Gracefully handle non-existant tags

[nodunayo]

You can see all proposals tagged with any given tag at: speakerline.io/tags/.

If you visit a page for a tag that doesn't yet exist, you will see the following page:

We need a more graceful way of handling this scenario.

Should the user be directed somewhere else or shown a custom error page?

[andrewmcodes]

I see two good options here:

• Use redirect_back_or_to in the controller if the tag isn't found with the root as a fallback location and display a flash alert that the tag doesn't exist yet
  • Simpler option with less UX upside
• Create an index page for tags and navigating to a non-existent show page will send you back to the index with a flash alert.
  • This one is slightly more work just because we'd have to come up with a tag index design
  • More UX upside than then first option because it may help them find the tag they are actually looking for or discover new ones.

WDYT?

[nodunayo]

Oh hi, @andrewmcodes! 👋🏾

I prefer the second one because of the discoverability aspect you mention! Right now, there's no way to see a complete list of the tags!

To start with the UI could be incredibly simple, i.e. exactly the same as the other list views, with the tag names in alphabetical order?

[hilarysk]

Working on this one at Hack Day for RailsConf 2024 :)

[nodunayo]

@hilarysk Great stuff! Thank you!

Just one more addition: if someone attempts to just change the URL to a non-existent tag, we still get a 500. Can we handle that more gracefully? Perhaps with the redirect to the new wonderful index route?

[nodunayo]

Note: This is going to be handled in PR #571 as that built on top of this PR.