Compiling suggestions for tags

I was trying to track down all the tag suggestions that have been made, but they are spread too thinly over lots of topics. So, if you have a suggestion post it here so we can all keep track. :)

1. Auto completion. Check, I think this is one of the things that Tom is aiming to add in the future.

2. Using the check boxes on the product overview to add tags to multiple items. This would really help as a lot of people seem put-off by the current, slower system.

3. Personal and Public tags. I think this has already been talked about a lot.

4. Conversion of tags. I think that on the "My Tags" pages there should be a conversion box at the bottom. In it we would be able to enter any misspelled or variations on tags and be able to covert them all at once to the other! This would help greatly in my opinion as if you accidentally copy and paste a lot of wrong tags over and over again then it is easily fixed.

Anybody else have any that I have missed/want to comment?

Think someone suggested categories at some point. For example, music could include genre, nationality, format, original year of release and so on. Not actually something I'd want, but can see why some people might

6. The possibillity to find owned/wanted items without tags

7. Merging of semantic similar tags (sci-fi, science fiction, scifi)

I forgot about number 7! Thanks!

I think countries and languages should probably have a capital. Right now "Japan" has a title but "japanese" doesn't. Maybe other proper nouns too, like place names, but then where is end line for that one and how easy would it be to monitor?

Maybe just stick to lower case then if it's easier...

EMI/IRS. I knew thee so well...

Seriously though, all my tags (in clouds at least) are showing up as capitalised regardless of me entering everything except for the aforementioned record labels as lowercase.

Phil, they show up in the cloud like that, but actually on your items it's another story. ;)

my biggest pet peeve about the whole tagging engine is that its a big ball of mess of the following: genres, themes, personal notes, language, film locations, and even actors and characters found in film.

Example, tag of Japan. does that mean it was filmed in Japan? or is about Japan? Or its a Japanese film? or maybe it's 'Saving Private Ryan' that you have in your collection in Japanese dub version.

So I propose a complete eradication/overhaul of the tags.

Add 'Genre' and only allow pre-selected tags to be used, such as action, thriller, sci-fi, and so on. this also avoids misspellings and multiple ways to write sci-fi.

Add 'Theme/Subject' which will be have a lot more pre-selected tags that could be used, maybe even 'suggest' a new tag. This area will be for tags such as 'robbery', 'adultery', 'father-son relationship', 'alcoholism', 'drugs', etc...

Add 'Rating', 'Language', 'Country of Origin' as seperate entities that can be accessed in 'Edit Description', or retrieve this info from IMDB and don't allow editing.

And finally, add 'personal tags' that are searchable. Right now, we can add 'personal notes' but its quite useless as we can't search by those terms, its only useful when accessing that particular movie. If I can add personal tags, then I can fine-tune my collection and be able to search by any term, such as the infamous 'Watched with Luke' and other tags like that that are only useful to one person, and hidden from view for rest of community.

I'm all for having the personal and public tags. I'm also all for having a complete overhaul of the tags mainly because the whole tagging system is driving me nuts. Other then that I can't really input anything different to what anyone has said so far. I think they are all good ideas.

If we are nerve-racking enought (like during the report button thing) we could convince Tom perhaps to get this on the top of the todo-list.
;-)

I think at the very least, the tag box should be truncated to show only 2 or 3 lines of top tags, and click (more...) to see the rest. As it is, all the popular films have a massive tag box that either annoys, confuses, or scares new users. And having 'My Tags' at the top of this massive tag box, while 'add new tag' is all the way at the bottom, that makes it even more difficult to add a tag. For some of those movies, i've actually had to scroll up to see what my tags were after i hit 'add new tag', because I couldnt see them. tsk tsk tsk...

So I know overhauling entire tag area is very much needed but I'd imagine its fairly complex task, but making tag box truncate should be a simple bit of code hack, and I vote we do that right away while we wait for new improved tags.

