Comment on So, About those Additional Tags...

  1. The back of a small pink octopus in a black sea, arms spread out and curling so that all eight are visible.

    What I'd really like is a way to view only canonical additional tags. I want to be able to see "alternate universe" or "BDSM", but avoid "omg i have all the feels what is this i can't even."

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    1. This. Because "omg i have all the feels what is this i can't even" doesn't tell me anything useful!

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    2. kristen stewart smoking in the bath

      But some non-canonical additional tags ARE useful. Sometimes they're used to add warnings, clarifications, or specific elements about the fic. I have fics tagged "voice restriction," "kitten play," and "meds adjustment," none of which are canonical, but all of which, I think, offer specific and useful information about the story's contents. How do we balance that?

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      1. The back of a small pink octopus in a black sea, arms spread out and curling so that all eight are visible.

        Honestly, some of them may be useful, but I'd rather lose the ability to see those than to have to see all the long, chatty tags. And since currently my options are "view no additional tags" or "view all additional tags", I would really like to have that option in between.

        I mean, I'm not saying it should be the default, just that I would really like it as an option, just like viewing no additional tags already is.

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    3. Barbara Gordon. Text: SUPER GEEK

      This!

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    4. Another "yes" vote for this. Tags about content are super helpful to me, but the long rambling free text tags tend to be a turn off and muck up the works in my reading-brain when I'm looking at the tags.

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      1. I don't know. In my personal experience, an excess of the long rambling tags tend to be highly useful to me in that they help me weed out fics that I would probably want to avoid. And if there's just a handful, I don't really mind them. As with anything, it's a question of where do you draw the line, and that's trickier than anyone could say, and probably really subjective, because nobody's line is going to be in the same place.

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    5. I agree with this as well. "Hurt/comfort" or "established relationship" or "BDSM" is helpful. Long incoherent rambling is not.

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    6. Trobadora - Words

      Yes, please! The tags that are basically only chatty commentary make it hard to see the actually useful tags hidden in there (if any).

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    7. Hi, ladysorka! Thanks for the suggestion.

      Ideally we'd like to provide an optional way to only view canonical (or synonym) additional tags. We would want it to be optional because some folks do enjoy seeing those tags, but we know others don't. (We're also considering ways to optionally limit the display of tags with only a single use.)

      However we have to make sure that any way we do this doesn't overload our servers (currently tag lists don't indicate the status of a tags but simply lists the text; to do so the system will have to check the database for the status of every tag displayed.

      So it's a feature we're definitely considering and working on, but it may be a little time before we can get it up and running on the Archive!

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    8. early galactic star formation

      Even better might be to have canonical tags set off by shading or something, like the pairings currently are, so they jump out of the pile of tags they're in. I don't necessarily want to lose all the information in the additional tags, but I want to be able to see the more meaningful stuff first and more easily.

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      1. Bionicle UDD symbol made out of clouds

        I second this idea.

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      2. Hi, Arduinna! One of the wrangling co-chairs here.

        What we're hoping to do is to mark canonical and non-canonical tags in the code, so that skins/CSS can be used to optionally control their display - either by not displaying non-canonical tags, or by highlighting canonical tags as you mention, or however else users want to display them. First we have to work out some potential logistical problems with this (as I mentioned above, it puts more burden on our servers, so we have to be careful if we don't want to slow down or crash the Archive!) But we're definitely looking into it, and hopefully will work out something in the upcoming year!

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        1. early galactic star formation

          Oh, that would be awesome. Thanks!

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        2. BW photo of flute: icon made by shadow_icons on LJ

          I would really, really like this option. I seriously dislike those "all the feels" sort of tags, but I wouldn't want to take away anyone else's option to use them. If I could de-emphasize them through CSS or similar, that would be fantastic.

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      3. Thirded!!

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