For popular books/series perhaps, but I suspect it to be pretty limited. I just searched a title by a popular author (å¤č¦ by 赤å·ę¬”é) and it doesnāt seem to have an entry. If one went entirely by author itād be bucketed as ācrimeā but that novel is actually āsupernatural suspenseā.
Iām personally inclined to just have the users tag the genre like anything else.
This is a wonderful system suggestion, that will make searching much easier and allow for people to have a better idea about books they are interested in.
I also think having it be restricted to 2 types of tags:
Genre
Trigger Warnings
Would make the most sense.
Since it seems people are concerned about spoilers, having general tags that are restricted to genre only related topics (maybe a predetermined list of genres to pick from), or trigger only related topics (basic trigger lists are pretty easy to find so having options from those wouldnāt be hard) it would solve that problem.
So these are bucketed together because I figured they would both be community editable / voted onā¦ Iāve even thought about having the āgenreā simply be a content tag which gets special handling in filters (i.e. when filtering genre content tags are easily viewable) and display (maybe for short blurbs on the book it would get the genre tags, if they arenāt spoilers).
Regardless, did think they would be done together. I donāt think Iād implement genres separately before content tags.
We could certainly have a list of tags deemed ātriggersā if we can agree on them.
However, the UI will be similar to AniLists. So I wont be breaking into separate sections, but may surface an icon on the tag.
Keep in mind that genres are usually pretty binary. Either something is sci-fi or itās not. Itās comedy or itās not. Also, most books/series tend to only have a few genres, making them easy to view and highly valuable. But tags can be pretty much anything and are much more subjective, which is why AniList has a voting system where users can specify how prominent the tag is to the series, impacting the percentage for that tag. And then when searching by tag on AniList, users can specify the minimum percentage before they want to include something in the search results, because honestly thereās a lot of noise at the lower percentages (I believe a new tag is only set to 20%, so unpopular series tend to have only a few tags, and at low percentages). Just to give an example of a very unpopular series, this is Sora Communication:
They are all at 20% (the default), but having read the first volume I can say that all of those things are absolutely valid tags and should ideally have high percentages. Of course, I could go and add an unrelated tag and it would probably stay there at 20% as well, meaning these 20% tags canāt really be trusted. On the other hand, a popular series with tags at 20% would indicate that those tags are likely wrong and should be ignored by users. Iāve had a very mixed experience with tags on AniList because of that, but Iāve never had an issue with genres since they are just included or not included for a series.
Not saying you shouldnāt do both. I think they both certainly have value. Itās just that one comes with a lot of complexity and the other seems straightforward to me.
Itās just iām not entirely sure how to implement genres without tags. It has to be community editable. I could have all users be able to change them, or have some sort of trust level. It may be easier after I tackle the ācommunity editableā feature around descriptionsā¦ but using the content tags is an elegant solution imo.
Maybe follow a similar upvote system, but only surface a genre when it reaches a certain threshold of upvotes / percentage?
Basically I just mean that Iād find it weird if āsci-fiā (genre) was the same importance as āspaceā (tag) or if āslice of lifeā (genre) was the same importance as ācafĆ©sā (tag). The genres can still be community sourced, but should just be listed or not (no percentage, e.g. ā60% sci-fiā would be really weird) and should be placed in a more prominent place than tags.
Iām not sure if this will be helpful, but StoryGraph when browsing shows genre tags (which are green) and then the top few tags about the mood and pacing (which are pink). After going to the bookās page you can see more of the tags. Genre tags users can choose from a set list, but i donāt remember what about the mood and pacing tags, if there was a set list or you could make a new one.
Everyone who reviews the book can choose whichever mood and pacing tags they think applies to the book and the percentage gets adjusted. There are also questions about character and plot development, but I donāt think we need them.
When browsing:
Mood tags inside the book page:
Mood and pacing from a different book to show how lengthy it can get:
Ooooh different colors for different types of tags looks fancy.
As mentioned in the main product thread, Iāve started work on the first iteration of this ticket!
One question for you all - how should we handle spoilers? AniList simply allows the initial user to specify spoiler tags. Iām not sure if they have a way to change that initial specification outside pinging an admin on the forum?
Iām inclined to handle it similarly unless people have better ideas around this. We could allow a vote system for spoilers too, but that may be overkill.
Pinging @seanblue on this as I know youāre one of the more sensitive ones about spoilers 
You can submit a change and a data mod will do it.
Hovering brings up the options to see who submitted the tag, delete, or toggle spoiler on/off.
Would it be possible to hide/blur tags of unread books as an option for people who are averse to spoilers that could be contained in tags?
A checkbox in the user settings like āShow tags for unread books (may contain spoilers!)ā
That may be useful but I donāt think it achieves the same thing. For example, if I do a book search by tag, hereās how Iād want it to work:
I get where youāre going here, but I often add in content warnings that are spoilers. Ie, one book I can think of you donāt find out til several chapters in that the crime the main character has been accused of is sexual assault, but thatās a topic some people absolutely donāt want to read about so Iād like to be able to tag it, but also spoiler it so people can decide for themselves whether or not they want to be āspoiledā.
I see. Yeah, different use of tags, but in that context that makes sense. But then people really need to make sure they donāt forget to spoiler their tags.
(Personally I put CW in my reviews (blurred).)
I do too, but I think having them as tags gives the neat possibility of (down the line) excluding them from a search.
For sure. I think there was previous talk of letting users specify triggers in their settings and it would automatically filter out all books with those tags from search.
Yes everything laid out here are possibilities, pretty easily implementable.
I will say that I am somewhat leery of having too many āauto search settingsā in the user preferences. Or at least Iād like to show all the filters be filtered on. Just because people may search for something or share a search link and see different results and be confused as to why.
But we can probably figure out an elegant way to do that.
This is now done! Any more comments please refer to the Tags, Tags, Tags [Official Management] thread
