The conversation around tagging and tag-related features is moving kinda fast. I’m available to do work on IFDB, but my availability is always limited for volunteer work.
It’s not totally clear to me what we want and what’s high/low priority:
A way for someone to delete all instances of a particular tag. (Me, personally? Any admin? “Trusted” users?)
An easy way for someone to tag all games with a certain tag with another similar tag, e.g. tagging all the games tagged “3d graphics” with “3D.” (It’s already possible for anyone who can write code to use IFDB’s API to search by tag and tag games. But that’s hardly “easy.”)
Maybe all we need is a way to define “synonymous tags,” like @HAL9000 suggested. (And maybe just admins would do it…? Or “Trusted” tag wranglers…??)
My overall feeling is that none of this will directly impact most people’s experience of IFDB very much, unless/until @otistdog can be convinced to share any code for his Magic 8-ball “similar games” algorithm.
Specifically, I’m quite concerned that TagFest will come and go, and IFDB will have nicer, cleaner tags, but nobody will really notice, because they won’t actually be used to find similar games or provide automated recommendations.
As he keeps saying:
I don’t think this can be considered anything other than an amusement.
Is tagging stuff more important or less important than home page stuff?
Improvements to moderation tools? (We still have no log of what actions admins/moderators take on IFDB, and it might be quite a bit of work to implement that…)
Why do we even have an IFComp review spreadsheet? Couldn’t IFDB do all that for you…?
Or at the very least have an easy way to auto-ingest the entire spreadsheet when the comp is over, so all those reviews show up as “external reviews” in IFDB…?
At the very least you should be able to rate a game directly from the search results page, and/or mark games as played/wishlisted, so you can quickly improve the results on the “new to you” search (played:no willplay:no wontplay:no reviewed:no rated:no)
So, uh, yeah, we’ve got a lot of stuff to work on, and contributions are welcome. I just found out that it’s easier than ever to get started, using Github Codespaces!
I’m glad to see that there is interest in taking action on longstanding open tickets for IFDB.
There seems to already be a separate thread about them and their priority, so I would suggest that replies be placed there to help keep this thread on topic. This thread is about collecting tag consolidation suggestions, for later action if and when any of those items are addressed.
Some of these would merit a closer look, I think. There are some groups on your list where different tags within the group definitely tell you different things about the game:
alien culture / alien sidekick
animated art / animated text
choice-based / choices matter
CYOA / multiple paths
sound effects / comes with theme song
date / dating sim
I’ve used the tags to search IFDB for years. I don’t think their utility depends on anything like this proposed Magic 8-Ball. They’re already useful just by themselves. But maybe I’m in the minority with this opinion.
Same here—that’s the reason I’m so gung-ho about improving tag functionality, because I search by tags a lot. It may be that the average IFDB user doesn’t, in which case there probably are other improvements that should take priority, but while Otis’s spearheading of TagFest might be related to his recommendations algorithm, some of us are just jumping on the opportunity to improve an aspect of the site we already use regularly.
I’m sure everyone would agree that tags are useful, and I search them sometimes, too. It’s all about prioritization, and what creates the greatest benefit. (A lot more people look at the home page than search for tags!)
Even within the six features I listed for tags, it’s not at all clear to me what’s highest priority, even just to support Tagfest for its own sake. Is it synonyms?
I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but synonyms and suggestions for existing tags showing up as you type things into the tags field are the two features I would most like to have.
I think it would also help to be able to conveniently scroll through all the existing tags on IFDB (maybe in a separate window) when you’re tagging a game.
Thanks to a PR from @bg, https://ifdb.org/showtags now shows a list of tags in a table, sorted by frequency. (You can still view them in a cloud, if you want.)
I started to work on synonyms and immediately ran into confusion about what “synonyms” are supposed to do.
Game-search synonyms: When you search games for “tag:science fiction”, games tagged “sci-fi” would show up in search results.
Bulk replace tags: A trusted/admin user would replace all the “sci-fi” tags with “science fiction” tags, so you can see that there are 500 games tagged “science fiction” rather than 300 games tagged “science fiction” and 200 games tagged “sci-fi”.
“Add Tag” enforces primary tags, banning synonyms: If you try to tag a game with “sci-fi”, we’d require that you tag it with “science fiction” instead.
#1 really isn’t very compatible with #2 and #3. (What’s the point in searching for “sci-fi” if we’re just going to delete all the “sci-fi” tags?)
Similarly, I don’t really know what “Tag suggestions” are supposed to do.
I think I know how to search for tags as you type, like autocomplete. (Maybe this would minimize some typos.)
But that’s hardly “tag suggestions” in any meaningful sense. I have no idea how we’d decide to suggest tagging a game as “science fiction” before you start typing “sci.” (But maybe nobody really meant that.)
Maybe all “tag suggestions” means is #3, so if you type “sci-” we’d recognize that you’re referring to “sci-fi” but if you clicked on that autocomplete option, we’d “encourage” (require) you to tag it as “science fiction” instead.
I think I was interpreting tag suggestions as being like what happens on this forum when you start to type a post, and as you type, it displays a list of similar topics off to the right, under the heading “Your topic is similar to…”. But in this case, instead of similar topics, it would display a list of similar tags that already exist. And maybe you could just click one of them if you wanted to choose that one. It wouldn’t just be autocomplete, because the tag you actually need might begin differently than what you are typing. For example, if you typed “source,” it might display “I7 source available” as one of the options.
And if you type an unofficial version of an official tag–for example, if you type “point-n-click” when the designated official version of that tag is “point and click”–it would suggest “point and click” instead. And maybe it wouldn’t allow you to submit “point-n-click”–I’m not sure.
And to be clear–all I’m talking about here is what happens when you try to tag a game. I hadn’t given a lot of thought to how this would apply to searching for games.
I was looking up ways to do autocomplete. It looks like there are a lot of simple pre-made solutions, but they generally rely on having an array of words for autocompleting.
This could be maintained manually or automatically. I think manually would be good; just take the top 100 or so most popular tags and include them in the autocomplete list. The top 100 tags are unlikely to change all that often, and it could be updated every couple of years.
I was assuming we were going to do 2 (using a not-yet-added feature that would allow an admin to do this in an automated way), and maybe also 3, but I’m not sure what most other people thought.
For 2, I was also assuming we were going to do this for tags that are identical in meaning (like “sci-fi” and “science fiction”), not necessarily for tags that are just similar.
When a synonym is added: find all tags that match the pattern, for each tag: find all games with that tag, remove it and add the synonym tag (if not already present)
When a tag is added to a game: check it against existing synonym patterns, if it matches, replace add the synonym tag instead, (maybe also alert the user?)
When searching for a tag: check synonym patterns and replace as needed
When doing an unstructured search: check for synonym pattern matches, but append the tag instead of replacing it
Yeah, I meant autocomplete preferably pulling from a list of existing or possibly most-used tags, which I think would not just reduce typos but also make it easier to see when there’s a commonly-used tag that is similar but not identical to the one you were about to add, reducing creation of redundant tags. I wasn’t envisioning something fancy involving IFDB guessing what tags a game should have based on information in the entry or anything like that.
As for synonyms, I’d be happy with either “search for sci-fi, get everything tagged either sci-fi or science fiction” or “automatically replace sci-fi with science fiction”; I agree it doesn’t make sense to combine those options.
