Pro Tip on getting me to be quiet in your comments, authors · 7:05am Jan 18th, 2022
if i'm acting the fool, do not respond. do not reply. leave your dislike and continue with your day. because guess what? most times, this isn't even really your fault. it's the site's problem for not having a proper tagging and filtration system. you're stuck with like, 3 character tags on a story maximum, and the genre tags are broad as fuck. were this site to have a proper tagging and filtering system, like AO3, you'd be able to have as many tags as you could think of, with entirely separate tagging categories for ships and characters! i'm not trying to say AO3's the best site ever, but comparing the two tagging systems is like comparing a half-dead campfire to Alpha Centauri. Mods, Devs, if you're reading this please for the love of fuck get to buffing the tagging on this site, as if i recall correctly, AO3's source code is open source.
Cringe
Man, if I'd seen this blog the last time you got reported, I'd have banned you in a heartbeat. My finger was on the button just based on the story comments in the report itself, but I decided ultimately to maintain the more hands-off "user blocks should be Plan A" approach that I believe makes for a better community without heavy-handed moderation.
The only thing authors do wrong is not block you on sight the minute you get up in arms about a story using the word kumquat inappropriately, or whatever other insane ramblings-of-a-madman you gripe about on a constant basis. I'm sure there are improvements that can be made to this site's tagging system but screaming at authors over nothing and then pointing the finger at the site, as if it's responsible for your own poor behavior, is not going to get anything accomplished.
You want to talk rationally about tags? I'll hear you out and see what I can do. But regardless of the outcome, I'm done putting up with you attacking people for "violating canon" in a fanwork, or using a ship you don't like, or anything else that only you seem to have a problem with. You are responsible for your own behavior, and the next valid report filed against you is not going to be ignored like the last several.
5629880
what would you consider a "rational" conversation about tagging
5629910
My ability to take you seriously is inversely proportional to the degree you present your case like a child having a tantrum. I don't expect, like, proper moderated debate format or anything, just say what you have to say. Here, elsewhere, wherever, I don't care. I promise you if you can make a case like an adult I'll hear you out, and it's entirely possible that our tagging system can be modified if you can make a legitimate case for it being broken.
Just stop derailing comment threads where everybody else is talking about the story's merits with junk like "noooooon-cannooooooon" because somebody dared use a ship that didn't receive express written permission from the Late Night Central Bureau of Acceptable Horse Romance, and then call everybody who thinks that's kind of an odd response "smoothbrains" and generally just acting like the edgiest know-it-all kid on Myspace circa 2008. Whatever the exact polar opposite of that is, that's what I want.
5629912
so...
about how i'm talking right now
ok
so uh, all i really have to say about tagging i said in the blogpost, albeit phrased differently than i'd phrase it rn
all i can really say about the issue is to look at how AO3 does tagging
iirc the site's code is open source
5629919
This ran a little longer than I intended but I do actually want to try to respond as respectfully and comprehensively as I can. You're owed that much.
The idea of just broad-strokes anything-goes user-create-your-own-tags thing is just fundamentally incompatible with the goals of this site. AO3 is a complete nightmare to use because anything can be a tag (and thus, everything is a tag). This is kind of a problem on booru sites that allow the same thing, too, and while some of them like derpi and e621 have tag-groupings and the like to consolidate tags under common banners, this is effectively them trying to take a more diffuse system like an oldschool booru and make it more like ours. The broad scope and vague umbrellas of our genre tags is not a bug, it's a feature. It stops hyper-specific tags that could only ever conceivably apply to one or two stories from making the site harder to navigate, and preventing people who find themselves on one of those one or two hyper-specific stories from being able to find stuff that's broadly similar but doesn't quite fit this intensely narrow niche. So right off the bat, AO3/booru style tagging just isn't going to happen on this site, fullstop, and suggesting that we should do that is like suggesting that we get rid of all our MLP stories and turn the site into a VeggieTales fanfic site instead. That is the level of fundamental purpose-shift you're suggesting, and it has about the same likelihood of going anywhere.
That said, it's not impossible to add or modify or otherwise restructure our existing tag system that is properly curated by a singular team with a goal in mind. And on paper, something like tags for different ships sounds like it might be alright. But it's got a few problems.
