Separate Genres and community tags :planned:

[thejadmaster]

My two cents on Genres and Community Tagging: I just wanted to put this out there, as the suggestions I've been reading make me think that these two topics are being treated as one and the same.

There are a ton of things that people like to know to help them choose which series to check out. Some non-genre examples might be whether or not there is a "trap" in a manga, if the manga has a "female lead", "male lead", or "no lead/cast", whether a series "ends in tragedy" or has a "happy ending".

All of these are useful bits of information, but not all of them need to go into the Genre tags. Some of them should probably be hidden as spoilers. Some of them might be subjective on the side of the reader. Those sorts of tags seem like they would work best as some sort of community added/voted tags separate from the genre tags.

Checking out the tags in series on NovelUpdates.com could give a good example of what I'm looking for.

In addition to the basics, adding tag voting, up and down only when editing tags, seems like a good way for the community to decide what are the most important tags in a series as well as which tags might be a bad fit. If one minor character in a series is a trap and shows up in only a couple of chapters, the idea would be that the "trap" tag wouldn't be voted up as much and thus would appear lower in the tags list, perhaps. Perhaps they should be administrated to some degree and it would be nice to be able to set the tags as hidden or spoilers.

All that said, these are just my ideas for tagging apart from genres. I'm sure there are details more appropriate or feasible than the ones I've outlined (I'm a web developer by trade and understand the data and otherwise concerns). I hope you will take my suggestions into consideration.

 

[Zephyrus]

This is something that we're talking about. It'll be in a future update, though no firm timeline.

 

[ununseti]

I agree that it's probably a good idea to keep genres and content tags separate. Genres are good for getting a broad overall sense of what kind of manga it is. Content tags are good for when you're searching for something very specific, and also good for getting a very detailed and possibly spoilerific breakdown of what kind of manga it is.

NSFW tags / Hentai-specific tags could be implemented as content-specific tags so that they don't clutter the genres. Come to think of it, NSFW and spoiler tags are sort of similar in that they probably should be hidden by default unless the user explicitly wants to see them.

Comparison to other sites:
- Manga Updates and Novel Updates keep genres and category tags separate. MU's most popular tags. NU's most popular tags. On MU, you vote for categories, and the categories with more votes appear larger.
- VNDB has options to hide/show "sexual content" tags, "technical" tags, and a 3-way toggle between "hide spoilers", "show minor spoilers", and "spoil me!". Although the tag types are well categorized in its tag tree, they just sort of show up all mushed together on a VN's page, sorted in descending order by votes. You vote for tags on a scale from -3 to 3.
- AO3 has 4 main kinds of tags: fandom, character, relationship, and additional/freeform. They make no functional distinction between generic genres and very content-specific tags. Their most popular tags tend to be the more generic ones, though.
- TVTropes: They use tropes. There are many.
- Pixiv: tags are pretty homogeneous; there's no functional distinction between descriptive tags such as "背景", series tags such as "東方project", character tags such as "チルノ", shipping tags such as "レイマリ", subjective tags such as "10点じゃ足りない ", or bookkeeping tags such as "東方Project50000users入り", although the pixiv wiki classifies them pretty well. The number of tags on a work is limited to 10, though. Their most popular tags.
- (NSFW) Dynasty Reader has tags for anthology, doujin, series, author, scanlator, pairing, and general tags. Tags range from generic genres to very specific. Their tags.
- (NSFW) Danbooru has 5 main kinds of tags: artist, character, copyright, meta, and general. Their most popular tags. Pools are used for organizing subjective things/things requiring interpretation, and also series. Their most popular pools.
- (NSFW) e-hentai has tags for language, parody (series), character, group (circle), artist, tags applying to males, tags applying to females, and misc. Their tags.
- (NSFW) nhentai has tags for parodies (series), characters, general tags, artists, groups (circles), languages, and categories (manga, doujinshi, etc.). Their most popular tags.

Some of the tags out there can get really specific... For example:
- Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
- Alternate Universe - Time Travel
- Crack Treated Seriously
- Time Loop
- Time Travel
- Time Travel Fix-It
- Aaaaaangst
- Body swap
- Depressing as fuck
- Introspective
- NSFW
- Adapted to Anime
- LGBT Character in Non-Yaoi/Yuri Manga
- Male Demographic with Female Lead
- Parent's Work Plays a Big Role
- Seeing Things Other Humans Can't
- Unrequited Love Stays Unrequited

 

[Teasday]

What's being called "tags" here (as in user-submitted categories) have been discussed at least on Discord before, although with no real consensus that I'm aware of.

I'm against implementing it, because of reasons including but not necessarily limited to 1) it would fairly significantly complicate all relevant systems and diminish performance, the biggest problem probably being the search, 2) it would rely on a small percentage of MangaDex users (namely the people who actually have an account) adding massive amounts of data for it to be remotely worth the investment, and 3) it's basically completely redundant as MangaUpdates has already spent years and years amassing this data, all of which is easily accessible with the MU links on the manga pages.

As a bonus reason, there's my personal distaste for many of the categories users tend to submit. There's only so many "Appearance Different from Personality", "Male Lead Falls in Love First" and "Important Non-Romantic Relationship/s" type categories that I can stomach.

 

[totallynotmike]

Point's kinda moot, since apparently stuff has been decided, but yeah, i thought things were okay the way they were. I really don't see the appeal of narrowing things down that much (not in the way the initial post presented anyway), and even if i did, the answer's almost always one click away, given that linking MangaUpdates ids in descriptions is unspoken, yet almost universally followed gentleman's agreement.

I also don't know how eventual voting on tags would realize itself. The end result would probably still be better that one-person-only arbitrary H grouping (real lack of consistency there), but some (my guess is at least one third) series have very small number of viewings and followers to them, so things would most likely end up weird, at least in some cases.