Proposal: Tag removal

[ellifeedn]

Lately I've wondered why we need to have tags (the ones in the bar beneath the thread). We have a whole subforum for suggestions of series of any genre and I see the tag system as redundant. Not to mention that I've seen people write nonsense tags that don't contribute anything and in worse cases spoil things that happen in the series.

[TheFluff]

Tags used to be a great place to stealth troll threads (the fansub classifieds thread was tagged "desperate and dateless" for a long while) but then the moderators started cracking down in "inappropriate" tags. Maybe they've gone lazy in their old age though?

[CrowKenobi]

Originally Posted by ellifeedn

Not to mention that I've seen people write nonsense tags that don't contribute anything and in worse cases spoil things that happen in the series.

If you see anything like that, just report the first post in the thread and let us know of the inappropriate tag.

[Cosmic Eagle]

Honestly speaking I find this thread a major overreaction....

[NoemiChan]

No problem as long the tags are appropriate and true to avoid misunderstandings.

Removal of tags are necessary if they are misleading and false .

[Triple_R]

Originally Posted by Cosmic Eagle

Honestly speaking I find this thread a major overreaction....

I don't see the nonsense tags as an issue. Actually, they often make for a good laugh.

However, the OP has a point - Do tags serve any practical purpose? People don't even seem to notice them unless there's nonsense tags being used.

So if the Moderators are strongly against nonsense tags, I wonder if there's any purpose at all to keeping tags. It's certainly not a major issue, but I can see where the OP is coming from.

[Kotohono]

Do tags serve any practical purpose?

Tags impact search results and allow searching quickly using the tag cloud.

[SeijiSensei]

We had long and not always fruitful discussions about the tagging system when it was introduced five years back. I recommend reading that thread to gain some understanding of the issues involved in monitoring tag usage. The "tag team" as it was humorously titled then never materialized.

[Solace]

Tagging never really caught on, honestly. Just look at the tag cloud. It's filled with the most generic search terms ever. That's not really a product of moderation, as we tend to leave tags alone unless they break forum rules or get ridiculous in some manner.

I'm sure there's a small minority that might find some use in it, but frankly I don't think the majority of the forum would miss them if they were disabled.

[relentlessflame]

To potentially disable the feature because it doesn't seem useful and people aren't using it effectively is one thing (though I find that regrettable; tags could be a very useful way of finding similar threads, and a powerful complement to the Suggestions sub-forum if used well).

But to potentially disable the feature because people are abusing it and polluting the tag cloud with "makes for a good laugh" nonsense just makes me mad, and makes me feel like "this is why we can't have nice things". To be completely honest, if that were the main issue, I'd support harsher punishments for tag abuse, including (eventual) permabans, because if you can't be responsible enough to make good use of this shared resource, it suggests to me that you probably don't have much of value to contribute to this site in the first place. Perhaps the "humour" is because the feature doesn't seem useful to people anyway, so they figure they can just mess around with it, but that just sends us down a death spiral (more crap tags = less useful = even less motivation to use it properly...)

(The Tag Team is a solution in a way (that comes at somewhat of a cost to keep it manned and organized), but it still has this underpinning of "most users can't be trusted to put things into proper categories" -- which may be true, but still depresses me a bit.)

Case in point, thanks to our "anonymous" poster (of course the staff know who it is) who added "tag hating" as a tag to this thread -- a completely useless tag because it doesn't provide any meaningful linkages. But I accept it for its ironic value, even if I don't find it funny.

[Triple_R]

Originally Posted by Solace

Tagging never really caught on, honestly. Just look at the tag cloud. It's filled with the most generic search terms ever.

Yeah, I doubt your average AS member has a hard time finding shows with "romance", "harem", "comedy", and (my personal favorite) "characters".

Perhaps tags could become a much more useful tool, as relentlessflame argued. But to get there, it would probably help to have a "tag team".

I remember how there was a time when it seemed like AS members couldn't get enough of direct links to TV Tropes pages. That, I've noticed, has really fallen out of favor since its high-point. I see that very rarely these days here on AS. And I think it's because TV Tropes shows how there's certain things you probably shouldn't trust 100% to the general internet population.

Similarly, these tags is probably another one of those things.

[brocko]

Originally Posted by relentlessflame

Case in point, thanks to our "anonymous" poster (of course the staff know who it is) who added "tag hating" as a tag to this thread -- a completely useless tag because it doesn't provide any meaningful linkages. But I accept it for its ironic value, even if I don't find it funny.

If you wanna call me out on it then just do it lol

On a more serious note, I think tags going under the radar can be boiled down to a lack of exposure, encouragement and education for the feature. If no one knows it exist how do they even utilise it to begin with? Likewise, even if they did want to search for tags, if no one is tagging things it kind of defeats the whole purpose does it not? If we want to promote the feature, the user base will need to be guided (or re-guided if it has been done in the past) on how to properly incorporate said feature into their usual forum activities. This could very well include cracking down on pointless tags with no real useful purpose (so users have good examples that they can clearly follow) and having people just straight up tagging more things.

It's either that or there really is just that little of a purpose behind the feature so it's only natural that it gets overlooked.