So you're currently dealing with a website that's been around for over a decade, where filtering by just the romance tag yields 42,542 results. Setting aside the merits of separate tags for ships, how exactly do you expect such a system to retroactively be applied to that many stories? Let's be generous and say that it takes exactly one minute to complete the entire process of opening a story, reading enough of it to determine what ships are present, and then applying the relevant tags. Let's be further generous and round down to 42,000 romance stories. That's 700 man-hours of labor required to apply these tags. If I worked eight hours a day, seven days a week, doing nothing but applying these separate ship tags, it would take me nearly three months. We also have a ton of character tags, and any sort of ship-tag database would be an order of magnitude bigger than that due to the way basic mathematics work. Just creating those tags would be an insanely massive job.
So instead, the system in place that 99.9% of our users have no problem with is that Character Tag + Character Tag + Romance Tag probably suggests that a romance between those characters is likely to be a prominent feature of that story. Most authors are also helpful enough to describe their stories in the story's description box, and reading that can generally go a long way towards understanding what a story's about.
The part of all this that's definitively a you problem is that you like to get mad when ships you don't personally support or approve of are used as random background details in a story. That, I can't help you with. Even if I did spend eight hours a day, seven days a week, for eighty-seven consecutive days compiling a ship tag database, it is not appropriate to tag a story as "Appledash" if the story is primarily about Twilight and Rarity, and Applejack appears in one scene and casually mentions she's dating Rainbow Dash, a fact which never once appears in the story again or is relevant beyond that one tiny inclusion.
The reason for our limitation on character tags is because people used to tag every single character who even slightly passed through the background of a scene, which isn't appropriate at all. If I want to read a story about Rarity, I don't want to filter by Rarity and get a bunch of stories about Pinkie Pie where Rarity shows up for three seconds and says hello. I have been misled, in that case. Similarly, applying the AppleDash tag to a story which is not primarily about the AppleDash ship is wholly inappropriate and misleading to people who are actually looking for that content. Any appropriate tagging system should be able to reasonably accommodate all use-cases; it doesn't just exist to warn you which stories contain Dangerous Contraband Ships. It exists to help the people who actually like that thing (or at least can be exposed to references to said thing without being physically compelled to start stomping around yelling about smoothbrains) find that thing just as much as it exists to help people who don't like that thing avoid that thing.
I hope that all gives you a better understanding of the whys and hows of our tagging system. It's certainly not perfect, and if you have specific suggestions on how to fix it, I am absolutely willing to hear you out. PM me, comment at me, whatever. Hell, I'm not even telling you you can't comment negatively on people's stories anymore. But I am telling you right now I will not tolerate you continuing to derail threads screaming about minor elements of stories you disapprove of, and then personally attacking everybody who disagrees with you. You will behave in public or you will be removed from the site.
5629934
ok so that's the comprehensive version, can i get a more compact one?
there's too much info to parse there
5629943
I certainly don't expect you to respond with a massive essay of your own, but if you can't be bothered to even read that, then I can't be bothered to hold your hand. I'm willing to treat site tagging as a serious issue worth discussing, and I'm willing to spend significant chunks of my evening trying to understand why you feel the way you do and see if there's a way you can help the site improve. I'm not going to water down everything I have to say to tiny little bullet points like "AO3 tag are bad mkay" so you can strawman them like you do every other time people disagree with you.
The only short TLDR I have to offer is that you need to start behaving better when you encounter things you dislike. Just your account itself has been reported literally dozens of times for this, and this "I'm not the problem, the site's tagging system is the problem, for reasons I can't be bothered to explain in anything longer-form than a sentence!" junk you're posting now has really made me realize just how out of patience I am at this point.
If you change your mind and want to talk, it's an open offer, but if I have to settle for you just shutting up and leaving people alone, I'll take it.
5629955
ok, after reading your previous comment a bit more thoroughly, i've a few things to say:
1. you think i like getting so fucking angry? i don't, it's something that happens, and by the time i've realized i've done it i've already gone and blown up over stupid minutiae and am sitting in the fallout of my headassery
and before you say "get therapy" like i know you're gonna, i live in the USA and can't cuz it costs a ton(and every time i try to get medicare they leave me on fucking hold for hours at a time)
trust me, if i could just cut my anger out of me i'd do so with no second thoughts
2. so ship tags can't be a thing
ok, i guess
though i'll admit some confusion over the "goals" bit
like, what are these goals? and how does making the tagging more robust go against them?
