Since like half the communities and posts here are NSFW related, can we have a common tagging standard?
I’m seeing different requirements across the communities and it gets frustrating to have to check the rules for every post to make sure I’m fitting in the guidelines.
I’d suggest having the tags at the end instead of the beginning, as they can get kind of “noisy”, and you want the most important information first. While the title isn’t always important, it often is.
How about this order (using whatever brackets):
If categories are used, having category first allows people to quickly scan for the categories they’re interested in, and ignore the ones they’re not. For example, in incestconfessions I put pairing information first, since people are often only interested in specific pairings (brother/sister, mother/son, etc).
The title often describes what’s happening in the content, so that goes next.
People usually only care about the creator of the content if they really like it, so that goes third.
Tags come last, not because they’re unimportant, but because of the potential noisyness, and because if you want them to filter further, it’s easy to skip to the end of the line.
Example of what I mean by noisyness:
vs:
I suppose it depends on the type of media. In this context I would define tags as categories that are not necessarily mutually exclusive, rather than something like booru-style tags. As you said, tags like that in a title would get very messy very quickly, so they should probably go in the body text.
My community, BeastClub, has the animal type as a tag at the beginning so people can immediately know what’s in each image. Multiple animal types can be in one image so multiple tags are sometimes necessary. In my case, the title of the art means very little, and can even be totally irrelevant! Of course, this doesn’t apply to every community. Music communities, for example, place much greater importance on the title than mine does. That example alone proves there is no one-size-fits-all solution here.
Category is sometimes thought of as mutually exclusive, but doesn’t have to be. Like, I can do (M/d S/S) for a story that fits two categories, and you can do (dog, horse) for a picture that has both. “Supertags”, I guess?
I don’t think everyone will necessarily go booru-style on their posts, but some will. Having the “subtags” at the end also allows people to get a bit more detailed without feeling like they’re totally trashing the post title.