fail_fandomanon

People on this meme have ranted a lot about the flaws of both ff.net and AO3, mostly about the searching, metadata, and tagging functions. FF.net tells people to classify their works into preset categories. AO3 mostly tells people to tag their works any which way they like (with required things, like warnings), and then the tag wranglers will sort things out.

What do you think the ideal system would be, for ease of browsing and searching? Feel free to give examples of other types of archives. (I'm also thinking of pixiv)

1) Pre-set categories for each fandom (fandom name, characters), with an easy way to introduce new ones (i.e., fans add a new fandom tag, wranglers check it out, standartize it and input characters. Pairings/threesomes/relationship tags are made from combining existing character tags)
2) Pre-set genre categories
3) Freeform tagging for anything else

Oh, and an opt-out option for search (look for "Avengers hurt/comfort -crossover -Loki", something like this). Or at least putting crossover results separately from main ones.

Have to say, the idea of pre-set genre categories really horrifies me. A big part of the point of fanworks is that they're not restricted to market categories. Certainly a lot of people happily channel their work into recognizable genres even without market pressures, and a good archive search would give people ways to mark things as belonging to genres if they wanted to do that.

But structuring your archive to assume that work will belong to preset genres, which implicitly turns genre into a kind of normative goal, and assumes that there is no interest in non-genre work from either makers of fanworks or the audience for them? No. Just, no.

I like the idea if pre-set tags for all the fandoms. With a simple way for new fandoms or characters to be added. They could be flagged for the wranglers to check, and once that's happened become the standard.

Having a big list of everything from kinks to genres, things like AUs, also H/c, angst etc, that users can choose to use. With the option of users being able to add other freeform tags if they want to. But also give users the option to view all tags, or view only site tags.

Different categories for fic, meta, art, vids, and podfic, and the ability to search either all the works in a fandom, or just fic, just art etc.

Mandatory crossover mark, and the ability to choose all works, just single fandom, or just crossovers while searching.

Yes.

Agreed with this. Fandoms and character names should be set (and by extension pairings), not variable. The current AO3 system is ridiculous.

Genre is also good, and to appease anons who object to preset genre categories, I'd say that there should also be an "Other" category. If your story doesn't fit into any of the available categories, just put it there.

I think a hybrid solution would be possible in which authors are free to tag their works as they see fit, but get only a limited number of slots in which they can suggest new tags. So if you're uploading a work, you get to use as many validated tags as you like, then enter in three or four provisional ones. If each author is limited in the number of free tags they can use, then a) they will be less likely to suggest frivolous tags that serve no purpose for finding the work and b) whoever is in charge of validating tags will have far fewer to deal with. Readers can suggest tags for works which authors or admins can approve or disapprove of, with the author having the final word. Or, scrap the molly-coddling of authors and just have an author's tagset alongside a public tagset, and if they author doesn't like it they can take their ball and go home.

Using semantic technology and site statistics, validated tags can be grouped in categories to make it easier to spot synonymous or redundant tags, and users can vote on controversial tags. Conversely, synonymous tags can be linked to a supertag that leads to the same place, so if Author A wants to use "blah" and Author B wants to use "bleh", and the camps behind each tag are irreconcilably wanky, "blah" and "bleh" can just go to the same "bl*h" supertag without anyone having to wade into the self-entitled nitpickery that plagues fan-creators.

Tagging is a beautiful semantic invention that should enable me to find every story ever written that contains or revolves around loving description of trains, machinery, factories, or cities. Instead, we get tags like "I'm so random!!1! lol". No. Just no.

Oh, and validation of tags, both site-wide and work-specific, can run on weighted voting systems.

Say you're reading a story and it's been publicly tagged with "flarg", but as far as you can tell there's no flarg in the story. You can vote against the work being tagged "flarg". If you own a lot of stories tagged with "flarg", your vote is slightly weighted. If you're an admin, your vote is slightly weighted. If you're the author, your vote is heavily weighted. If too many people vote against the work being tagged "flarg", the tag is removed and can only be reattached by appeal. You can only get the ability to vote on a work's tags if you've opened the work (and possibly if you've scrolled to the bottom or otherwise proven your interaction with the story).

Or, scrap the molly-coddling of authors and just have an author's tagset alongside a public tagset, and if they author doesn't like it they can take their ball and go home.

New evil finger-twiddling note-taking anon had this idea as well. It would need a voting mechanism or something: often-nominated tags weighted over that misspelled tag that one reader put in.

Auto-completion can help reduce accidental mistagging due to typos. Also a confirmation step: "You're about to add brand new tag cofeeshop au. Is this new tag going to help readers find your fic?" Or something like that. Limiting the number of new tags & their length will also help.

One goal I have is a design that does not depend on vast amounts of volunteer labor. Zero volunteer labor would be ideal. Though I think the tags list should get seeded before archive launch with a nice chunky set of fic tags created by experienced archivist nonnies. Tags *are* the hard part here because you're putting a crucial method of browsing for fic into the hands of the writer. Some will care a lot and tag carefully. Some, er, won't.

