Archive Testing, 1... 2... 3...

[icarus]

An Archive Of Our Own is in testing. To help facilitate this, I am slowly uploading fics there and assiduously providing feedback on what works, what doesn't. Hopefully my suggestions are helpful and not too redundant.

Please let the archive know if you note any problems:

Tanlines & Dogtags

First Signs Of Magic: Hermione Granger

A Moment Of Sin

My question for you is on tagging in the An Archive Of Our Own. Yes, it sorts by tags like delicious.

What would you like to see in tags so you can find what you want to read? What makes a good tag? How general should I be? How specific? How much should I customize tags to the content of the story? Is there such thing as "over-tagging"?

For example, for Tanlines & Dogtags I have the tags:

* drama
* pre-slash
* ust
* mild angst
* photography
* art

While for A Moment Of Sin I only used the tag:

* prostitution

I realized, huh, I'm not sure how to do this.

This is in your interest. If I tag badly, it will make it difficult for you to find what you want. It also helps me, so thank you all very much in advance.


ETA: Based on your suggestions, here's what I have for tags: http://archiveofourown.org/en/users/Icarus/profile

Length: shortfic, medium length, longfic, novel length

Character: All prominent characters are listed, even if they're not the main pairing.

Time: season, pre-OotP, where relevant.

Genre: humor, angst, romance, darkfic, drama, crack!fic, au, bdsm, pwp

Pairing generalities: rairpair, crossgen, chan

Story themes to help people beeline their searches: prostitution, polyjuice, photography, gay bar, gun kink, wingfic, crossdressing, non-con, exhibitionism, skinny dipping, etc.

Series name: Primer to the Dark Arts, Beg Me For It, Skinny Dipping, and First Signs of Magic series names (and future series names).

It's clear to me that your ability to filter and find stories will depend upon successful tagging by the authors.

Comments

[princessofg.livejournal.com]

i feel that nothing i say will be useful because i'm so stupid about this, but here goes.

the way i use existing archives, the most important thing for me is the author and the pairing. length is nice because that's the other limiting factor -- sometimes i want an epic to get lost in, sometimes i need something short.

everything else is secondary to that.

i also do need some warnings, but my ironclad squicks are quite rare and fall into things that most people agree "deserve" warnings...

i also always love the violence warnings and need them more than the explicit content warnings. always. and of course my squick lies at the intersection of sex and violence, so....

i have a feeling that the way the archive is approaching tagging might be a huge mess. but i am no expert. there's two ways of looking at it which I guess are designed to operate independently -- author generated tags and reader or reccer tags. and never the twain shall meet.

but even the author generated tags are so stylistically different already that it's going to be a big mess, i fear.

but again: I know very little about the theory of tagging and have never used delicious at all, so there.

thanks for being a pioneer for us, though.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Warnings are a different category, built into the system (including a warning that states "chooses not to warn"). So that's one thing I don't have to worry about.

I've added length to my tags. I hadn't thought of that.

but even the author generated tags are so stylistically different already that it's going to be a big mess, i fear.

It looks messy to me, too. Seems they've chosen flexibility over structure by choosing to use tags.