Feedback: Tag Discussion

[Solace]

As a test, I tried tagging the SOTM threads with these: SOTM, Signature of the month, contest. The locked threads cannot be tagged, however.

@TSO - A good idea for the subforums. I wonder if it would be possible to tag the subforum, and then leave the rest with various tags. Otherwise you'd reach the five tag limit pretty quick.

Edit: saw NSW's response.

[Solace]

Ok, was thinking on this a little more. So here's some suggestions:

I see three threads on the first page in General discussion relationships. So perhaps something like "advice, relationships". We seem to have friendship, love, opposite sex, and dating threads come up pretty often there so it seems appropriate to lump them together under the relationship tag.

For suggestions, perhaps a tag like "suggestions romance". Just having suggestion or romance by themselves seems too wide open. But with tagging by genre or mood together with the suggestion part you could group threads together and offer a way to get more ideas for shows.

News threads are a little tricky because they can cover a lot of topics besides the obvious news tag. So no thoughts on that one yet.

[NoSanninWa]

It's probably fine if some threads remained untagged. Some tagging just won't add much value after all... though it's great that folks are thinking so seriously about this. Heh. You may be thinking about this more than me, so perhaps I'm wrong.

[Solace]

Nah, I'm probably over thinking it. I was just posing the possibility of using tags to link common threads together, as such discussions generally end up grabbing the same types of people. The idea was that by linking them with common tags such people might be able to find similar threads easier and it might help prevent reposting of "new" topics if they could find an existing thread they could respond to.

[bayoab]

So tags are going to be a glorified search thing where a select group of people decide what you can search for and what the correct results are?

Note: This is not objection to having the tags moderated. This is questioning whether a group of possible outsiders to a show actually know how a show should be tagged.

[Zippicus]

It would probably be nice if the tags were easily understood, I'll use the example cited in this thread since it fits the bill IMO. If I saw the tag "Kemonomimi" I would have no idea what it was, probably quite a few other people would have this problem as well. I can imagine deciding on tags will be difficult since people can rarely agree on just what the various labels tossed around mean. I think erring on the side of understandability would be better than being most technically correct.

[NoSanninWa]

Originally Posted by bayoab

So tags are going to be a glorified search thing where a select group of people decide what you can search for and what the correct results are?

Note: This is not objection to having the tags moderated. This is questioning whether a group of possible outsiders to a show actually know how a show should be tagged.

I don't know the answer to that question. So far we're just discovering that a non-select group of people are eager to tag shows with names of characters, awesomeness and fail. That doesn't seem to be working either...

[Ichihara Asako]

A tag team could be fairly broad, with fans of all genres, thus covering all shows, so SOMEBODY amongst them should know how to tag any given show. And if such a team is established, there could always be a thread to debate which tags belong on a show or not, as everybody has different opinions about them. Though like genre tags on sites like AniDB, there can be compromises met that please all parties.

[felix]

Originally Posted by bayoab

So tags are going to be a glorified search thing where a select group of people decide what you can search for and what the correct results are?

Note: This is not objection to having the tags moderated. This is questioning whether a group of possible outsiders to a show actually know how a show should be tagged.

Originally Posted by NoSanninWa

I don't know the answer to that question. So far we're just discovering that a non-select group of people are eager to tag shows with names of characters, awesomeness and fail. That doesn't seem to be working either...

A good reason to leave room for the thread creator to have a say.
The privilage can be limited to the Anime Discussion section to avoid complications.

People would then be able to pm him instead of "strangers to the show".

[NeoSam]

Here's another un-correct tagging with shounen:
http://forums.animesuki.com/showthread.php?t=57514

Toshokan Sensou is a novel series not only aimed at males (not a shounen light novel) nor is it only aimed at females (not a shoujo light novel). It's more a "mainstream" type of light novel.

Bakemonogatari and Yakushiji Ryoko no Kaiki Jikenbo (which both are getting animated) belong to that "mainstream" aimed light novel series. It would be really annoying to see them being tagged with a demographic tag when both these light novel series are aimed at both males and females.

[bayoab]

Originally Posted by Cats

A good reason to leave room for the thread creator to have a say.
The privilage can be limited to the Anime Discussion section to avoid complications.

People would then be able to pm him instead of "strangers to the show".

While I work on a rather long example reply, I'll note that the majority of threads are started by a handful of creators (mods for the series forums, a certain group of people for the unaired forum, etc) and I know at least one of these people knows nothing about half the shows he starts threads for and only posts again in the threads that he actually cares about.

[NeoSam]

Originally Posted by bayoab

and I know at least one of these people knows nothing about half the shows he starts threads for and only posts again in the threads that he actually cares about.

So what? so what if "he" posts in only the threads he cares about, is there any rule that says: "you should post in the threads you create". I haven't read this rule anywhere.

[Scep]

Imo, tags on authors/op/eds and information like that that is 'cold hard facts' does not need to be tagged, since it dosen't take a forum to know this kind of stuff, you can find it on google easily. My own two cents is that how much more relevant would tags be as compared to a search function?

Tags like 'episode discussion' or 'chapter discussion' may be redundant since you can simply do a title search. Image threads and etc. aren't that hard to find as well, and do not need to be categorized because there's only one such thread in every topic. Maybe a better alternative to tag systems would be a systematic naming system. Just my 2 cents.

Also, I was just wondering, are certain tags really useful? Like, its just my own opinion, but what would be the use of a tag that categorizes romance together, like i mean even if you're interested, you're talking about totally different characters with totally different relationships. And tags like kemonomimi or furry are specific to animes, and not threads. Disregarding the question of whether this information can be found through other means, you can't label series, so which thread in a series would you label? (although on second thought, there are many series without their own forums, so this may not be a problem)

[Deathkillz]

I wonder what would happen if power were to be given to the normal users so that they can edit not only their tags but others as well. This may solve the problem if it can be corrected (like if a thread was wrongly tagged) without bugging a mod and hence making their jobs easier but then again it is based on trust and that no one runs around causing havoc. Maybe allow a select few to be able to have this editing power?

