Modpost: Tagging standards

[laurenthemself]

One of the other things I'm trying to do is make the tags consistent. We've never had rules about tagging, so some people do and some people don't and some people tag one way and some people tag another and the oldest posts aren't tagged because they were made prior to the existence of tags. So from now on, here's what'd be good for people to do for tags:

Author names: author: username OR preferred pen name
Artist names: artist: username OR preferred pen name
Art styles: art: icons OR banners OR wallpaper (or other art style we don't have a tag for yet)
Pairing: pairing: rimmer/lister or whosoever it might be. I recognise and bow to the inevitability that we will have both pairing: rimmer/lister and pairing: lister/rimmer as options. You get that. I just want to make it a bit more consistent than those two AND 'lister/rimmer' AND 'l/r' and whatever else.
Rating: rating: nc-17
For crossovers, add fandom: whatever the fandom name is

There are a lot of other things that need to be fiddled with tag-wise, but if we could bear those basic guidelines in mind and I'll work on putting together a full list of tags; at the moment there are a bunch of tags that need playing with to be useful, and a bunch of posts that need tagging, so it's going to take a while. I don't want to be all whipcracky, I just want to make the most of the tag system.

Edit: Following the suggestion from debris_k below, I am turning off new tag adding. If you need to add a new tag to your entry (e.g. an author tag if you don't have one already, a character tag for a character who's not listed, and so on), please tag your post with tag request and put the tags you're requesting at the bottom of your post, and I will create the tags for you.

Comments

sorry for the repeated editing, I keep noticing mistakes in my wording >.<

[debris_k.livejournal.com]

As a long-time tagger in an unrelated comm (and general busybody in a few others) might I suggest you turn off members' ability to create new tags? That way only existing (and used - only mods can see unused tags) tags would be available for folks to add and it would cut down drastically on tags appearing twice over in different forms and spellings, etc, etc. Learned this the hard way I did, back when I first set out to tag a comm. Has been working like a charm since, though.

A simple 'misc.' or 'new tag [of this and that type] needed!' would be the only thing you'd need to add to preserve the system of folks being able to get new tags when needed. Mods could check up on them from time to time and do what needs to be done, and everyone would be perfectly content. :-)

[laurenthemself]

I really, really like this idea. And possibly should've thought of it myself considering it's how tagging works at capeandcowl, where I play, so I'm aware of the functionality.

Thanks heaps for bringing it to my attention. I'm going to do this.

[debris_k.livejournal.com]

Glad to be of help! :-) I'd offer help with the tagging itself, but on edgy dial-up it's both costly and nerve-wrecking to spend any prolonged time online.

[laurenthemself]

Oh, that's absolutely fair enough, and it's a massive help just to have that suggestion; I don't expect anyone to offer to help tag! (Although I suppose if anyone wants to, they can always put their hand up; there are an awful lot of entries now I'm looking at them...)

[queen-fiend.livejournal.com]

I'll have some spare time coming up so I can probably do some. It will give me a excuse to re-read awesome fics. :D

[laurenthemself]

That'd be really great if you could, and just let me know if you need a particular author tag or anything like that.

[queen-fiend.livejournal.com]

Ok! Oh, I guess I could use an author tag. :)

[laurenthemself]

I've added author: queen_fiend if that's cool, let me know if you want it altered to a pen name or anything.

[queen-fiend.livejournal.com]

That's fine. Thank you! :)