The fact that tags may be ill suited for use on forum threads may very well be another possibility to consider as well. I mean discussion threads are often pretty complex and cover a wide range of topics so it may be hard for tags to try and categorise something that's constantly changing and evolving (i.e the discussion itself). Sure a thread may be tagged with 'industry talk' for example, but you're still gonna have to sift through the thread further to get that 'industry talk' that you want. The tag only gets you part of the way there, but not exactly the whole way there most of the time. In those instance, it's just not cut out for what it wants to achieve.

For threads dedicated solely to the one series, sure enough the tags can operate similarly to how they do on anime listing sites by categorising them into common genres and themes. (action, shounen, romance, etc.) It's relatively nice and easy for those cases.

But when you start getting into subforum type territory where each thread is so clearly and strictly defined from the thread title alone, it starts to serve a rather redundant purpose. For example, I want to tag this thread with 'music', but the fact that the thread itself is already clearly labelled as such in the title kind of makes it redundant to do so. Or I want to find the image thread for series x. I can already navigate there easily enough by quickly browsing the sub-forum for it. So, why would I want to take the less intuitive and more roundabout method by using the search and tag functions just get to add more resistance to the path when I really didn't need to at all? It seems like there's relatively little value add in these cases where it may as well not even be worth the effort.

The more I write about this, the more I start to believe that tags really aren't so well suited or designed for use on discussion boards as they are on something static like a list of shows, news articles, images, or whatever simple. How neatly arranged and organised the forum can be probably wouldn't be helping tag usage either.

I can see how they can be useful into grouping up threads with common themes running through them (i.e rounding everything up with director x, seiyuu y, or company z), but we're going to have to get the userbase to really buy into it and use it with much greater frequency first. Something that seems to not be happening as of current for whatever reason.

The next step after that is actually coming up with useful and descriptive tags, which seems to be where the former attempt lost steam/died at. Letting people freestyle their way with the tagging system may essentially skip that step, but it is much more random and you're essentially hoping to catch lighting in a bottle so to speak. There'll also have to be some guidance to help moderate things along in the correct direction as well.

[TheFluff]

if you want people to use tags maybe you should call some attention to them in the interface, because they sure aren't very prominent at the moment (why are they at the bottom of the thread? don't that kind of info belong in the header with the thread title?)

That is the question, though, do you want people to use tags? Personally I think that unless you build your entire site structure on tags (a la *booru) they should either be free-for-all and only moderated for harassment etc, or they shouldn't be there at all. In order for tags to be actually useful for categorizing and finding content, everyone has to agree on what tags to actually use, and maintaining that list of approved tags requires considerable effort (just ask any librarian). Tagging things with random comments the way people tend to do on tumblr can be a sorta funny (albeit mostly useless) feature, but the way asuki's tag system works right now effectively prevents it both from being useful and from being funny. It's completely worthless.

[Dhomochevsky]

The last time I tried to tag something, my tags got deleted and I caught some flakk from a mod who thought I was using tags wrong.
Just like with posts, sometimes a mod just comes along and takes offense in them. I have to this day not figured out what is behind this.. reasoning or random? Sometimes it just seems to happen.

However, unlike with posts, tags are not worth the trouble, so I'm staying away from that.
The whole thing reminds me of the great wikipedia delete-wars tbh.
It makes no sense having to argue with mods why something should or should not be tagged in a certain way, having to defend every choice you make. They are clearly designed to be a fuzzy categorization feature carried out by the community, not a 100% accurate list of facts.
Why are tags so heavily moderated, when no user really cares about them?
You should first get a healthy base of tags going (and maybe when that leads to some 'strong' tags with a good number of hits behind them, there will less duplicate tags too).

[Liddo-kun]

Originally Posted by Solace

Tagging never really caught on, honestly. Just look at the tag cloud. It's filled with the most generic search terms ever. That's not really a product of moderation, as we tend to leave tags alone unless they break forum rules or get ridiculous in some manner.

I'm sure there's a small minority that might find some use in it, but frankly I don't think the majority of the forum would miss them if they were disabled.

Referring to the part that I put in bold.
I've been here for years and rarely notice the tags.

The only time they've caught my attention is during a certain year in the Saimoe thread. Certain tags were added to that thread, tags like "strategem", "rage" and "despair". A mod promptly came to set things straight.

[SeijiSensei]

I occasionally tag threads in the Suggestions forum to provide some guidance to people looking for specific subjects. Shows for younger viewers are requested occasionally and are hard to find in amongst the dozens of requests for romantic action comedies. I've also systematically tagged all the Choice Awards threads so you can see the list of winners over the years.

I doubt anyone uses any of this, but it only takes a few minutes and might help someone. When I see a request pop up in Suggestions for "shows to watch with my kid sister," I'll generally post a link to the "children" tag. I think tags would be more widely visible if more people posted them in ordinary threads. So far I seem to be the only person who monitors the Suggestions thread who posts links to tags.

[ReaperxKingx]

Originally Posted by LKK

What most viewers think of when they see a "harem" tag doesn't really apply to Mahouka's situation, in my opinion. I'll remove it. If someone feels strongly that the harem tag should be restored, plead your case to me VIA PM. If you convince me, I'll put it back.

Shouldn't the tags be removed? I mean tags can still exists, but I believe only the moderators should be able to place them on threads. You get some people being a troll placing random tags on some threads.