FanFare request: Make tagging a little easier

November 9, 2014 5:54 AM

For TV episode posts in FanFare threads, can we have an option of importing tags from the previous episode's post? Or maybe have tags for the show itself that can be applied to each episode?

Now that I'm posting a fast-forward series of posts (one ep every other day) to catch up to the current episode, I'm noticing that most of my time on each post is spent copying-and-pasting the tags from the previous episode and then adding or removing one. Most of the tags for any episode are applicable to the series it is a part of (genres, character names, actor names, etc.) so this could be a convenience especially for people who aren't particularly tagging-astute. It can also help make tagging uniform when multiple people are posting episodes for the same show.

posted by ardgedee to Feature Requests at 5:54 AM (15 comments total)

Just noting here that it's still the wee hours (on a Sunday!) in pb-land, and he will respond a little later.
posted by taz (staff) at 6:01 AM on November 9, 2014

Wait, I thought pb had overcome the frailties of the Old Flesh....
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:37 AM on November 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I wrote this up while it was still fresh to mind, I'm not expecting an immediate response. Thanks, taz!
posted by ardgedee at 6:49 AM on November 9, 2014

I would pet and feed this pony.
posted by Jacqueline at 7:24 AM on November 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

There has always been a serious tension between the idea of tags as a top-down, authoritative categorization system and the reality of what we have here: user-added tags. That tension makes people uncomfortable, but it also means we can have lots of spontaneous and ingenious uses for tags that we might not anticipate. So we have always lived with less control of tags and the drawbacks that go with that to have some of the unexpected benefits.

So my first reaction is that we probably won't change how tags work for FanFare. The tags work the same across all sites: it's up the poster to decide which tags are included. If you're one of those posters making a series of posts that include similar tags, you could always put them in a text file and do some copying and pasting.

The idea of suggesting tags for posters has come up a lot over the years and we've always said no. We've always felt like the spontaneous things people come up with are preferred to a standard set of tags. Yes, that has plenty of drawbacks. But tags aren't the only system we have for retrieving posts. We also have search which can find text in posts. We have specialized categorization on some sites. Ask has categories. FanFare has show pages where every episode of a show is grouped together on a single page.

I completely understand the desire for more structure at FanFare. It's something we're thinking about and working on. But I don't think we'll build that structure via tags.
posted by pb (staff) at 8:14 AM on November 9, 2014

I see this mostly a way to automate a repetitive action.

For example, the user would have to press a button that says, "import the tags from the previous show", and then the tags field would be auto-populated (and editable).

If it implies enforcement, it'd be an opt-in sort, and totally overridable.
posted by ardgedee at 8:22 AM on November 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

But if you're importing tags that someone else has added, that is a kind of enforcement. There would be social pressure to use it if it exists.
posted by pb (staff) at 8:25 AM on November 9, 2014

I think that tags in FanFare have to be considered a different beast from tags in the rest of the site. The rest of the site discourages double posts - the same thing is not getting posted over and over again, so there isn't as much incentive to import tags from an existing post.

Posts for series on FanFare are different - in a way each episode in a series is the same thing, that should retain consistent tagging. So being able to import tags from previous episodes is a useful feature for the person making the FanFare post. While I was making posts for most of Aldnoah.Zero's 1st season run, I kept wishing there was some way to import tags from previous episodes, as the majority of tags did not change from episode to episode. When you consider the number of episodes long-running series can have, an auto-populated and editable tags field would be a tremendous help for the person making the post.

I don't think it's fruitful to impose the same usage models from the other parts of the site to FanFare. A huge difference is that serial posts about the same thing do not exist on the rest of the site. Thus the way people tag or search on the blue or Ask may not reflect how people are interacting with FanFare. I do not think enforcing the structures and practices of the blue or Ask on FanFare assists in developing practices that are particularly suited to FanFare, and doing so may hinder people's productive engagement with the subsite.
posted by needled at 9:28 AM on November 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

There would be social pressure to use it if it exists.

