what's on your wishlist?

[kaigou]

ETA: you can find all posts on this topic at http://kaigou.dreamwidth.org/tag/fantabulous+delicious+extravaganza

I've been watching the spiraling storms of raeg around del.icio.us and its utter fail, and there seem to be about six different places that people are randomly congregating about possibly doing a fandom version. Consider this a welcoming home if you want to link/share for all suggestions in one place. I don't know if anyone else is organizing this, but I'm not talking about the heavy-duty of code. I'm talking about something that has to happen before anyone puts code to screen, or else any project would end up just as messed-up as the current disaster.

Short version: first step is to figure out the fandom wishlist.

I do business analysis & an information architecture (BA/IA), so this isn't scary to me. Those titles just mean I figure/find out what clients (that's all ya'll) want (the BA part), and I figure out how to shape that into something meaningful and findable in a web application/site (the IA part). Basically, I organize stuff. Granted, something like this -- which is effectively tagging potentially the entire freaking intarweebs -- is much bigger than anything I've ever done personally... but that just means I'd be [very!!] happy to be joined by any other IA, or UX, or BA, folks. And, if for whatever reason real life gets in my way, at least this post would stand as a collection-point for the reference of whatever team does end up doing the project.

[NOTE: I'm not volunteering to run this project. I'm not even remotely considering running it. I'm just not a project manager. I will happily defer to, and assist, anyone who is and is willing to take on the lead position. Just be aware that I know where I'm good and PM ain't it.]

To keep this easy to organize for me and/or whomever ends up compiling it:

• PLEASE do ONE requirement/request PER REPLY. If you have five things that you really really think are important, do five replies. It's okay, this isn't spamming. It just makes it easier for the next step:
  
  
• If you see someone else has a request and it's the same as yours, just reply to that request with a +1 as the subject line. Consider it a kind of informal voting; the more +1 replies a request gets, obviously the more important it is to the community.
  
  
• Feel free to suggest something that del.icio.us didn't do, but that you've seen elsewhere. Be sure to add a link to a screenshot or the app itself so the requirements-gatherers (me and my kind) can see your suggestion in action, if that's at all possible.
  
  
• If you want to volunteer, please do that as a separate reply just so it doesn't get lost in the requests. Just put "VOLUNTEER" as the subject line of your reply, followed by the specific task. Like, say, "VOLUNTEER: php coding" or "VOLUNTEER: user interface design" or whatever. If you want to volunteer for something & you see someone else already has, just reply to their post with your own -- this way, everyone with similar skills gets grouped together, and we'll (hopefully) keep the noise-to-signal ratio down a little.
  
  
• Link, share, pass along, signal-boost, whatever you like.

I'm not going to reply to every single post, just to keep the noise level down, but I may reply if I'm not sure what you mean, for clarification. (If you're also a BA, IA, or UX person, feel free to jump in wherever, as you think's needed. The more the merrier.) See first comment & reply if you're interested in the ongoing googledoc with requests to Pinboard. Feel free to extract & copy to this list, if there's a wish there that you'd want recorded here, as well.

Also, anonymous comments are NOT being screened, so be sure to sign your post if you're volunteering, so we can find you! (You do not have to sign your posts if you're just adding to the general requirements list.)

Be civil, help keep the threads organized for easy finding later... and dream big.

Comments

[kaigou]

The problem with this is that then you have multiple tags, frex: Dogs and dogs are seen as two different tags. One way to get around that (and what I guess the old delicious did) is to just save all tags as lowercase. I think it's possible to have capitals read as same as lowercase (anything's possible, it's just a matter of how hard the code gets)...

I guess the best way I can put it is: "what kind of capitalization [do you think would be most common]"? Sentence-case (first letter cap, rest lowercase), or title-case (every first letter capped)? Or do you mean personalized kind of capitalization, like "dOGs" (or whatever equivalent)?

related: would it make a difference if tags were multi-words, if perhaps you're using capitalization to create a pseudo-string, like MetaAboutMyFandom? If the actual tag could be "meta about my fandom", then would capitals be as crucial? (A nice-to-have, rather than a need-to-have?)

[zellieh]

Tricky. I can see both sides of this; I want to search for "Harry Potter" and see "harry potter" results as well, but I also would like a difference between meatloaf (food) and Meatloaf (band).

Then there's language issues: German requires some capitalised words. I'm not a linguist, but I'm pretty sure German isn't the only language where capitalisation is used to convey a lot more meaning than in English.

It might be the best compromise to recognise case, and make this another option: if you're searching for [Tag X] have the system suggest "do you also want to search for [tag x]?" Or possibly leave tag merging on by default, and have a ticky for "search for this exact case" if you want to search for only lower case, upper case, sentence case, or capitalised word(s). I think it's more likely that most English-language users won't care about case, except in special circumstances, but the option to be specific would cover those occasions.

[kaigou]

Doh, very good points.

Then for now, I'll just list the requirement as "respect capitalization" and add a requirement that the system also gives the option to search for the same text but without respect to capitals -- then it'd find all other tags with same text but won't differentiate btw capitals/not.