Tag team, lol >.>

[NeoSam]

Originally Posted by Deathkillz

I wonder what would happen if power were to be given to the normal users so that they can edit not only their tags but others as well. This may solve the problem if it can be corrected (like if a thread was wrongly tagged) without bugging a mod and hence making their jobs easier but then again it is based on trust and that no one runs around causing havoc. Maybe allow a select few to be able to have this editing power?

Tag team, lol >.>

TT for short LOL they will be crying for being nagged on so much by users

[bayoab]

Originally Posted by NoSanninWa

I don't know the answer to that question. So far we're just discovering that a non-select group of people are eager to tag shows with names of characters, awesomeness and fail. That doesn't seem to be working either...

I don't disagree with the current tagging is mostly failure and there needs to be some sort of balance against stupidity. I would partly blame it on different expectations of what the tags are for. Some people may want genres (comedy,romance), others will want themes (big boobs [Dragonaut/Eiken], fujoshi [Genshiken, Doujin work], tsundere), others want demographics (for girls, for boys, for fujoshi, for kids), and some will just want silly things (Your new god! [Haruhi, Kyouran Kazoku]). And someone who cares about various aspects like "cat ears" may find tags such as "kemonomini" useless when half the results are for foxes.

It would be nice to have common themes to search through like "Ninjas", "Magic", "Greek myth based" or similar to find stuff faster. Running a search on some of these is rather useless.

Something I like is the Niconico Douga style which was elaborated on in this post. Certain tags could be protected/unprotected by the "mod group", but all others are free for all. This results in more collaboration over it by the viewing community and at the same time, lets those people who want to have fun have their fun. Eventually, someone will come by and "fix" it.

For the problems with having a small group of keywords, in the fansubbed forum, you have to compress a lot of information down into a few words. For example: Nabari no Ou. Yes, it is a show with ninjas so that may be a good tag. However, although it runs in a magazine for boys, it clearly has a very large female fanbase and posting group. Tags that mean more to females may be better than ones that mean more to males (Bishi, shounen-ai, etc)

For the kind of thing that might happen in the individual series forum:
To use the example of Nico Douga and Yugioh, commonly placed tags on individual episode videos are:

• "MAD ingredients"
• the name of the animation director of the episode
• various things that are repeated throughout the show ("just riding it", FGD, "Enter my road")
• Key popular items: "enemy controller", "Zutto ore no taan"
• Various comments on the episodes such as "disaster in animation"

Some of these always link to other videos and others will not.
While they might look like nonsense to an outsider, to a fan of the show, these all make sense and are sometimes great ways to jump between episodes.

Yes, these are videos and you can't search through videos like you can search through text, but these are also things that you wouldn't expect to appear in posts in a thread.

The tags kind of lose their meaning if a select group of people are deciding whether they are actually relevant or not as opposed to those watching the show. Maybe making a way or requirement for people to justify the tags will do the trick (ex: alt text).

[wao]

bayoab's post on niconico-style tag systems reminded me - what do you do if people start posting spoilers *in tags*? Can't block tags unlike the way you block users who are known to keep spoiling.

On niconico the only thing people can do is have tag editing wars for unlocked tags and try delete the offending tags. A small amount of people get around chronic tag-spoiling incidents by getting some greasemonkey/proxomitron script to not display tags at all or something, I think (or was that long ago).

I don't suppose there's a way for people to not have tags displayed if they want to?

I agree that it can't all be decided by a small group of people. In that case I think the benefits provided by tags will be too minimal to justify implementing them... (don't tags increase load time for pages? I dunno.)

Tags have to have something different from normal search functions so that they're not redundant (and if seiyuu/author/studio info is better looked up on ANN etc, I'd say some genres should be too - maybe not ANN/AniDB etc alone but a cursory search of an anime usually tells you what it is.)

Unfortunately I think most "non-searchable" things that people would like to add tags of would most likely be unique or maybe controversial things... Something about the thread that isn't actually searchable by the words that describe it... like a summary of the thread that is not a summary of the show ("flame war"?)
Then again I've never been on a board that uses tags so I think my imagination would be quite limited here.

[Radiosity]

Originally Posted by Zippicus

It would probably be nice if the tags were easily understood, I'll use the example cited in this thread since it fits the bill IMO. If I saw the tag "Kemonomimi" I would have no idea what it was, probably quite a few other people would have this problem as well. I can imagine deciding on tags will be difficult since people can rarely agree on just what the various labels tossed around mean. I think erring on the side of understandability would be better than being most technically correct.

For ease of use for the less knowledgeable about the japanese language, I'd personally suggest going with the english equivalent (Animal Ears or whatever) then setting up an alias that would point to this tag if someone searched for kemonomimi instead (I assume the software does have an alias system of some sort?).

[felix]

Originally Posted by Radiosity

(I assume the software does have an alias system of some sort?).

I don't recall one existing. Maybe some trick with languages can produce the effect.

[NightWish]

Originally Posted by wao

what do you do if people start posting spoilers *in tags*?

Report it? We can see how has added each tag, so even if the system stays open (debatable) abuse will be monitored and stomped on with very large boots.

Originally Posted by wao

I don't suppose there's a way for people to not have tags displayed if they want to?

Not currently; it should probably go on a wish-list of little tweaks that users want. Then someone can try implementing them, rejecting them, or submitting them to the developers to add to the base product.

Originally Posted by wao

don't tags increase load time for pages?

Not significantly.