INAP again. Categories this time. :)

[whiskyinmind]

I Need a Parrot has been 'mine' for so long now that a lot of people don't necessarily know that it used to be run by someone else. kaz814 to be precise. When I took it over (with smileawhile who still manages not to hate me for the number of times I've said "Yes, but why does it work?") I stayed with the format Kaz had set up to ease users into the new site. That

Comments

[naol]

Yes, these categories do make a lot more sense. As things are set at the moment, the fics are sorted by 'ship when the 'ship itself might not be the real point or focus of the story. Odd thing to notice for a 'shipper like me, but I've stumbled across a few fics in 'pairings' categories that I might not have read if been bothered with the pairing and discovered some real gems. To sort them into categories like these would help a lot, I think, and maybe even generate more readership (if that's a word, which it probably isn't but my brain isn't working at the moment).

Of course, there would have to be a way to state exactly what to expect as well, as there are people who feel strongly about their 'ships and pairings. I like the idea of adding those to the selectable characters list.

[whiskyinmind]

I'm leaning towards adding them to the character list rather than sub-divide the categories further into the pairings. Of course, this is a fandom where people are extremely vocal about the pairings they don't want to see which means there would have to be a very definite way of warning them what pairing the fic contains.

There is also the 'Genre' label which we've not used up until now - there may be a way to re-name that to 'Pairings' which would solve the problem at a stroke. I'll have to look into that a bit more I think as it's hard-coded into the script as 'genre' right now.

[naol]

Yes, a specific sub-label would be an interesting compromise, if that's not impossibly hard. Heck, even if you can't re-code "Genre" into "Pairings", there might be a way of using that somehow. I must think *wanders off to meditate on top of a mountain somewhere in the Himalayas*

[francis_eugene]

I like the idea of time periods/settings and genres, but only if they are in addition to pairings (and I'd never really thought of the pairings as necessarily romantic, but more as which two characters were the most prominent in a story).

[naol]

I think the point would be to change the current means of classification at INAP to take the primary focus away from who is with who in a story and shift that to precisely what kind of story we're talking about. So the initial classification would fit into the WKA categories as listed here (romance, comedy, dark, etc...) and the pairing would be a sub-division of that, however the pairings are eventually registered. Concretely, you'd click on the story index, choose the kind of fic you're in the mood for and then check the pairings within that category for the 'ship you're looking for, as opposed to now where the process is mostly reversed.

[mushmeister]

That sounds good to me, but I think a lot of people would also like it if they could go in looking for a specific pairing and still get every story with that pairing, in every category. If you're in the mood for a Willow/Xander story (and if you're not, what's wrong with you?!) you're not going to want to have to check out every category one at a time.

It also occurs to me that most stories will fit more than one category. I mean, what if you've got a story about Xander as an evil vampire in Africa in an alternate universe after the finale of the series? Would you be able to add every applicable category to the story or would you have to pick one?

I know there are ways to set up story archives so you can search for any or all categories, and can specifically choose any combination of categories, no matter how ridiculous, but how easy is that to accomplish? I sure couldn't do it, but that's not really saying anything.

[francis_eugene]

First I'll echo the concern up-thread about having to go through each category one by one and searching for a pairing. It's one of the things I do NOT like about SFA. I cheerfully admit I'm more interested in who is in a story with Xander than when it occurs or whether it's angst or comedy, which was one of the reasons I liked INAP so much.

Now if you want to have hard-coded first-order hierarchies of time period and genre in parallel to the character-based hierarchy then that's fine too. But maintaining that (and the necessary cross-references) could be time-consuming (e.g. if I look for X/W and then romance I should see the same stories if I look first at romance and then X/W

[derithon]

I totally understand the desire to see the stories sorted in a different way. Personally, 95% of the time, the ship is all I care about. I know not everyone is that way.

Whatever makes it easier for people to find the type of fic they are looking for is what is best to me.

Even for a ship'aholic like me, I know there were some shortcomings in the old method. So a change is fine.

I've liked the WKA nominee page, which lists fics by category, and lists the ship/pairing next to each fic. Searching isn't as big a deal there, due to the fewer number, but I'm sure you will make the archive as easy to access as is managable.

Regardless of how it gets indexed, as long as I can look at a header and know who the ship is (if any), I'll be ok with it.

Thank you so much for the hard work you put in.

[willowmina]

4-7 - something reflecting Xanders non-college status - University of Life - The Open Road is my College..... or is there a quote where he references being grown up?

[swedish15]

First of all: I was a big fan of INAP's pairing order. I wanted to read Dawn/Xander? Instead of battling with all the different ways to denote the pairing (D/X, Dawn/Xander, Dander, X/D, etc...) I could simply go to INAP and had it with what? Two clicks? Very cool. Very, very cool