Tags....OMG, what have I done?
Hiya! Just your friendly community moderator dropping in to say "OMGWTF happened to the tags?!?!" :D
Here's the situation. I've been extraordinarily busy and didn't feel like I had the time to keep up with the requests for tag additions that I was getting through comments and email, so I went ahead and changed the community options on who could create tags from just me to any member. Then I made the mistake of not checking in to see how it was going, for which I humbly and profusely apologize. One of the community members dropped me a line today and brought to my attention that the tag list had grown out of control with duplicate tags (alternate or misspellings, plurals, etc.), useless tags like "50book challenge" (uh...why do you need to tag your posts in the 50bookchallenge community as 50bookchallenge??), and a general glut of overly specific tags like obscure authors, etc.
So, I've made an executive decision. Not only have I changed the tag options back to allow only community maintainers to create new tags, I'm going to delete 99% of the author tags. Before you get upset, let me explain!!
This community has LJ Seek enabled on it (which, in addition to the link I've placed in this post, can also be found in the community profile *and* in the links sidebar when viewing the community pages). What this means to all of you is that if you want to search for any text string in the community entries, you can. Since people's entries almost always include the book title and author, I think that it's redundant to have tags for authors, since if you want to see lists of entries that talk about books by any particular author, you can use LJ Seek. Since genre is not mentioned in people's book reviews nearly as often, I think that's where the usefulness of tags really lies, so that's where I'm going to head with the tag list.
So, the new guidelines for tags are going to be that I will entertain requests for tags for genres, content, subject matter, types of awards, book lists, etc. I will *NOT* create new tags for book titles or authors. I am also going to monitor the tag list and clean up any tags that don't generate more than 5 uses or so. This is to try to control the proliferation of uberspecific genre tags that no one really understands or uses.
ETA: I also have to add...I can only shake my head in disbelief that I'm actually finding tags for people's personal LJ user IDs. Buh? There are over SIX THOUSAND members in this community...do you really think it's reasonable to make PERSONAL tags to track your own posts? The mind boggles. For real.
Comments? Questions? Suggestions?
Here's the situation. I've been extraordinarily busy and didn't feel like I had the time to keep up with the requests for tag additions that I was getting through comments and email, so I went ahead and changed the community options on who could create tags from just me to any member. Then I made the mistake of not checking in to see how it was going, for which I humbly and profusely apologize. One of the community members dropped me a line today and brought to my attention that the tag list had grown out of control with duplicate tags (alternate or misspellings, plurals, etc.), useless tags like "50book challenge" (uh...why do you need to tag your posts in the 50bookchallenge community as 50bookchallenge??), and a general glut of overly specific tags like obscure authors, etc.
So, I've made an executive decision. Not only have I changed the tag options back to allow only community maintainers to create new tags, I'm going to delete 99% of the author tags. Before you get upset, let me explain!!
This community has LJ Seek enabled on it (which, in addition to the link I've placed in this post, can also be found in the community profile *and* in the links sidebar when viewing the community pages). What this means to all of you is that if you want to search for any text string in the community entries, you can. Since people's entries almost always include the book title and author, I think that it's redundant to have tags for authors, since if you want to see lists of entries that talk about books by any particular author, you can use LJ Seek. Since genre is not mentioned in people's book reviews nearly as often, I think that's where the usefulness of tags really lies, so that's where I'm going to head with the tag list.
So, the new guidelines for tags are going to be that I will entertain requests for tags for genres, content, subject matter, types of awards, book lists, etc. I will *NOT* create new tags for book titles or authors. I am also going to monitor the tag list and clean up any tags that don't generate more than 5 uses or so. This is to try to control the proliferation of uberspecific genre tags that no one really understands or uses.
ETA: I also have to add...I can only shake my head in disbelief that I'm actually finding tags for people's personal LJ user IDs. Buh? There are over SIX THOUSAND members in this community...do you really think it's reasonable to make PERSONAL tags to track your own posts? The mind boggles. For real.
Comments? Questions? Suggestions?