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branchandrootDear AO3,
I am once again stunned by the sheer ridiculousness of attempting to, what was it now, 'respect everyone's fandom expression' or something when you are not using the system that expression is associated with. To whit: Tumblr style "commentary" tags.
Because here's the thing, dear AO3, Tumblr does not index all those tags. They are not all searchable. And the searchability is determined by the site code, not the site employees. If I type into the tag search field of my dashboard, for example, "lettuce and gravy what", or click on that tag in the post of a moderately horrifying foodstuff, I will get the "no posts found" page, despite the fact that there are clearly posts using that tag. This is because that tag has not been used often enough, and by enough different people, to trigger the completely automatic indexing threshold.
Of course, if I go to the blog of the person who made that entry, and type "lettuce and gravy what" into their blog search field, or click on it while in their blog, I will get all the entries that person may have tagged with that phrase, via a search limited to their own account. This is, naturally, why many people use very idiosyncratic tags on certain types of posts, for things they suspect may be an indexed tag-stream (eg "tenipuri fanning" instead of "Prince of Tennis" on a simple reblog); this prevents a post from being aggregated in the tag-stream, but keeps it searchable on the individual blog.
Furthermore, only the first five tags of any entry are even eligible to be used in aggregating that post into a tag-stream, if one exists. All tags after that may be used to search within that user's blog, but will be ignored when fetching posts to be shown in a "all site posts in this tag" page.
All of this indexing and search scoping is automated in the basic Tumblr code. This is, in a nutshell, why Tumblr has not fallen over and died, suffocated under the weight of unique or rare "commentary" tags. Tumblr fails at documentation, but the basic parameters of how tags are indexed and used to search and present content are solid, and optimized to a high traffic site on which neither permanence nor locating all of a particular kind of content is a major priority.
Tumblr has evolved as a culture of ephemerality, in which commentary is given in the tags and therefore erased with each reblog, in which content is a constantly flowing stream that one watches pass and occasionally dips something out of, in which the only way any user can preserve content for later location is to blog or reblog it on their own account under some internally consistent tag rubric. (And then include the javascript in their theme to actually display their tag list.) I have a hard time imagining anything less suited to the permanent storage and reliable sharing over time of content.
But if AO3 really wants to hold their own funeral and attempt it? Indexing of that field has got to be automated.
I am once again stunned by the sheer ridiculousness of attempting to, what was it now, 'respect everyone's fandom expression' or something when you are not using the system that expression is associated with. To whit: Tumblr style "commentary" tags.
Because here's the thing, dear AO3, Tumblr does not index all those tags. They are not all searchable. And the searchability is determined by the site code, not the site employees. If I type into the tag search field of my dashboard, for example, "lettuce and gravy what", or click on that tag in the post of a moderately horrifying foodstuff, I will get the "no posts found" page, despite the fact that there are clearly posts using that tag. This is because that tag has not been used often enough, and by enough different people, to trigger the completely automatic indexing threshold.
Of course, if I go to the blog of the person who made that entry, and type "lettuce and gravy what" into their blog search field, or click on it while in their blog, I will get all the entries that person may have tagged with that phrase, via a search limited to their own account. This is, naturally, why many people use very idiosyncratic tags on certain types of posts, for things they suspect may be an indexed tag-stream (eg "tenipuri fanning" instead of "Prince of Tennis" on a simple reblog); this prevents a post from being aggregated in the tag-stream, but keeps it searchable on the individual blog.
Furthermore, only the first five tags of any entry are even eligible to be used in aggregating that post into a tag-stream, if one exists. All tags after that may be used to search within that user's blog, but will be ignored when fetching posts to be shown in a "all site posts in this tag" page.
All of this indexing and search scoping is automated in the basic Tumblr code. This is, in a nutshell, why Tumblr has not fallen over and died, suffocated under the weight of unique or rare "commentary" tags. Tumblr fails at documentation, but the basic parameters of how tags are indexed and used to search and present content are solid, and optimized to a high traffic site on which neither permanence nor locating all of a particular kind of content is a major priority.
Tumblr has evolved as a culture of ephemerality, in which commentary is given in the tags and therefore erased with each reblog, in which content is a constantly flowing stream that one watches pass and occasionally dips something out of, in which the only way any user can preserve content for later location is to blog or reblog it on their own account under some internally consistent tag rubric. (And then include the javascript in their theme to actually display their tag list.) I have a hard time imagining anything less suited to the permanent storage and reliable sharing over time of content.
But if AO3 really wants to hold their own funeral and attempt it? Indexing of that field has got to be automated.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-23 06:05 pm (UTC)Yes, exactly. As a reader looking for specific kinds of stories, I find myself inconvenienced by their current system a lot of the time.
Just as a specific example, it's practically impossible to find stories starring Nick Fury in Avengers fandom, because he gets tagged as a character a lot even for fic in which he briefly shows up to give a few orders, so you have to scroll through *checks* 2109 stories. I would have better chances at fanfiction.net, which allows to list only two main characters. ffn's system has drawbacks, sure, but AO3's current system more or less ensures that less popular content gets drowned out by the more popular things, in larger fandoms at least.
(That's why I'm rooting for a distiction between major and minor character and pairing tags, which should solve at least some of these problems.)
no subject
Date: 2012-10-23 06:10 pm (UTC)Ooh, that would be nice.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-23 06:19 pm (UTC)You can add your vote to that ticket by submitting a support request here: http://archiveofourown.org/support - that new ticket will be added to the existing one. Maybe chances are better if more people are asking for a feature. I have no idea if it's technically doable, mind. But I would love that feature!