Why haven't the terms "COVID-19", "coronavirus", etc. been added to the list of topics here on Fluther?

Probably just a bug.

Nope – nobody’s adding topics any more. No new developments; only fixes.

COVID-19 and coronavirus are on the list of topics: https://www.fluther.com/topics/COVID-19/ https://www.fluther.com/topics/coronavirus/

That’s coming up from a key word search on the questions but I don’t think they’re on the list of topics you can label a question with.

When I type a question related to the virus, I’ll use “illness” and “lifestyle.”

Too late to edit. My second comment was in response to Brian’s

@janbb, I think maybe it is, because whenever I list ‘covid-19’ among my topics, it gets changed automatically to ‘COVID-19’. That happens when it defaults to a topic that’s already there. Either someone got there first with that spelling or someone with tag-editing powers changed it.

That’s annoyingly true for various other topics as well: for instance, when I spell a term in lowercase because it’s a common noun, and it shows up with an initial cap because it’s already present in that form. Can’t override it. So it sticks me with an error or inconsistency that I didn’t commit.

^^ No – I don’t see COVID-19 as a topic in the dictionary at all so I don’t think it was ever added in any form. As I said above, I don’t believe any new topics are being added to the dictionary. What you’re talking about seems like a spell-check correction.

I think people are confusing two things; one may be the dictionary of searchable terms and the other is the topic labels that one can choose from. Those correspond to the topics that you identify as areas of expertise or interest and were how “Questions for You” were sent to you back in the day.