I think you may be overstating that a little. Having ways to sort posts on FanFare (to find posts by the same director or same actor) has value and I think multiple ways to link different chains or series has a high level of utility, much more than it does on the rest of the site. Even a simpler way to copy/paste multiple tags at once might be helpful without leading to the coercive aspect that you are concerned about.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 9:47 AM on November 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

I do not think enforcing the structures and practices of the blue or Ask on FanFare assists in developing practices that are particularly suited to FanFare, and doing so may hinder people's productive engagement with the subsite.

I absolutely hear what you're saying. We need to improve the ways we organize things at FanFare. At the same time you could argue that abandoning the way we have done things for years could hinder people's engagement with the subsite.

I think you could make a case that FanFare would be an excellent non-MetaFilter site. If we could do away with our conventions we'd have more more freedom in some ways. But we're trying to make a media discussion site that works in the MetaFilter way. There is some advantage to having the subsites work in similar ways.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:50 AM on November 9, 2014

Yes, I see that for FanFare to work as a MetaFilter subsite it has to retain a MetaFilter way of doing things.

But as I pointed out, there is a very fundamental difference between posts on the rest of the site and posts on FanFare - FanFare has multiple posts about the same thing, which none of the other subsites do. So this results in this case in one need that the other subsites do not have, the ability to import tags from previous posts of the same series. I don't think accommodating this unique aspect of FanFare detracts from it working in the MetaFilter way.
posted by needled at 9:57 AM on November 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

I wonder if there could be a way to add tags to the show page and more granular ones to each episode. So that the Fringe show page, for instance, had JJAbrams, AnnaTorv, JoshuaJackson, JasikaNicole, JohnNoble, scifitelevision, or whatnot, but specific episodes had tags more like: ghostnetwork, raredisease, paralleluniverse, or other specific to episode tags, including ones like KevinCorrigan, who was in some episodes, but not the series as a whole.

If the tags took you to the show page, they wouldn't have to be added individually on each episode.
posted by Margalo Epps at 10:01 AM on November 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

Yeah, it makes sense that we'll need additional tools at FanFare. I think sorting by actor and director would be fantastic features. I think that can been done other ways with public databases. It's something we're investigating.

We do have recurring subjects at the other subsites, and it's very tempting to standardize tags across them. We just haven't ever wanted to go down that road. I'll bow out now to let the community discuss. This might be a case were divergence from our norm is good.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:01 AM on November 9, 2014

That's a neat idea there might be ways to suck in the actors and other people involved even episode by episode by linking up with IMDB and then you wouldn't have that annoying thing where an actor leaves a series but then all the posts for a whole season would still have their name attached to it.

Maybe there's a way to do "machine tags" where there are special attributes to tags like pb mentions so that actors and other people involved (writers? directors? I don't know) would be linked in a way and then have ... faceted searching so that you could find them all easily!

I have always thought that having robust search would do wonders for the ability to find and collocate stuff. This seems like a way to do that without having the maybe-too-simple "add all tags" thing.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 10:18 AM on November 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

> Maybe there's a way to do "machine tags" where there are special attributes to tags like pb mentions so that actors and other people involved

That might be nice, but there are also considerations like genre and medium...

For example, I'm following the series Gugure! Kokkuri-san. The majority of the tags for each post don't change per episode -- either a character appears in an ep or they don't -- but every episode is consistently anime, comedy, gothic... Since FanFare doesn't have defined categories like "anime", tagging episodes like this make it easier for people searching FanFare for anime titles to watch. But for me it means a lot of redundant effort while preparing any single episode post.

A button that could copy the previous episode's tags into the tags field while I'm writing this episode's post would be convenient. I can choose to not click that button when writing the post, and I can choose to remove/change anything it copies before the post even gets to the preview stage. I don't see how it could be construed as enforcing standardization. Importing data from IMDB would be much stricture method of enforcement than this, IMO -- for anime in particular, considerations like actor and director are really only interesting to a small minority of fans (or for the few rare celebrated directors/actors/artists), because it's such a rabbit hole with little or no payoff for casual viewers.
posted by ardgedee at 2:06 PM on November 9, 2014