AnimeSuki Forums

Register Forum Rules FAQ Members List Social Groups Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Go Back   AnimeSuki Forum > Support > Forum & Site Feedback

Notices

Reply
 
Thread Tools
Old 2008-05-27, 03:13   Link #61
xris
Just call me Ojisan
 
 
Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: U.K. Hampshire
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cats View Post
How exactly do you do that?... I can't seem to search/list multiple tags.

edit

NVM, found it. It's in Advance Search, right under search by user name.

edit 2

Oh wait, no that only works for 1 tag. Hm.
Correct, at this point in time you can only search for one tag at a time. Advanced Search doesn't help in this case.

Something like a multiple tag search will have to come from Jelsoft as it would be a major hack.
xris is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 2008-05-27, 03:25   Link #62
cyth
Banned
 
Join Date: Dec 2006
Age: 38
Arguably, younger fans are taking over the fandom. I would personally not want to see AnimeSuki turn into a sort of "fun house" for children. Open tagging system can become a part of this problem (I see it as such), but please don't fool yourselves that AnimeSuki's House of Fun hasn't opened already (just look at the Saimoe thread ;_;). I see this tagging business more of an issue between certain kinds of tags and their usefulness (leaving spoiler, joke and insult tags aside); I can't say with 100% conviction that labeling Kanokon with a "furry" tag is incorrect because that's a term with which a segment of the fandom relates to it.
If you're going to go with the popular vote (displaying tags that have been clicked the most/agreed upon by the majority), then we can all pretty much guess that publisher labels, creator credits and other useful information will be pushed aside--the tag system will be dominated by genre names, or it'll be a plethora of every possible label known to man. The former alone is a problem because most anime are mixtures of very different genres, and a lot of people can go really angry, really fast if you don't mention every possible genre. If we take Kanokon as example again, AniDB has the following genre names attributed to it: Comedy, Ecchi, Harem, Juujin, Love Polygon, Romance, Sudden Girlfriend Appearance (ww). That's a lot of "genres" for a relatively new series, not to mention passionate series fans would find some objectionable, others would dispute the correctness of some of the terms, on the other hand, some people would complain if they weren't included. The problem with genre labels is that usually there is no party more reliable for labeling than publishers themselves. Sure, you can leave the tagging system to self-moderation and self-formation. However, for people who know that xxxHOLiC isn't shoujo but rather seinen, in presence of persistent but misinformed people, the struggle between correctness and popular vote can become irritating and tiresome. There is also a possibility of losing informed posters that contribute a lot of useful information to the clutter. Case in point, you can't get away without a group of people that should know better than the majority taking the charge here. Elitism vs populism is an age old debate, but taking all things in consideration, I think the former is much needed in this case.

(Then again, you could simply disable tags and this discussion is over, but I guess that's not happening.)
cyth is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 2008-05-27, 03:36   Link #63
NeoSam
Senior Member
 
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Age: 43
Quote:
Originally Posted by NoSanninWa View Post
He wasn't criticising you for creating such threads. He was making a point that thread creators aren't necessarily the best judges of tags.
Ahh I see, no problem then

I only will be adding the "genre" type of tags >.< probably, also mangaka, author, illustrator, ... stuff like that, but I'm not going to add tags that usually don't interest me >.<
__________________
NeoSam is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 2008-05-27, 07:07   Link #64
SeijiSensei
AS Oji-kun
 
 
Join Date: Nov 2006
Age: 74
I spent an hour or two yesterday tagging threads in the Suggestions forum. I've spent a lot of time there over the past couple of years and have a pretty good sense about the kinds of requests that get made. I limited my efforts to threads with a substantial number of postings that have seen at least one posting in 2008. (I'm down to threads with about 30 postings or fewer at the moment.) I also included a couple of older threads that concerned less common requests like shows for children.

Most of the tags I used were obvious genre ones like "romance," though I used "romantic comedy" for threads where the OP specified comedic shows. I created a couple of more obscure tags like "genre definitions" when a thread veered into a discussion of which shows were correctly classified in a particular genre. (I almost created an "is elfen lied mature" tag since nearly every discussion of "mature" shows seems to end in a debate over EL 's relevance!)

Multi-word tags like "romantic comedy" may help alleviate the problem of searching for multiple tags. I did find that starting from scratch with only two tags at my disposal posed some difficult choices. For instance, there are a number of requests for "action/comedy/romance" shows (e.g., FUMOFFU) that really cry out for three separate tags.

