Community Tags on Dreamwidth: An Announcement, An Apology, and a Poll

[nookiepowered]

The announcement: so as it turns out, after going on 12 years, we've generated quite a few character tags in fandomtownies and fandomhighdorms; - enough to be over Dreamwidth's 1000-tag limit for free accounts, once we'd transferred everything over. (The other game communities are safely below that and will probably remain so.) The quick solution was to spring for a short term paid account for those two comms, but unless we wanted to keep that up forever, we needed to find the least game-damaging way to reduce the number of tags.

What we came up with was this: we've deleted the least-used character tags for dropped characters only: any in Townies that had 12 or fewer usages, and any in Dorms that had 5 or less. (Student turnover rate means that there were a ton of dorm tags that were only used once or twice.) BUT! Fear not, for we haven't destroyed the ability to find all the posts in which those characters appear. We've just moved it out of the tagging system to a Discontinued Tags page, which lists each deleted character tag alphabetically, and beside it, the individual links to the posts that were tagged: here's the Townies page, and here's Dorms. We also added one new tag to both comms - administrative: discontinued tags - which will always alphabetize at the top of the tags list and show players where to look if you can't find a character tag that you're pretty sure used to exist.

During the process of creating those pages, it became clear pretty quickly that it would be a lot easier to find and check the character tags if they weren't filtered in with business names, cabin names, residential addresses, areas of the dorms, and so on. Restructuring the tag format to match the way the community center classes were already tagged ("cc class: name") grouped the same type of tags together in lists, and made the regular community tags pages ( townies | dorms ) show them outline-style - which seemed like it might be a useful thing for everyone going forward, not just temporarily for the tag-reduction project.

You knew I'd get to the apology part eventually, right? The plan was to have that whole project done in a couple of days, then make an OOC post to explain all the changes at once, since they were all related. The reality involved some technical difficulties that meant the name-changing got done back in May, but one of the Discontinued Tags pages couldn't be completed until this week. I -- this is totally MP's fault -- dropped the ball on letting you guys know what was going on, which should've happened as soon as I knew there was going to be a delay, if not before the change was even made. So if you've been confused or inconvenienced when your character, location, or business tags suddenly had new names with no warning or explanation, that's on me, and I'm sorry.

The poll: Now that the extra character tags have been eliminated, whether we keep that format change is pretty much up to you. It's easy enough to put back the way it was, if it's actually more useful for people to use the old system of ordering everything by name. (Which does have the benefit of shorter tags to type, if you usually get to them from the address bar.) With that in mind, we'd like to figure out which works best for the most players, so here's the promised poll, which we'll keep running until the end of the day on Saturday, the 5th.

Poll #18643

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 15

View Respondents

Preferred Tagging Formats for the Non-School IC Communities

View Answers

I'd prefer the tags in Townies and Dorms to be alphabetical by name, the way they used to be.
3 (20.0%)

I'd prefer the tags in Townies and Dorms to be grouped by type, as they are currently.
3 (20.0%)

I don't care, but I will NOT be denied my existential right to click a radio button if everybody else is clicking one too.
9 (60.0%)

If you've got an alternate suggestion/issue that we haven't thought of, please toss it into the comments here and we'll be glad to take that into consideration, as well as answer any questions you might have.

Comments

[uncertain_dume]

Thanks for this post! I have just one suggestion to go with whatever people decide here-- Would it be possible on top of it all to have the tags for current businesses updated at the business owner's request? I've got two with tags that have been outdated for several years now, and would love the opportunity to have them changed to the current business names if at all possible. It'd cut down on confusion and the potential for accidental doubling up on business names by those with the permissions to create new tags- I know there had been two different tags for Demon Marcus at one point, for example, with both the current name and the old-school Pixie Dust, before one vanished and it all went back to being Pixie Dust again.

[nookiepowered]

I'll toss that up on the admin board so more brains than me can consider any possible side-effects that might have, but my own initial response is that it's a great idea.

[nookiepowered]

And now that we've knocked enough heads together to get a communal answer: yes, absolutely, changing a business tag at the request of a new owner is something that shouldn't be a problem, going forward!

[uncertain_dume]

Ooo, awesome! Thanks so much!

[sharp_man]

I would just like to say please please please put them back the way they were. (And yes, I voted, but I feel like I should make a case for anyone who's undecided.)

For one thing, because there's no autocomplete drop-down, it makes it ridiculously long to type things when tagging. I have to get through "Character: Hannibal L" before I can autocomplete for the only Hannibal currently in the game. For another, at least one character (Jalian) cannot currently have her entire name in the tag because of length once you add "character: " to the beginning of it.

[nookiepowered]

I noticed the Jalian issue when I was doing the final cleanup, yes. The short-term solution was to eliminate the spaces/apostrophe, but that's definitely temporary, no matter which way people vote. If we stick with the the sorted version, we'll go to "char" instead of "character" which should provide enough spaces to get Jalian's full name in there, in both comms.

[sharp_man]

Thank you. And speaking of missing apostrophes (and the above point about out-of-date names), is there a reason that Stark's is now "Sparky"? I had to check several times to make sure I was tagging it right.

[nookiepowered]

There is: Stark's used to be Sparky Repairs, and those tags needed to be consolidated as part of the tag reduction process. They were actually consolidated long ago, but that particular one was a victim of "at least one admin character works there, so the alternate tag kept getting re-added." (Ask me how many times we've had to re-combine "devils nest" and "devil's nest" tags if you want to see a very funny face.)

It's not an issue of forgetting to update names; it's that if a business changes names, but still does the same thing, it needs to keep the same tag, in order to keep the tag total down. That's why Turtle & Canary is still "sundries," for example.

In the early days of the game, re-naming or combining tags wasn't an option, so they had to keep the oldest name. Later, it became so, but we still didn't change the tag to the most recent name very often, because there was a possibility of breaking link URLs used on profile posts or directory indexes.

The move to DW broke all those links anyway, so it's now less of an issue, and Shannon's proposal to update them when an owner requests it makes sense. (It would still update everything, though - so if Demon Marcus gets renamed Flashy Threads, all the old DM posts will now be tagged Flashy Threads too.)

[sharp_man]

Ah, okay. I kept thinking it should at least have been "Sparky's" and getting very confused!