3. if any changes are made, i certainly don't expect them to be retroactively applied
you said it yourself, there's 42,000+ stories in the romance tag alone
4. speaking of changes, can we come to a compromise? like, instead of a collection of shipping tags, maybe just have it be a mandated rule to mention any ships in the story in the description?
and one last point: not trying to sound like a dick here, but i don't do longform thoughts
i prefer to be quick to the point
5629981
Cool. Other authors don't like having to deal with it. Your right to swing your arms around ends at someone else's nose.
"Goals" may not have been the best word. "A plan" might have been better. Everybody has their own organizational system, for just about everything. What shelf in the refrigerator does the milk go on? What cabinet stores the glasses and which stores plates? The same thing is true of fanfiction, and different people have different ideas for how to organize and group stories. None of these are inherently any better than any other, really. If you walk into my kitchen you might be a little turned around at first but then you'd learn where stuff is. If I walk into your kitchen, same thing happens.
With sites like AO3 that allow user-created tags, it's just the Wild West. Anything goes. There are three different drawers for spoons, and two of them also contain forks, and another one also contains napkins. Every time you open the fridge, the milk is in a different place. Our system may not be perfect, but it's consistent. It was created from the top-down according to a plan. Maybe you have to bumble around a bit before finding the right types of stories, but that's infinitely better than the barely-contained chaos of AO3, which is just an utter nightmare of filtering and sorting and ratings and content warnings that are so over-specific that they end up being harmful. Or like a booru site where there are tags for "character sitting in a chair with one leg over the armrest" and stuff like that. If you're looking for that incredibly hyper-specific thing, sure, it can help, if everything's appropriate tagged, which it never will be with that many tags to keep track of.
With something as all-encompassing like a ship tag, why even bother if you're not going to even try to get it applied retroactively? Obviously authors could do a lot of this work themselves and I was definitely being a little facetious by suggesting it'd all be up to me personally. But if we introduce ship tags and people stop having to filter by Appejack+Rainbow Dash+Romance to find Appledash, and they can just filter by Appledash, then there are tons and tons of older stories that won't be tagged that are going to fall into obscurity. You'll either have to miss out on those stories or not actually use the new tag system at all. So why have it?
The vast majority of people already do when it's a major theme of the work, and you're the only person on this entire site who has this extreme a response to stories that just mention ships as worldbuilding. At some point, all these content and trigger warnings reach a point where you're just putting the entire story in the description, since if something as minor as "yeah yesterday I went on a date with Applejack..." is enough to make you foam at the mouth then surely there are other people out there who foam at the mouth whenever Rarity says "darling" too much, or whatever. Should I compromise with them?
What if I put a special badge below your name, like how mine says Moderator, that says "I am literally unable to control my anger; please block me immediately"? I'm sure you wouldn't appreciate that following you around whenever you're engaging with material calmly. Similarly, it's not fair to make authors change their whole behavior around and adapt their descriptions to suit your tastes and your tastes alone. Yes it's good practice to tell people your story is about Appledash, but there's no way to reasonably expect all authors sitewide to have to sit and think and scour their story for any possible mention of a non-canon ship before they post it. Random background lines about relationships don't set anybody else off like this. This "problem" begins and ends with you.
I'm not trying to disparage you for your mental health or tell you you need therapy or anything like that. Honestly, if I was ever on a website that made me half as mad as this one seems to make you, I wouldn't be using that website any longer. Not telling you to leave, but you're going to have to figure something out, because it's not fair to adapt the entire site to cater to your specific needs.
5629989
the reason i'm still here boils down to two points
1. ease of use
it's pretty fuckin intuitive what does what
2. this site kinda has a monopoly on good pony stories
fanfiction.net's kinda trash for this sort of content, and AO3's not really centered around this kinda shit
and i'm not gonna trawl fuckin 4chan for greentexts
5629996
you don't have to justify that to me, I'm just saying be aware of the toll things take on your mental health. If you're willing to stay here despite the fact it's got these downsides, then at least try to anticipate and understand what's going to upset you before it happens. Or, failing that, find a way to not have the "I am really angry" step in the process lead immediately to "I am now screaming at anybody and everybody who isn't equally as angry as I am." Somewhere between those two points is a spot you need to get control of your emotions and stop yourself from going through with it.