Bo Jones. Or maybe Dennis. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nookiepowered) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomhigh_ooc2017-08-01 09:53 am
nookiepowered) wrote in fandomhigh_ooc2017-08-01 09:53 am
Entry tags:
Community Tags on Dreamwidth: An Announcement, An Apology, and a Poll
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.
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.
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.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 15
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.
no subject