I then tried searching for my tags and discovered that it was a forum-wide search even if I accessed it from the "search this forum" drop-down box. You apparently can't ask only for threads tagged "romance" in the Suggestions forum, though you can obviously sort the results page by forum title and browse to "Suggestions."
SeijiSensei is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 2008-05-27, 07:13   Link #65
NightWish
…Nothing More
*Administrator
 
 
Join Date: Mar 2003
Age: 44
Quote:
Originally Posted by SeijiSensei View Post
You apparently can't ask only for threads tagged "romance" in the Suggestions forum, though you can obviously sort the results page by forum title and browse to "Suggestions."
You can, but only via the Advanced Search page and only if you press "Search Now" rather than following the link in the search tag cloud. The fact it doesn't work from the forum menu is probably a bug. -- Not sure what you mean by it not working via the forum menu, as there is no tag search directly, only a link to advanced (which does work)?
NightWish is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 2008-05-27, 07:20   Link #66
SeijiSensei
AS Oji-kun
 
 
Join Date: Nov 2006
Age: 74
Tagging the Suggestions forum

I spent a couple of hours adding tags to threads in this forum that have a substantial number of postings and at least one submission from 2008. For more details, see this thread.

I'd ask people posting new requests to the Suggestions forum to consider adding tags at the end of their submissions. Please try to stick to broad categories like genre (romance, comedy, mystery, ecchi, etc.) as much as possible. Requests of the "more shows like X" variety should probably include the root show title as well, since someone searching for, say, Zero no Tsukaima might also be interested in a thread about other shows like ZnT.

For everyone else, please help tag this forum by adding your own contributions. Anyone can submit up to two tags for a thread; the OP can include five. Tagging the Suggestions forum may eventually help reduce the number of redundant requests submitted here.
SeijiSensei is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 2008-05-27, 07:25   Link #67
xris
Just call me Ojisan
 
 
Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: U.K. Hampshire
Quote:
Originally Posted by SeijiSensei View Post
I then tried searching for my tags and discovered that it was a forum-wide search even if I accessed it from the "search this forum" drop-down box. You apparently can't ask only for threads tagged "romance" in the Suggestions forum, though you can obviously sort the results page by forum title and browse to "Suggestions."
You can search a forum for specific tags, you have to use the advanced search feature.

Enter the tag in the Search by Tag box and then highlight the forum(s) in the Search in Forum(s) list just below.

But, this is the problem. I would serious suggest that none of the threads in the Suggestions forum are tagged at all.

I would also suggest that creating tags such a "Romantic Comedy" is in general a bad idea. We really need to wait for Jelsoft to improve their code to allow the searching of multiple tags (as it is, a single tag limits the search so badly).

As has been mentioned many times, tags mean different things to different people and at the onset of the tags implemention here at AnimeSuki, it generally is a mess already Time may help, decent s/w from Jelsoft may help, some sort of formal implementation may help (i.e. the Tag Team) but who knows.

But if I wanted to search for Comedy (or whatever) anime series , the last thing I would want is to have the hundreds of tagged threads located in the Suggestion forum. Since tags can be sorted by forum maybe it's not so bad but only if the searcher is aware that you can in fact limit such seraches.

Ah well, beaten by NightWish.
xris is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 2008-05-27, 07:31   Link #68
xris
Just call me Ojisan
 
 
Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: U.K. Hampshire
Quote:
Originally Posted by SeijiSensei View Post
For everyone else, please help tag this forum by adding your own contributions. Anyone can submit up to two tags for a thread; the OP can include five. Tagging the Suggestions forum may eventually help reduce the number of redundant requests submitted here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by xris View Post
I would serious suggest that none of the threads in the Suggestions forum are tagged at all.
This appears to be using the tags the wrong way round. I think that if you want to search for a genre, then you should have actual series discussion threads returned, not the oddles of threads that offer the suggestions.

Last edited by xris; 2008-05-27 at 13:02. Reason: Added quote from post it refers to
xris is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 2008-05-27, 07:55   Link #69
SeijiSensei
AS Oji-kun
 
 
Join Date: Nov 2006
Age: 74
Quote:
Originally Posted by xris View Post
This appears to be using the tags the wrong way round. I think that if you want to search for a genre, then you should have actual series discussion threads returned, not the oddles of threads that offer the suggestions.
I respectfully disagree. If I were looking for "romantic comedy" wouldn't it be useful to get lists of them as well as a collection of individual series threads? Moreover the lists in the Suggestions forum often include comparative discussions about the merits of different series. It would take a lot longer to glean the same type of information from reading individual series threads.

