yuletide_coal | Coalclaw Adventures

"Hockey exemption" you know it applies to all the sports and actor RPF right?

I say keep it but lower the count to 200 or 300. Small actors/athletes/teams should be allowed but there is no reason Podolski or Seguin should technically sneak in even though they are more NPT medium sized in their fandoms popularity.

It would be hard to filter accurately without primary and secondary character fields however.

Not hard to filter at all - just type the character's name in quotes in the main search bar and boom, you've got a count. Seguin only barely snuck in this year - he went over 1000 between when noms closed and the archive opened (and, tbh, could have been reasonably disallowed, I think). And he and Benn will both be out next year, most likely. And once you get past them, there's literally nothing for any of the hockey teams that has even 300 fics for a pairing at this point, so unless something retro explodes massively this year...

Anyway, I guess my point is that I don't think lowering the count would have much effect - and I do think that it should be kept as is unless the count for other fandoms is being changed, as well.

I think primary/secondary comes into play when someone you like is a bg character in a lot of fics but the fic itself isn't about them. If Gonch or Jordie Benn were DQ'd because they were tagged when they were really yentas with a few lines, their fans might be mad that them being ineligible.

So to argue they didn't really have fics about them, it would be easier if you could point to them being secondary based on a secondary tag.

This is more of an AO3 flaw than a Yuletide one though. I'll never hold my breath for primary and secondary relationships OR characters but fuck if that isn't something a fanfic archive shouldn't have.

NA

On AO3 browsing through the tag for character A won't bring up all A/B fics. They lack even that extremely basic functionality, it's amazing how shitty the coders are.

NA

it's amazing how shitty the coders are

They are volunteers running a massive system. Speaking as a software engineer, it is really really hard to build a system that is well-architected and easy to maintain when no one (or few people) on the project have a long-term stake/commitment in it. All things considered, I think they are doing a pretty damn good job.

I repeat: clicking on A doesn't actually bring up all fics with the character A. That's not pretty damn good after all these years and all that fundraised money.

+ 1

Other archives have it. It's not impossible.

They have money to hire someone to at the very least make coding decisions and tell the voluenteers what they should get coding. They can't even do that? It's mismanagement and people making bad coding decisions. The site constantly breaking and remaining largely stagnant can't be handwaved by 'it's mostly voluenteers!' They can be doing it out of the goodness of their hearts and still suck.

da

Does it not bring up everything tagged with character A, though? Do you think the coders should have produced a heuristic system to determine whether a given fic has a character or not?

sa

Ah, didn't parent up. Not every fic tagged A/B has both characters A and B, though, so assuming that A/B means A is incorrect anyway.

Agreed--I don't know why you'd want to search that way?

Yes. Is character A tagged in the pairing? The fic appears when browsing for character A, voila. Or at least make it so that tagging a fic with the pairing A/B automatically adds the characters A and B to the tags. Many archive users won't know or understand that a character needs to be (in their minds) tagged twice.

NA

But isn't that because the Character A/Character B tag and the Character A tag are separate? And it's not like you can syn those - people who click Character A/Character B don't also want all other fics with Character A in them. Be pissed at people who don't tag relationships and characters, not at the tag logic.

You could sync them at first upload. Basically:

If relationship tag is not blank:

character1 = x
character2 = y

if character1 is not in tags

add character1

if character2 is not in tags

add character2

DA

By syn, they meant equivalent. I'm sure it's technically not difficult to add characters A and B if the work is tagged canonical and fully wrangled A/B, but unlike you, they (and I) don't think that should be intended behavior because relationship A/B should not equal characters A and B. Plenty of fic exist where A/B is an appropriate tag and character A and/or character B less so.

Re: Unpopular Opinions About Changing Things

(Anonymous) - 2015-12-27 21:37 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Unpopular Opinions About Changing Things

(Anonymous) - 2015-12-27 21:52 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Unpopular Opinions About Changing Things

(Anonymous) - 2015-12-27 21:56 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Unpopular Opinions About Changing Things

(Anonymous) - 2015-12-27 22:07 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Unpopular Opinions About Changing Things

(Anonymous) - 2015-12-27 21:38 (UTC) - Expand

As a wrangler I really wish we had this. Relationship tags get the character tags added as parent tags for... some reason? I've never understood why, since that doesn't actually do anything.

Re: Unpopular Opinions About Changing Things

(Anonymous) - 2015-12-28 02:49 (UTC) - Expand

That's on the morons that don't understand character tags and pairing tags are two entirely separate fields, not the coders. How dumb do you have to be?

I'm not blaming any of the users when there are no set rules about tagging and it makes perfect sense to assume that tagging the pairing would also have the system realize that those characters would be in your fic.

That's bad UI and the fault of AO3. Refusing to make shit uniform/explicit just so that ~people can tag however they like and nobody is stilted~ makes things useless and creates more work for wranglers. You don't have to /force/ people to tag a certain way but fuck, giving an explanation doesn't hurt.

Not very dumb at all, actually. Things that are obvious to someone with coding and/or database experience are not obvious to your average person who knows how to turn on their computer and update their antivirus and that's it. It doesn't help that there's no explanation of this when you're uploading your fic and choosing the tags.

I was a wrangler and am apparently dumb, because I didn't know it either that Character A wouldn't pull up stories tagged with Character A/Whoever, because why else did we wranglers faithfully attach the Character A to Character A/Whoever in the backend as child tags for exactly that purpose, if it didn't do anything.

Gonch is tagged in 116 fics, Jordie in 350 - hell, even Patrick Sharp is only tagged in 650. I doubt any of them are going to lose their eligibility any time soon based on getting tagged in for yentaing duties. And while I do agree with your point that the AO3 ought to have the ability to differentiate between primary and secondary characters, if it got implemented now we'd still be left with sloppy data because most people probably wouldn't go back and fix their tagging to conform to the new standard. So I'm not sure how much good it would do this problem.

Yeah, but hockey and football are the only two team sports where any exemption rules matter. Whether you called it "Red Sox RPF" or "Baseball RPF," it'd still be eligible.

The real problem is that hockey and football are very different fandoms, so even if you tailor-made the RPF rules to hockey fandom, they wouldn't work for football, and vice versa.

How so? Is there that big a difference between Penguins vs Blackhawks RPF and Real Madrid vs Barcelona RPF?

Football RPF is both older and more tribalized than hockey RPF. It has a longer-lasting tradition on both livejournal and separate archives, so the tradition of calling it a single fandom is more entrenched. But at the same time, football RPF writers these days tend to be football fans who write fic (as opposed to hockey fandom, which is populated in the main by fandom people drawn to hockey), so the team and club preference divisions tend to be much stronger.

Ok, but why does that mean the rules for team divisions would have to be different in Yuletide?

I'm not saying the rules would necessarily have to be different; I just think that different rules might impact football RPF and hockey differently. For example, football fans are way less likely (IME) to write across multiple teams, so in theory it should be easier to start tagging more stories by team and avoid some of these issues. At the same time, though, there's also a longer institutional legacy of calling the fandom "Football RPF," so making that change would be a challenge.