Any AO3 tag wranglers know off-hand how many tags total are in the AO3 system? I was doing some back of the envelope calculations about how much memory the whole dataset would occupy with a particular indexing scheme I was pondering. Had to guess at real numbers, though.

You can't close the browser window or otherwise leave the site until you leave feedback of some kind (preferably positive).

Only half-joking here.

That would end with me leaving an awful lot of feedback that said things like "this worked well for five minutes of procrastination!" or "Your characterization, grammar, and spelling are terrible, but that fisting scene was just what I was looking for!" or "Your fic is crap, but thank you for writing in this tiny fandom!"

'Want to close window' to circumvent the character count you'd have to implement to keep me from going '.'.
And I can't think of a way that'd stop me from keeping control over my own damn browser while still letting me read the fic.

Separate from browsing/searching, I'd crib the DeviantART Critique feature. On every specific work you have the option of allowing viewers to submit critiques, which are treated differently from regular comments (visually separated on the page, notifications are different, etc) and set up to encourage the responses to be in-depth and constructively critical.

That's a great idea.

Oh, I didn't know DA had this, but yeah. Ideal feature for me too.

Personally, I'd also prefer the option of making critiques screened/private. That way there's never any question of people jumping on bandwagons wrt critique. If 3 people tell you the same thing without seeing each other's response first, then it's a lot easier to admit that they probably have a point.

I like that idea! I haven't been on DA in ages, but that was one change they implemented that I actually found useful.

Probably an awful lot like FF.net, only with the ability to tag for more than character and genre and rating. Only the tags would be generally preset so people didn't spam their stories with a paragraph of tags that's longer than the actual summary. No limits on the number of stories that come up, ability to exclude by tag as well as search by tag. Easy ways to bookmark links and favorite them, NO KUDOS OPTION.

It would also support fanart and fanvids, if people wanted to post those, but it would allow people to search by only fic, art, or video.

Why the hate of kudos? I freaking love them, both as an author and as a reader.

VERY IMPORTANT for me: Separate categories for browsing for main characters/pairings and secondary chracters/pairings. So when I search for Alice/Bob fics I only get fics that are actually about them. But if the Alice/Bob fic contains secondary Charlie/Dave, then that should be visible too.

A community function for making sure stories are tagged in a way that makes it easily findable by anyone interested.

Clean, consistent, preset tags of all kinds. Tagging page before posting fic, is set in a comprehensive and intuitive way so that the author themselves doesn't miss out on tagging comprehesively in the first place.

Separate viewing methods for fic and art and vid. I don't like AO3 method of making vids and fanart just embedded in fic skin. Make them visually different (and hopefully offering previews) on common feed and also have ability to view them individually in separate feeds.

Umm, not browsing/searching, but I really really like FF.net's new reading function. SO AWESOME, even if I don't read anything there, it's making me want to. So I want that. Ability to javascript change fonts between serif / sans serif etc, increase/decrease font size almost indefinitely, increase/decrease line spacing!, dark/light reading option and of course the page width options, it's just awesome all around. So yeah, that.

I'd be thrilled with a primary pairing vs secondary parings option. (The perils of being a minor pairing fan in a fandom where my OTP keeps getting broken up on page one of a fic to facilitate the fandom fave.)

It'd be nice to have that extended to the character tags too, I get sick of clicking on a tag for Bob, then finding a bunch of fics where he only shows up for one line.

Twisting the hellmouth has a basic character sort option, where you can search a category by character and it sorts the fics by the number of times the character's name appears in the fic. A more sophisticated version of that would be awesome.

I would kill for a way separate tags as being either 'focus' or 'cameo/background' elements - particularly when it comes to characters, pairings or crossovers. Fic is mostly about the great romance of A/B but has a bit of C/D going on in the background? A/B goes under 'focus', C/D goes under 'cameo'. Fic has a single appearance by a detective from the writer's favourite incarnation of CSI despite being set in the DC universe? Tag it as a cameo crossover. Chuck an 'ignore/include cameos' checkbox under the search page, and half your complaints about misleading tags are gone overnight.

(Naturally, this all takes place in the fantasy wonderland where no-one ever deliberately mis-tags their fic for extra hits, where everyone intuitively gets the focus/cameo distinction, and no additional coding difficulties are incurred whatsoever.)

I really really want preset, browsable categories for AO3. Ffnet's system is pretty lacking but it still works much better for me even with all of its many faults. If they want freeform tags on AO3 they should be in addition to the preset categories, not instead of them.

Also AO3's search and browsing interface is so ugly and counterintuitive.

+1000 on separating main characters/pairings from secondary characters/pairings

No red on grey layout! Hell, not even blue on grey ro whatever. Can't we have a nice green layout for once? Or just a plain white & black one with a happy little "pick this flip to white on black" option