Also one of the biggest problems with the Suggestions forum in my eyes is the enormous amount of redundancy that occurs. I had the, perhaps unrealistic, view that tagging in this forum would cut down on the n+1th romantic comedy request, since it would be easier to skim the tagged Suggestions threads that deal with that subject.

I know that tagging is supposed to improve searching across forums more than within them, but I thought the Suggestions forums presented a rather special case. It would be hard for me to go back through, find, and delete the few dozen tags I've inserted. If you think they're not appropriate, xris, just delete them. I won't be offended. If you think tagging isn't appropriate in this forum entirely, is there any way to turn it off selectively? Leaving it enabled will inevitably lead to people submitting tags.
SeijiSensei is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 2008-05-27, 08:40   Link #70
NightWish
…Nothing More
*Administrator
 
 
Join Date: Mar 2003
Age: 44
Quote:
Originally Posted by xris View Post
But, this is the problem. I would serious suggest that none of the threads in the Suggestions forum are tagged at all.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SeijiSensei View Post
I posted this reply to xris's comments about the Suggestions forum.
I personally agree with SeijiSensei here If this use of the tags is not usefully providing an alternative slice through the forum's content, I am not sure what would. Aside from the use of a two loosely related words (romantic and comedy) in one tag, what specifically about tagging the suggestion forum is negative? The only argument against it I can see is that it would "pollute" the results with lots of suggestion threads, which it would. But that would be helpful IF the tags are applied to a selection of the better suggestion threads. There is duplication, as SeijiSensei says, in that forum which could be effectively "removed" by not tagging some of the threads. Maybe I'm missing something obvious?
Quote:
Originally Posted by xris View Post
We really need to wait for Jelsoft to improve their code to allow the searching of multiple tags (as it is, a single tag limits the search so badly).
My guess, on the reason for a multi-tag search not existing, is the added complexity on how you combine each tag. Do you want threads featuring ALL the tags, ANY of the tags, or worse still, do you want to be able to say ALL threads with x, BUT not y. It could be as complex as the keyword search. As it happens, expanding it to simply "search more than one tag" is a relatively trivial change (I have a working example on a test system).
NightWish is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 2008-05-27, 10:21   Link #71
xris
Just call me Ojisan
 
 
Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: U.K. Hampshire
I would first say that we need to understand the reason why the Suggestions forum seems so popular, well maybe not "popular" but active, and why people post here in the first place.

I would suggest that the reason is that in most cases (not all, but I'm sure it the majority) the thread creator doesn't know what they are looking for and often doesn't actually know the question they want to ask. They may not be familiar with the huge range of the different anime series available and it can be a daunting task trying to sort the wheat form the chaff, an easier solution is to simply ask the advice of others.

Very often it's a case of "I've seen this, this and that, please recommend me similar series". It's rather difficult to pin down in a few words what it was about one particular series that struck a cord, it might well be a genre, it might be an emotion the series triggered, it might be so many things. Reading a number of the threads here I would say that very often the poster doesn't even know themselves what it is they are after.

So what has this got to do with tags? My point is that it's rather meaningless to associate tags with such threads in this sub-forum because the person who asks the question may not even notice the tags or may not really care as such, what they want is a number of recommendations of actual specific series.

In most cases, the poster could have searched sites such as ANN, AniDB or better yet use Anime-Planet for anime recommendations. The poster could have searched these forums and our genre list but such is life, it's easier to ask and let someone else do the work for you. In many ways there is nothing wrong with this, there are thousands and thousands of anime series out there and it's not easy to get familiar with so many of them.

What I'm getting at is that if these posters are not going to search for themselves beforehand, why do you expect them to search using tags afterwards? Tags in the most part are going to be added by those responding (or at least that is what you are primarily recommending it seems) and the point I'm making, such tags are only going to clutter up searches with oodles of slightly off-topic suggestions threads.

But again tags are primarily a search tool. Does it matter if the search tool returns chat as well as the wheat? Who is it that decides what is chat an the wheat anyway? Personally I still am unsure of tags but so far it seems clear that different people will find different uses for them and will use them in different ways. All well and good. What I want to say with my initial comment was that please don't be in a rush to start tagging everything left, right and centre. Removing tags (at this point in time) appears to be a real pain (be it the user or a Moderator), it's time consuming and boring to do. We (AnimeSuki) are still trying to decide what path we should take over the feature and I hope that posters such as you (SeijiSensei) and others help us define the path. There is no immediate rush to tag everything, we are still trying to see how it can be best used here in these forums.

