i know i always told people to tag and tag, but...

this is going a bit overdone:

www.listal.com/viewproduct/movies/31869

and lately, i'm noticed a lot of top movies are getting similar tag-a-holic treatment. 'fall from height', 'attempted rape', 'subway', 'mask', 'rooftop', 'knife', 'rose', etc... wow, someone's going thru and using tags to the extreme. LOL

my beef though is maybe we should truncate tags to show only top taps, unless you click VIEW ALL, similar to how Amazon Review is truncated in the DVD section. or maybe have a toggle between 'view friends tags' and 'view all tags'. if you've build up a good list of friends on here that are top notch taggers, it could give you a nice list of tags rather than the chaotic mess that occurs once a movie gets overtagged by the masses.

aside from ugliness factor of having nearly a full page length of tags, pushing review, images and users who watched /want to watch down several pages south, there is also confusion that results from this. I've set up my dad and brothers and mother-in-law to start using this service to track each others movies. I sent my dad a link to V for Vendetta so he can add it to his 'want to watch' list, and he calls me on the phone saying he's confused as heck what the movie is about, because he started reading thru the tags. a quick skim thru them throws words like 'homsexual', 'attempted rape', throat slit, burned alive, dictator, pedophile. wow. took me a while to convince him its not some sick twisted homo-erotic gore-fest. :) then i told him to ignore every tag with only (1) tag, and to just use IMDB link if he wants to find out more info. and i'm thiking to myself, thats not right, to be sending someone to an outside source because the movie info page on listal is too confusing. We also need to add some sort of movie plot/description to the MOVIES sites, because this 'Sorry, but there is no description for this item...' is just not cutting it.

anyone else have thoughts on this matter?

As you might have guess... I do! I do! :D

I guess people don't like general tags. How about using "violence" or "lgbt" to cover a wide section of stuff? :P

One possible thing I think needs to be added is the merging of tags. It might be a bit easier on Tom if somehow members could contribute to doing it, as I'm sure there are a few of us at least who would be willing to help and even those (me) who are always looking for ways not to pay attention to their homework... I mean, who needs dystopia, dystopian, dystopic future and even dIstopia for the one movie??

(That last note made me think, is there any way we can get the spelling of certain tags corrected? lol)

Anyway, the only showing the most popular tags (or maybe the first 10-15) seems to be a good way about it.

Maybe in the future we could have "personal tags" for things such as "saw in theatre", people's feeling about it (such as "disturbing" and "rubbish"), and the good old "watched with ..." which seem to pop up every now and then. Then we could have the more "general tags" that identify themes and big events. But thats just an idea.

what about something in user settings that says 'auto-tag genres from imdb', so when a user adds a movie to their list, it can automtatically add the top genre field from IMDB. And rather than showing number of times the tag has been used, show the popular tags in bigger fonts. So, end result for V for Vendetta movie, it would show ACTION in big font, DRAMA in smaller, yet still large, font, then REVENGE smaller yet again, and by the 4th or 5th line, when the tags are shown in small font to indicate only 1 tag, add ...(more) which would be linked to show all tags.

This way, everyone is happy, the ones that love to tag, and also the ones that love to keep a neat organized look to their accounts, and involves minimal amount of alterations.

But i must admit, tartan, i love your suggestion for General and Personal tags. Maybe call it Public and Private, or something to that effect. Its an eye-sore to see 'watched with luke' or 'read in history class' tags, but i'm guilty of using personal tags as well to help organize my films,and if private tags came into play, i have a ton of ways i can image adding private tags to help sort out my lists.

on a side note, whats with all those 'krishna' tags? what does that even mean? LOL

and let me stress this, i'm not trying to make people tag a certain way, or to tag less. tags are awesome, and its what sets this site apart from other movie indexing sites. and if everyone tagged uniquely, you can find neat things about movies, and do some powerful searches for movies with very specific plot lines. I'm just worried about how current tag box may confuse new users and clutter movie's page.

