes only. Like you said, many don't fully understand it and the public one has gotten a bit too huge with many tagging individual PF entries that most likely should have been made private tags. But, I still find useful tags there, just takes time to go through it.

Thank you I was thinking the same thing thank you for clearing it up for me!

I have to say I love DGs layout and navigation. And the admins are always attentive to new ideas and improvements.
In comparison, I can barely even use GardenWeb. It's a nightmare. I rarely go there because it has hardly any of the features DG does. And no admins that I know of.
Keep up the good work, DG admins! :-)

Thanks for the kind words. But...just to give credit where it's due, all the posts on this thread were member-to-member help. That's also one of the things that has always set DG apart: an incredibly friendly community of gardeners from all over the world :-)

Terry, I couldn't find a forum like this on GW. Maybe I missed it. Their FAQ is worthless. I don't hate the site; I frequent the conifers forum over there. IMO, it's just so user-UNfriendly.