I also wonder if tags such as "inspirational", "maturation", "production values", "scenery", "emotional_attachment", etc., etc. are ever going to be used in a search before or after they are added anyway. While I don't have a say how you wish to spend your time I would prefer your help and effort be channelled in alternative ways in helping AnimeSuki define and implement tags and decide what direction we should go in. After this, we can go crazy tagging the world.

So by all means continue to tags if you wish
xris is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 2008-05-27, 11:32   Link #72
relentlessflame
 
*Administrator
 
 
Join Date: Dec 2003
Age: 41
Quote:
Originally Posted by Toua View Post
Arguably, younger fans are taking over the fandom. I would personally not want to see AnimeSuki turn into a sort of "fun house" for children. [...] If you're going to go with the popular vote (displaying tags that have been clicked the most/agreed upon by the majority), then we can all pretty much guess that publisher labels, creator credits and other useful information will be pushed aside--the tag system will be dominated by genre names, or it'll be a plethora of every possible label known to man. [...] Case in point, you can't get away without a group of people that should know better than the majority taking the charge here. Elitism vs populism is an age old debate, but taking all things in consideration, I think the former is much needed in this case.
I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at here, but my gut instinct tells me that you're wrong. I don't think any among the mods or admins would allow the feature to simply "run amok" and become useless. No matter how it ends up happening, it's virtually assured that stupid tags will be removed, and useful tags will be added. And I don't have a problem at all with helping put in some extra effort to implement the sorts of tags that can be useful, and helping inform/persuade everyone of their usefulness.

In other words, I don't see why you're so pessimistic about it. I think that, with a bit of work, we can make this something useful, relevant, and much more than the "lowest common denominator", and we can do that without either resorting to total elitism or close-mindedness. I have more faith in the forum membership than you do, I guess. We'll get there.

Quote:
Originally Posted by NightWish View Post
My guess, on the reason for a multi-tag search not existing, is the added complexity on how you combine each tag. Do you want threads featuring ALL the tags, ANY of the tags, or worse still, do you want to be able to say ALL threads with x, BUT not y. It could be as complex as the keyword search. As it happens, expanding it to simply "search more than one tag" is a relatively trivial change (I have a working example on a test system).
From what I've read, it sounds like one of the early beta version of this vBulletin upgrade allowed you to search for multiple keywords using the comma syntax that you'd normally use for entering tags. For example, you could search for "romance,comedy,spring 2008", which would be like an "AND" search for all three. I'm not sure why they removed it, though, and I found some other comments wondering why it was non longer there. I assume that perhaps they lacked the time to optimize the code and so it was dropped from this version in order to be reintroduced later.

Anyway, whether you use that method or another, I'm strongly in favour or multiple tag search, and I think that would probably help alleviate the need for "composite tags".

Quote:
Originally Posted by NightWish View Post
Aside from the use of a two loosely related words (romantic and comedy) in one tag, what specifically about tagging the suggestion forum is negative? The only argument against it I can see is that it would "pollute" the results with lots of suggestion threads, which it would. But that would be helpful IF the tags are applied to a selection of the better suggestion threads.
Well, if we had multi-tag search, we could fix this entire problem by just tagging all suggestion threads with "suggestion", or by encouraging people to use the Advanced Search to restrict the tag search to only a certain forum. For every problem, there's a solution.
__________________
[...]
relentlessflame is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 2008-05-27, 12:24   Link #73
SeijiSensei
AS Oji-kun
 
 
Join Date: Nov 2006
Age: 74
I appreciate all the fine arguments you've made here, xris. As it turns out, I've finished with the task I set myself, tagging threads with about 25 postings or more that include at least one posting in 2008.

The task gave me a chance to consider how I would tag a variety of items. Let's take the "inspirational" tag, for instance. Since members do specifically ask for shows with inspirational themes, I thought this might be a useful criterion when searching Suggestions. I agree with you that a large fraction of the requests here are of the "something like X" variety, but there are also dozens of requests for some combination of romance, action, and comedy, and the occasional ones for things like "production values." There are also some members who make more thoughtful requests. Often these threads get a lot of traffic, and much of it is well-informed.

However, I think my perception of how tagging works is rather different from yours and probably Jelsoft's (and, for all I know, everyone who knows about "social networking" about which I know nothing). Everything about tagging seems so global. If I click on a tag in the cloud I get all threads that are so tagged. Restricting searches to specific forums, though possible, isn't obviously supported on the tag search page.

