Tagging and You

[foxboyprower]

I was just about to create a forum thread about this, but everything I was going to suggest has already been said here.
Mainly
- The ability for an artist to choose if they will allow users to add tags
- A slight separation or distinction between tags added by users and the artist, "suggested tags"

The issues of large galleries having the potential for tag abuse have already been brought up. So... yeah. Wow the community here is very thoughtful and helpful. I don't have anything new to say here.

[Amber-Aria]

The tagging reference guide is a useful little thing, but even though it looks like it's connected to the Help page on the Weasyl website, there's no link to it under the Help Topics there, and it seems to be only accessible from the link here... I find that a little odd.

[Ceowolf]

personally i think additional tags by other users can be "suggested" and you would receive a notification for it to which you can approve. in that it alows people to inform the user that there are other tags that they could be using, and its unintrusive making it not free reign.

[Michael_Ezaiany]

The solution is obvious - incorporate full free tag editing but make it a Premium account feature. That should weed out the trolls quite a bit because I doubt someone would risk getting banned or taglocked or however else punished on an account they paid money for. And for tracking the abuse that does happen, it would be a nice thing to have a little notification page showing tag changes.

I'm obviously not a fan of artists locking their tags because I've seen too many of them either not giving a damn about how they tag or just not knowing how to. Tags used as extra description, joke tags, not linking words together with underscores resulting in "broken like one tags this", ignoring tagging rules and whining about them is a frequent sight too.

Think for a moment. Is the fear of being targeted by someone and having all your tags screwed up on purpose really what's driving you? Or is it the feeling of violation if someone else dares to touch the tags on your picture? Artists don't own tags, tags are here to make looking for stuff easier.

And for the record, my tags are not locked. You're all free to edit them as much as you like, provided you follow the rules. I'm not perfect so it's not a surprise if I miss a tag or two.

[Eskiworks]

Think for a moment. Is the fear of being targeted by someone and having all your tags screwed up on purpose really what's driving you? Or is it the feeling of violation if someone else dares to touch the tags on your picture?

This isn't an ego thing, let's be clear. I don't want people tagging my images for me because they could tag them wrong, or add abusive tags. I've already had to remove about a dozen incorrect tags from my gallery, and one joke tag. And this site is still in beta! I'm not looking forward to moderating my gallery's tags once the site goes alpha if it stays this way. There needs to be an in between, something like what you suggested or what others have suggested.

[Marzipan]

I think it's a give-and-take situation, maybe kind of a catch-22. On one hand, it does feel strange to have your stuff tagged with things you didn't necessarily want to equate your work with/didn't think of/etc, and I totally get that as a feeling of invasion on some level. On the other hand, the whole filtering system is based off tags, and people can't properly filter what they want/don't want if artists don't properly tag their submissions.

If someone comes across something they don't want to see - and I'm not just talking NSFW stuff or fetishes, I mean like, if someone didn't want to see fursuits or anthro art - but if artists don't think to mark it, then the person browsing will have it come up all the time anyway. So there's two viable solutions to this sort of thing - bother the staff to tell the artist to tag their stuff, which takes time, or just... cut the middle man out and be able to do it yourself! I think that's sort of the thought-process here.

As someone who's lurked a lot of art boards that have community tagging, I find very little abuse of it - mostly because the people who browse and participate in the community are way too picky about the tags. I guess I just wanted to post the positive sides to having the community tagging system and maybe the thought process to why it's here.

Some good solutions might be to have notices to changes in art tags, so the artist can take off ones that they don't want, or maybe to have it be a choice per submission/account to participate - have it be a two-way thing, like, "don't let people tag my stuff, and opt out of tagging other people's things".

Whew that was wordy... sorry! 'n'

[Tiger]

The solution is obvious - incorporate full free tag editing but make it a Premium account feature. That should weed out the trolls quite a bit because I doubt someone would risk getting banned or taglocked or however else punished on an account they paid money for. And for tracking the abuse that does happen, it would be a nice thing to have a little notification page showing tag changes.

Eski hit the part about the reason why some people (myself included) don't support the free tag editing, but I do want to respond to this part.

I personally disagree. Just because someone pays for more features on Weasyl does not say anything about their maturity or sense of responsibility. Premium Weasyl members are of all ages (meaning some may be at an age when they are not completely developed in maturity) and even then age does not denote maturity. I have met some hugely immature/irresponsible people in their late 20's or older through some of my college classes. And likewise, I'm sure that a good chunk of the userbase without premium is full of people that are reasonable and truthful when it comes to tagging appropriately.

So I disagree with Premium-only tagging. I do, however, fully agree that a notification page regarding tags added would be a good feature to implement.

[Michael_Ezaiany]

I personally disagree. Just because someone pays for more features on Weasyl does not say anything about their maturity or sense of responsibility. Premium Weasyl members are of all ages (meaning some may be at an age when they are not completely developed in maturity) and even then age does not denote maturity.

I didn't say Premium members would be more mature. I said they would be less likely to risk taglocking or ban on an account they paid for.

The fun part is that if everybody tagged responsibly we wouldn't need public tag editing. Unfortunately, you just can't trust everyone with tagging their own pictures. The best example would be someone who's name I sadly forgot, but who tagged his submission with "cheetah required_second_tag". I'm not sure about the "cheetah" part, but the more important part was the second tag anyway.

And how many people completely ignore the anthro (or furry) tag I can't even count.

[Tiger]

I didn't say Premium members would be more mature. I said they would be less likely to risk taglocking or ban on an account they paid for.

Gotchya. I personally don't think that the fact that they pay money for will impact a person's behavior when it comes to being immature about tagging. It's more of an issue with a person's responsibility than them being cautious about losing said money they paid.

It is a valid point, though, and I can understand that people certainly can (and I'm sure some do) have that reasoning. I do still feel, though, that making the ability to add tags a Premium-only feature might not be the best solution for the issue.

[Michael_Ezaiany]

I do still feel, though, that making the ability to add tags a Premium-only feature might not be the best solution for the issue.

It would certainly weed out the ones who create an account specifically to tagtroll. Although I guess those kinds of people would be okay with spending a few bucks on what they'd enjoy.

But what would you suggest then?

The problem is that regardless of how they do it, someone's going to whine about it.

If they keep it the way it is now then submissions will inevitably be stuck with bad tags because everybody ticks the little "don't allow deletion of tags" box for god knows what reasons.
If they fully open tag editing for public then a lot of artists will either feel violated or we'll have the classic dispute over which tags are relevant and which ones are not, people whining about getting tags removed/added and so on.
If they keep them locked then we'll all suffer because let's face it, a great deal of people have no idea how to or don't care about tagging properly, see example in post above. And admins will be swamped with tag-related submission reports.

Oh and as for notifications. Yes, they can be a good idea, but have you considered what they might cause? Someone adds/removes a tag and the artist who reads the notification then removes/adds it again and so on and so forth. Although this would probably happen even without notifications.

I don't think there's a simple way to please everyone in this matter. The only right way to do this would be choosing the one that offers greatest efficiency and people will get used to it eventually.