Devinter
The Dreamweaver
- Joined
- Jul 18, 2023
- Posts
- 879
You summoned me. I came.
Alas, as others have mentioned already, we can only dream of features and updates - and discuss what we would like and dislike - but have no real power to implement any of them. I do think that a streamlined list of the most common yet near-identical tags, like in my earlier example above, would be a decent place to start. We don't need both "18 year old" and "18-year-old" as they mean exactly the same thing. However, I would estimate that less than 10% of the total author's on this website even checks the forums at all, so even if we were to create such a list, only a small percentage of total writers would ever even see it.
Therefore, I think the solution has to come from the site admins themselves, implementing a more modern feature.I quite like the idea of users being allowed to add a tag that the author could choose to approve or reject, however - and perhaps the tags could be clickable, as a sort of vote from the reader, to highlight which themes are the most common or noteworthy in a story. For example: "Mind control" got 300 clicks and "Public" only 20? Then a reader would realize that perhaps only one scene would be in public whilst the over-arching idea of the story would about the mind control.
But that train of thought brings to mind something very important; Whilst such a system would be great for the average reader looking to find a new story, does the author really want to reveal all of that information before their reader gives their story a chance? I've heard some authors rarely add many tags because they sort of like it all to be a "mystery", and that tags in a sense are spoilers for what the story will contain. Whilst I personally do not mind that sort of thing, I know that many would.
omg im such a big fan 