I also thought that perhaps we'd get to see tag usage patterns by forum rather than the global "cloud." That way someone could visit a page like tags.php for the Suggestions forum and see the tags in use there. That would certainly make tagging a useful feature in Suggestions, since people could start with the tags page to get a list of existing relevant threads. It would also enable members to build up a common vocabulary of tags relevant to that forum.

Since you've been browsing my tags (how can I do that, by the way?), you can see I've studiously avoided ones like shounen, shoujo, etc., and tried to stick with obvious content genres like "romance." Then there are the variety of tags that you mentioned that are descriptive of the content like "maturation." Shows as divergent as Hikaru no Go, Dennou Coil, and Twelve Kingdoms share this characteristic. Given the primary audience for anime, maturation seems a common and likely theme.

As for how we might build up a common vocabulary of tags, I'll discuss that in the Tags thread over in Forums and Site Feedback.

Maybe this thread should be closed with discussion redirected to the Tags thread? If so, I'm sorry if I diverted the conversation over here.
SeijiSensei is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 2008-05-27, 12:50   Link #74
NightWish
…Nothing More
*Administrator
 
 
Join Date: Mar 2003
Age: 44
Quote:
Originally Posted by SeijiSensei View Post
Maybe this thread should be closed with discussion redirected to the Tags thread? If so, I'm sorry if I diverted the conversation over here.
I have merged them instead...
NightWish is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 2008-05-27, 16:10   Link #75
cyth
Banned
 
Join Date: Dec 2006
Age: 38
Quote:
Originally Posted by relentlessflame View Post
In other words, I don't see why you're so pessimistic about it. I think that, with a bit of work, we can make this something useful, relevant, and much more than the "lowest common denominator", and we can do that without either resorting to total elitism or close-mindedness. I have more faith in the forum membership than you do, I guess. We'll get there.
I'm really not pessimistic about it; please don't throw words like that around. I will confirm that I do not trust the forum membership, that I do out of good reasons, but I'm convinced your tag moderation team will tackle this problem just fine. With that in mind, an idea crossed my mind: Would it be possible to set a limited number of times regular forum members can add tags to a single thread? Say, every regular member has only two rounds of adding tags per thread. They could delete them but not edit or add them again. This would help moderators deal with troublemakers as illegal tags would simply need to be removed, you wouldn't even need to apply any punishments (except in global forum cases). The forum system would simply restrain members from doing it over and over again. It might even make them think a bit more before using their two rounds of tags.
cyth is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 2008-05-27, 16:47   Link #76
xris
Just call me Ojisan
 
 
Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: U.K. Hampshire
Checks and restrictions such as that might (or might not) be a good idea but you are suggesting it to the wrong people, you need to be suggesting it to Jelsoft.

Please remember these new features are only now available because Jelsoft released a new version of the forum s/w, it's not something we designed and implemented ourselves.

It may be possible to add a hack or a plug-in to do this but please remember we do not have unlimited resources to design, develop or debug such features. Chances are a lot of these new features are going to change and evolve with forum updates anyway so we could be wasting our time trying to work out how to make these changes.
xris is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 2008-05-27, 18:12   Link #77
Seditary
Ooooo what?!
 
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Someplace cold :(
Age: 40
Just something quick that occurred to me, do the tags get merged when threads get merged? (since Nightwish merged SeijiSensei's thread with this Tag Discussion thread)
__________________
Seditary is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 2008-05-27, 18:19   Link #78
NightWish
…Nothing More
*Administrator
 
 
Join Date: Mar 2003
Age: 44
Quote:
Originally Posted by Seditary View Post
the tags get merged when threads get merged?
Yes, they do.
NightWish is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 2008-05-27, 18:24   Link #79
NoSanninWa
Weapon of Mass Discussion
*Fansubber
 
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: New York, USA
Quote:
Originally Posted by Seditary View Post
Just something quick that occurred to me, do the tags get merged when threads get merged? (since Nightwish merged SeijiSensei's thread with this Tag Discussion thread)
That was such an excellent questions that I created two threads with different tag fields and merged them to test it. Yes, tags are merged.

Edit: Beaten by NightWish, but I bet he didn't actually test it!
__________________

There's not that fine a line between willing suspension of disbelief and something just being stupid.
NoSanninWa is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 2008-05-27, 18:27   Link #80
Seditary
Ooooo what?!
 
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Someplace cold :(
Age: 40
Well Nightwish had just recently merged some threads, so I assume he noticed, and that was testing enough NSW

But thank you for the effort.
__________________
Seditary is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Tags
feedback, forum upgrade, tags

Thread Tools

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -5. The time now is 17:56.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.11
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions Inc.
We use Silk.