> An author can choose to opt out of tags entirely, and people cannot put tags on other people's fanfic even if it's relevant and would benefit that work's findability
Curious about how this doesn't render the entire system near-useless? In my experience with other sites with user-generated content that allow tagging, this decision always makes the whole system way worse, because the OP alone is almost never going to be aware of all possible tags that are applicable to whatever it is they posted, and will instead just take the first 3-5 words that pop into their head and stick those in the tags field. The end result is a tagging system that barely works; you can search for a tag but you'll miss tons of stuff, and you can filter out a tag but you'll still see tons of stuff in that category. And if you ever find a hyper-specific tag you really enjoy it'll only have like 5 items in it even if there are hundreds or thousands it could be applicable to.
Don't get me wrong, the wiki-style approach of just letting anyone edit tags has its own issues, but it does at least result in tags on everything being at least mostly complete, and actually useful for finding what you want (or filtering out things you don't want).
> Curious about how this doesn't render the entire system near-useless? In my experience with other sites with user-generated content that allow tagging, this decision always makes the whole system way worse, because the OP alone is almost never going to be aware of all possible tags that are applicable to whatever it is they posted, and will instead just take the first 3-5 words that pop into their head and stick those in the tags field.
A few things makes this work brilliantly:
- authors are encouraged to tag as much as they want with whatever they want
- tags have an autocompletion to help authors select tags on keywords
- authors are prolific fanfic readers themselves and are therefore usually extremely familiar with the tag system
- manual tag linking means searching for one tag will also return results for all related or near-identical tags, a linking which has an extremely high success rate due to dedicated and extremely knowledgeable volunteers
This overall ends up being that authors use prolific tags, and reuse prolific tags from others, and ultimately search isn't strongly affected because the entire readerbase is hyper-knowledgeable. Check out the extremely specific fanfic-only "hanahaki disease" tag description in ao3 and you'll quickly see that any variety of related tags, with any level of hyerspecificity(some tags have neither "hanahaki" nor "disease"!), will appear searching for any of them, including hanahaki disease in other languages!: https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Hanahaki%20Disease
Curious about how this doesn't render the entire system near-useless? In my experience with other sites with user-generated content that allow tagging, this decision always makes the whole system way worse, because the OP alone is almost never going to be aware of all possible tags that are applicable to whatever it is they posted, and will instead just take the first 3-5 words that pop into their head and stick those in the tags field. The end result is a tagging system that barely works; you can search for a tag but you'll miss tons of stuff, and you can filter out a tag but you'll still see tons of stuff in that category. And if you ever find a hyper-specific tag you really enjoy it'll only have like 5 items in it even if there are hundreds or thousands it could be applicable to.
Don't get me wrong, the wiki-style approach of just letting anyone edit tags has its own issues, but it does at least result in tags on everything being at least mostly complete, and actually useful for finding what you want (or filtering out things you don't want).