To be perfectly honest, as it stands, when I show some of my friends Listal, they usually first say 'haha, whats with those 500 words, 'bump in head', 'decapitation', 'rape', 'watched with luke', etc... and I always answer them 'just ignore that part, it's being overhauled.

not dissing Listal, I love the site, but just being honest, the current tags is an embarrassment. popular movies have way too many tags, and obscure movies usually have no tags, forcing you to go to IMDb to find out if its even a comedy or drama or thriller.

I definitely agree it needs a bit of a revamp, but I'm sure this is going to be one of these updates that is going to take some time to get through as there are a multitude of features we're all wanting.

Oh, another, smaller, input from me: I find it annoying that when on the list overviews you can't click on the tag box that you are typing in or else it will close on you and you have to keep opening it again to make sure you don't lose your tags. This is very annoying because I use copy and paste a lot for my manga collection and that involves clicking to highlight (though I usually make sure I use ctrl+c for copying), and if a correction needs to be made to an incorrectly spelled tag the arrow keys have to be used instead of clicking since that would close the damned thing.

A minor inconvenience, but one that will be sure to put people off.

Thanks for this thread! I would love to see #2 implemented, as it's very slow to tag many things at once.

Is it usefull to have something like a report button for wrong tags?

Maybe a flagging system? Report seems too harsh for tags as it sounds like we're hunting down the spammy tags (of which there are some out there).

Some way of removing stupid tags would be good - someone has tagged Tolkien as ugly and bitch...

I'm not entirely sure tags should heavily moderated, people have the right to tag 'ugly' if they really want to. Things like 'bitch' though are pretty offensive though and should be removed. Tags work best when there are lots of people contributing to them and when it's more opinion based than facts, in this way the popular tags rise to the top and the spam sits at the bottom. Unforutanly in a case where only a few people have tagged so the spam has equal weight to the legitimate tags.

Tom, what about limiting the size of the tag box? That way, for popular items, all silly and stupid tags would end up disappearing out of view, visible only when you hit 'more...'

www.listal.com/viewproduct/movies/31869

take this example. there are so many tags that Images, Videos and Reviews all appear so far down that many people would get tired of scrolling down. :)

and worst of all, if you click ADD with is BELOW all the public tags, you can't even see what tags you already used. that's a pretty bad interface 'faux pas'.

I say if no tag overhaul is planned, at very least truncate that darn box to be 5 lines max of public tags, and make the ADD feature appear right below My Tags, not below General Tags.

Another thing that irks me is that when you search the database by tag, it completely sucks. Why? because look at this :

www.listal.com/search/movies/1/?tag=comedy

Ok, someone wants to find popular comedies. So they click on 'top tags' and click on 'comedy'. Fight Club? American Beauty??? Sure, maybe those movies may have had a comic element of two in there, but to call them comedies? Take fight club for example. only one person has tagged it as a 'comedy', so why did that one person's action result in Fight Club showing up in 6th place in Top Comedy tag search? I mean, someone could go an make spider-man 3 a 'classic', and searching by tag for classic movie will put spidey 3 near top because it sorts it by overall popularity. I believe that is totally wrong and counter-productive, and makes people keep away from the tagging system altogether. It should sort the films by the ones that have 'comedy' tag used MOST OFTEN, with popularity being used as secondary sort in case of a tie.

It's not very easy to sort by tag popularity yet, I would probably have to generate that information everyday as it would be too slow to be done realtime.

I made it so it hides any tags with less than 2 people who tagged with that name unless there are less than 20 tags it will then display upto 20. I may add the more function (to see all tags) later on

Thanks tom, that really cleans it up very nicely:

www.listal.com/viewproduct/movies/2856

while keeping lesser known titles intact.

Would we be able to have a "View all tags" function? I sometimes use already existing tags for chosing the wording of a new tag and it would be a good feature so that there aren't a bunch of similar tags lost from view.

The hidden ones still show up in global seaches, right?

Yes the hidden ones still show up, I mentioned view all tags in the post above ;)

Lol, so you did! Silly me. :P