[37cats]

This is interesting...and not something I ever thought about. I'm not particularly coding-literate, so all I know is that it bugged the heck out of me when I created the tag SPN and came back to find the tag spn - because I am just that OCD about my tags. Which is actually maybe not what this is about?

One of the questions this brings up for me is: are the tags going to be moderated site-wide? I mean, there are a lot of different ways people would tag the same thing, depending on what their organization style is - Harry Potter could be: HP, HarryPotter, harry potter, f:HarryPotter, c:harrypotter, HarryPotter(Book!Verse), and probably a hundred other permutations. With that in mind, I'd think the most general search option might be best, but with a "search for exact phrase" option as well.

Again, I'm coming at this from the position of "has no freaking idea about coding or any of that fun stuff" - so I might not even be saying anything useful!

[kaigou]

In this situation, you're acting as the client/user -- so at least IMO, anything you say is useful! It'll be up to a developer-team to determine what could be done, but it's still important to let them know where you (and everyone else) would WANT things to be, so they can map something out. (Or at least give a really good explanation as to why not! so we can come up with an alternate, if it came to that.)

Me, personally, I'm not for moderating ALL tags site-wide, because we all have our own styles of how we want to interpret/save links. That said, maybe the auto-generated tags would be the moderated version, which you could then edit to fit your style -- or even add and then have a secondary tag that's in your style. Like choosing "Harry Potter" as a generic tag, and "HP:bookverse:book3" as your own tag.

That might be more important to people who want to be able to share their links, and make them easily findable to other users (whether limited or fully-public sharing). I mean, if I kept my links completely private, then it wouldn't matter whether I use global tags, b/c it's only for my own eyes, right? (And private wouldn't show up on searches, either, or in totals, so it wouldn't make much difference there.)

As for the capitalization, there are several really good arguments now for respecting capitalization, and they're not just OCD. It could also be foreign language tags (like German), or because the original term is an acronym or abbreviation, like you said. I mean, a tag of a govt department like "IRS" means something different to me than "irs", which just looks like a misspelling!

So I'm thinking I'll update the "respect capitalization" requirement with an added requirement that we have the option to search "cap-sensitive" or "not cap-sensitive" -- so if you only wanted SPN but not spn (or even sPN or Spn or spN!) then it'd only give you SPN, exactly.

(Granted, now we've got the question of who would moderate the tags, but that's for another day!)

[drunkoffthestars]

Whoops, I hadn't even really considered a lot of that, just the fact that it was a Thing that I had seen people wanting. I could have sworn delicious let you capitalize some tags, but idek and heck if I can go back and check or see how that worked. :P

I think the most important part is in the DISPLAY of the tag. If you enter it in/with capitals, it should be displayed in/with capitals on your tag list.

I think if the back-end does not differentiate between Dogs and dogs, that is less of a concern? I don't think it would be the end of the world if SITE.COM/tags/dogs (or however the URLs get set up) showed links tagged with both Dogs and dogs, and in the Meatloaf example below, that could be taken care of via the NOT filtering option.

Does that make sense?

[kaigou]

The problem is that the backend must differentiate, if the frontend is to do so. It's a matter of equivalence -- when Meatloaf and meatloaf aren't the same thing, the backend can't see them as the same, either. Plus, if the backend stores it as xxxx, then how would the front end know it should be Xxxx, or xXxx, or even XXXX?

Until a developer shows up and sets us all on the right path, probably best to save all capitalization as it's entered by the user -- and give the option in searching to be either "exact capitalization" (find tags with same capitalizing pattern) or "case insensitive" (find all tags with same order of letters, regardless of capitalizing).

For that matter, spaces or not might also be an option in the advanced search -- so your tag might be "harry potter" but saying you want everything would get you back variations like "harrypotter", "HarryPotter", "Harry Potter", and if you included wildcards like "harry potter *" you'd also get "harryPOTTERbookverse" and "Harry potter book2".

[drunkoffthestars]

Yeah, someone with Actual Knowledge Of How These Things Work will have to weigh in on this one.

For some reason, I thought it would not be too terribly difficult to tell a computer to ignore capitalization when looking for a series of letters. Would it help if there was some sort of conversion in the databse somewhere? Like have two fields: input/display tag vs internal tag. Or does get too messy/big? Like, when populating a user's sidebar, it would go after the display tag, and when doing site-wide whatever, it would to after the internal tag.

Is it is useful to distinguish between tags, tag search, and general search? I don't think search should be capitalization-sensitive, though more input on this one might be useful. I think having advanced options is a good idea, especially once we can get someone to weigh in on how ridiculous this would be to do.

[drunkoffthestars]

I just wanted to update this a wee bit: I've been fussing around on Pinboard a bit and it does what I'm talking about.

EX: The tags 'duesouth' and 'dueSouth' are both pulled up when you look at the page http://pinboard.in/t:duesouth

Delicious also does it, I get 'duesouth' along with 'dueSouth' and 'DueSouth' http://delicious.com/tag/duesouth

So it's possible to do!