In fact, ideally, i'd love to see all parts of the info page truncated. Reviews for DVDs are truncated, list of users are truncated, and there is dicussion to truncated the comments as well to one or two lines, so why not do the same to tags, and also to actors list. Trucating the actor list would also allow to tap in to FULL cast list on IMDB which would fix all those movies who sort cast alphabetically or in order of apperance, yet it would be truncated so page doesnt run on forever. Later on, maybe allowing people to place STAR next to their favorite cast members of a particular movie, so end result would be all top starred actors would be shown first in the casting list.

I was going to make a thread about this; I personally wish there was some kind of master list of tags to choose from. I know some people like to get creative, but the purpose of tags is to describe a movie, not to detail every last happening in it. I think if we all helped, a comprehensive list could be made and those could be the only tags used. I think this would also do a lot for organization, avoiding double taggings like "book adaptation" and "book" and "books".

However if everyone is against this idea, only listing the most popular tags is a great alternative. But I wish there was SOME reference to look at when choosing tags. Maybe there could be a comprehensive list, and then an "add your own tag" choice as well, to make sure everyone chooses "book adaptation" (as opposed to the other two), but to also allow for creative tagging? If you look at the most popular site-wide tags, there are a lot of repeats due to slight misspellings or different wordings.

well, maybe have a list of preselected tags for GENERAL tags, and you can create custom tags for PRIVATE tags only?

using your book adaptation example, I'd still to be able to add 'based on Stephen King novel' to really fine tune my tags. That should still be allowed, either as public or private tags, as the full customization is what makes this place unique. and then there is language issue. Do you allow only Comedy, or Comedie, Comedia, Komedie, or whatever else other non-English folks prefer to using? I fear it opens up a big can of worms if we try to limit tags.

But perhaps if we trucated the tag box for starters, that would be a start. I noticed another big problem with lots of tags. Go to V for Vendetta, and try to add a tag. ADD A TAG is at the bottom of tag box, and because there is SO MANY DARNED TAGS, i can't see what tags I already have unless I go ADD TAG, then scroll up, then scroll back down to type it. To borrow a british term, that is pure bollocks. ;) At very least, I think adding ADD TAG box should be above list of general tags.

Also, another example from trying to get new users like me dad using the site; he wanted to know how to find new movies, like comedies. Well, click on TOP TAGS, then find the word COMEDY in the tag cloud, and what do you get?

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

Fight Club? Pulp Fiction? Catch me if you can?

All those have the 'Comedy' tag just ONCE, by someone with a weird sick sense of humor. LOL. yet because it shows ALL movies with comedy tag, and lists them by popularity, those end up first. If i were to add COMEDY to matrix movie, it would be listed as number one comedy. once again, it may seem minor, but it gives a very negative impression to some new user trying to use this site to discover new movies to add to their collection. It should ideally sort it by # times the COMEDY tag is used first and foremost.

lol! Sorry the Pulp Fiction one was me. Must have been hurrying. And Catch Me If You Can is actually a comedy (according to IMDB).... but I would agree that it would be better to have the ability to list them by the number of times tagged.

wow, really? Catch Me is a comedy on IMDB? I know many people quickly copy the IMDB categories, which explains why 7 of us on here list it as a comedy, but yeah. wow. i mean, it had funny moments, but comedy?

Anyways, I don't think the focus should be on altering people's tags, or limiting their tags. Focus should be on cleaning up the results and improving how those results are used by the general public. Everyone should tag however they want, but if we keep personal tags out of view, and auto-suggest correct spellings, and auto-suggest IMDB categories, and fix up the searching of movies by tags, then everyone benefits without any restrictions.

Tom, I know you're busy debugging and polishing up all the recent major changes to Listal, but what are your short-term plans (if any) for tagging improvements/changes?

Oh, maybe we could have result pages display, for instance for "Comedy", "would you also like to see results for funny, komedie..." and the suchlike at the top to show linked results?

I think tagging has a lot of potential to be more useful and a lot of the ideas above are good, like merging multiple tags into 1 and sorting by number of tags. I have a few ideas that I think would be really good as well.

For now though I am concentrating on getting people on the site and using it more and making it easier to use. Some of the features in the 'Planned features' thread are still the main priority, I am working on profile customization at the moment.

I have to say it's very difficult to decide what to do on the site as there are so many things to be done, just browsing the site I find loads of things that I've given up writing them all down.