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Apr. 29th, 2020 10:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
soc_puppetMy kingdom for a way to differentiate primary ships from secondary and background ships on AO3 🙄 I keep running into one that's not a NoTP, but also definitely not ever something I want to read as the primary focus of a fic. Meanwhile, fans of side-pairings that are popular in the background but not as often in the foreground are usually stuck sorting through dozens and dozens of fics with a given fandom's Uber-Ship that happens to have their preferred ship paired up on the side, and summaries aren't always as helpful as they could be in denoting who, exactly, a given fic is actually about.
Anyway, that's my tiny gripe for the day. I'd say to tune in next time, but I've no notion when that'll be, so I guess you're on your own.
Anyway, that's my tiny gripe for the day. I'd say to tune in next time, but I've no notion when that'll be, so I guess you're on your own.
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Date: 2020-04-30 05:09 am (UTC)I might lean toward the relationship tag split, in part because I think it would be more immediately useful, and in part because I would like to encourage any and all rethinking of AO3's tagging architecture. Though of course that's probably wishful thinking!
(Speaking of wishful thinking... If I were fabulously wealthy enough to buy some servers and build my own archive on AO3's base code, the biggest difference would be the tags! Major/Minor relationships differentiated, limits on the number of tags per work, standardised tags instead of freeform, and better tag-excluding options including "never show me works with tag X when I'm logged in" would be essential features on any archive I turned my hand to.)
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Date: 2020-04-30 05:20 am (UTC)ideally without losing the cool thing where a bunch of people wanting their fics' metadata to have stuff like "LGBT Patron Saint Aziraphale" or "no cops at pride just aziraphale and his flaming sword" results in being able to put in their fics' metadata "Queer Guardian Angel Aziraphale (Good Omens)"
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Date: 2020-04-30 05:07 pm (UTC)- major warnings (major character death, graphic violence/torture, noncon, underage, incest, infidelity, major canon spoilers, maybe a couple more - I've always felt that AO3's choice of 4 is a bit of a weird number)
- character names (down with piping! Or at least down with piping more than two names together! Maybe there'll be a "Spoiler"/"prefer not to say" option for authors who don't want to spoil a late-canon identity reveal etc.)
- relationships (my own DW always puts names in alphabetical order for ease of remembering how to tag them, and that's probably how I'd do it; sorry anime fans who care about the difference between AxB and BxA, I feel for you but you're just going to have to cope)
- major sex acts and plot tropes (possibly as separate fields again: Plot Tags and Kink Tags?)
and then I'd have some kind of petition/submission process where people could easily and conveniently (i.e. with quick response time and a clear approval/denial outcome) request that a tag be created, so that, say, when the next Homestuck fandom happened and a "Moirallegiance" tag could be created.
I am willing to leave tags like "no cops at pride only aziraphale and his sword" to Tumblr and/or one's story notes, in favour of having a tag system that facilitates searching and doesn't require an army of volunteer wranglers to maintain. #I don't need thirty tags on a story, #to tell me about the author, #and their dog, #and their sex life, #and their relative level of caffeination, #and what shipname they think is cutest, #just tell me what's in your fic, #tags are not a blog post, #explain yourself elsewhere.
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Date: 2020-04-30 05:35 pm (UTC)also I feel like your vision of fanwork archive tagging and mine are not gonna get along? because while your examples of tags you don't want are definitely annoying and I'd be okay if they went away: here are the freeform tags on my novel-length, less the five that are not already AO3 canonical freeforms. I know this is too many but all of these are one or both of (1) something I want to be sure people can exclude from their search, or observe in the metadata and then avoid the work itself, if the described content distresses them (2) something I want to be sure people looking for this content can find my fic. which is to say, they facilitate searching, in the exact manner that "no cops at pride only aziraphale and his sword" equating for search purposes to "Queer Guardian Angel Aziraphale (Good Omens)" does.(the relationship and character fields only have the four most important of each, plus the character field has Miraculous Ladybug Ensemble. 'cause people looking for fics that are predominantly Chloé/Kagami will be disappointed in this fic, but their relationship is part of a key subplot.)
under your proposed schema I think I'd have a plot tags field looking likeif that much, since you explicitly don't want the army of wranglers who would need to approve or deny ones like "Akumatized Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug", "Chloé Bourgeois Redemption", or "Lila Rossi's Lies Are Exposed". I think it's a plus that people looking for fics with one or another of those three plot elements, or unwilling to read fics with one or another of those three plot elements, can search by those, or search by not those, or observe them in the work's metadata and choose whether or not to click the work. and without being able to search on "Podfic Welcome", podficcers looking for fanfics they don't have to explicitly ask permission before podficcing would have a difficult time finding my stuff.
I'm not sure how we keep the parts I really like about AO3 freeform tags without also keeping the tag wranglers and both keeping and patiently ignoring the rambling, story-unimportant, never-to-be-wrangled freeform tags.
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Date: 2020-05-01 10:40 pm (UTC)Ultimately it's a matter of taste and habit, I suppose. I 'grew up' in fandom reading on Fanfiction.net and personal archives on Geocities or fandom/pairing-specific archives, and even a mailing list or two; I am used to stories having far fewer descriptive fields and warnings, back before "tags" were really an Internet concept at all.
I tried Tumblr for a while, but never fully got into it, and the same goes for Twitter and del.icio.us and so on. Tagging culture is still pretty much **waves hands vaguely** to me. A lot of what people use tags for can be useful or entertaining, but not having them at all wouldn't faze me; I used to have to figure out whether I wanted to read something based on just a header with the title, the author's name, the rating, and the summary (which usually, but not always, included the pairing), and that was 'normal'.
NOT that this minimalist approach is something I want to go back to! But that I do come to fic with a much different idea of what I want to know about it before starting. I honestly have only a foggy idea of what 'metadata' would mean to someone in a fic context, or even what I'd call something like "Queer Guardian Angel Aziraphale" - a vibe? a character interpretation? a zeitgeist?
There's a lot more space in my imaginary archive for tags that are useful, though, such as "Inspired by Fanart." (One thing my hypothetical archive would definitely keep is AO3's Inspired by setup, because I love it when people link their inspirations. I don't see a lot of people use it with non-AO3 links, though, so if there's an issue there I would build a better version. MOAR inspiration, please, even if it's on another site!)
My main quirk is just wanting tagged terms to be standardised (i.e. pre-available as selections), so one author doesn't enter "inspired by fanart" and a second "fan art inspiration" and a third "inpsiired by a pic by tumblr user XYZ" and a fourth never think of mentioning it despite it being applicable. Let authors be able to choose Inspired by Fanart from a menu, instead of having to come up with it on their own and making every author re-invent the wheel each time they post a story!