I remember the day categories were added to the MU database...
It's a wonderful concept, but it's become quite apparent recently that the categories are troublesome to manage and sort out.
As far as I'm aware, the person in charge is lynira, But she's only one person, and having a few more people voice out their opinions in a thread seems very inefficient to me. A lot of popular categories get deleted, only to return again and so on, effectively ignoring the voice of the community as a whole,

I'd like to suggest, if possible, the addition of "vote useful/not useful category" along or instead of the "vote agree/disagree with category" we have now.
If the usage of a certain category doesn't speak for itself, at least this might let us know how many people agree on what should and shouldn't stay.

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Hrodulf and Bjornolfr, you will not be forgotten.

And if the world were black and white,
you would be my rainbow in shades of grey.

Click 'n Play!

If I had a fantasy self, it'd be a tentacle monster.

I am going to show up in that thread again soon with a few opinions regarding certain problem i tend to notice again and again form a professional perceptive with certain tagging practices in general and poor lynira has my sympathy.
I further have another lengthy list ready when she finishes with my last one but my biggest problem besides all the the duplicates isn´t that we keep losing popular categories as nearly all that went over the years or even better were merged had a very good reason.
Cameo died recently i noticed and so did Porn with Plot to name a few i had zero hand in but approve 100%. What i am way more interested to see people take more care to categorize their reading list(s) instead of letting the community vote as we now have 140 pages where someone added just added Yuri .
1/3 of our current categories could go away and we still would have too many as deep rooted problems like inconsistent gender divides and the way school settings/relationships are being used now are beyond simple repair.

So why should one never sleep on giving out categories and cleaning up the database entry in general?:

Never forget that they aren´t only there to show you some general themes of a series on one database entry alone. The manga will also show up on every listing for the applied tags and your favorite series or review will only be found if you didn't sleep on that process. That goes double for a series that you would like to revive.
Then there is the Category Recommendations box. If you take a moment to give a proper amount categories you will see similar series will show up in it and your manga will be visible in such listing for other series. This means that awareness for your darling will multiply by a high margin (and series that i tagged show up everywhere).
The logical conclusion and why trashy tags can be harmful is this:
No/Bad categories, only basic genres/descriptions, a crappy or no cover and no review from you spells: No sales pitch!

If some of you think that i am wrong than please explain to me why Looking for mother age regression story still hasn´t been found despite the distinct theme.

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I also read EU/US comics and am a librarian.
Manga-Masters, My ANN-Lists + Imdb

And again I ask, what gives your or any one person's opinion more validity than that of a thousand people?
Even if you think that some categories should be renamed or deleted, many others might disagree.

And I think ''porn with a plot'' was a good category. =/

________________
Hrodulf and Bjornolfr, you will not be forgotten.

And if the world were black and white,
you would be my rainbow in shades of grey.

Click 'n Play!

If I had a fantasy self, it'd be a tentacle monster.

I don´t what to derail and i will only mention here too that categories are a form of Boolean/Logic operators that can´t and shouldn't be used alone to describe a manga and need to be applied in combination with others. The existence of duplicates as Mask, Mask/s and to a degree Masked Character (from a future suggestion list) overcomplicate research and tagging so a merger can only be the logical chose here or elsewhere.
(More than 1/3 of my suggestion are even framed as questions i just saw.)
If we get a choice to vote on these (instead of the admins?) than so be it and if more people will than participate in the categorizing process than we all win but i do trust in our rulers. These have final say on all sorts of things (lynira can´t be the one who killed the 2 mentioned as she has been afk i just saw) and decided what should stay, go or be merged when these matter were brought up by users in the past so i never decided on the fate of even one category in my time here and i only come up with them as let´s say my new Urban Fantasy.

So about "Porn with Plot" and why it sucked from my end: It´s nearly impossible to write hentai without a narrative so the tag is a judgment call if a user decides if a manga is worthy or not and way too many lead to non-hentai too. If one tags hentai with the proper sub-genre as let´s say Vanilla/NTR, the characters age, the setting, the art style and .... than the manga will show up on more than a dozen entries for tags so one will find it way better as with one measly tag alone. In practice here Sensei o Mite Kudasai. Borderline Seinen wasn´t even me so use it or Borderline Josei in the future and the genre box too.

I said my peace so let´s see what admins will have to say and we currently have 3483 categories with thousands of people with thousands of opinions giving them so this is inherently a bit unsolvable and a fundamental change it the process would need to happen.

Forgot: We still would need the Categories (Tags) Bug Thread or a version of it to present categories to vote on so the problem would be again that people would need to invest time (as me with my lists) beforehand. The biggest problem is thus audience participation to me and not the idea itself.

Edit2: Well spoken conquerorofheaven as this is how one learns it in library school (but Kakashi is a leading character so i would have given out Masked Character too).

Last edited by residentgrigo at 12:23 pm, May 6 2015

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I also read EU/US comics and am a librarian.
Manga-Masters, My ANN-Lists + Imdb

I don't know much about site maintenance, but here's my two cents.

I think the tags should be as specific as possible. Whether I'm searching for a manga who's name I forgot or just browsing, it is incredibly useful to have categories that directly pertain to the plot and characteristics of the manga. To be honest I even the use the tags to decide whether or not to read the manga when the description is just too vague.

A lot of people seem to be getting caught up in the categorization aspect and forgetting the utility of the tags. First and foremost, I think the tags should be used for informing others about elements of the manga. Using the "Mask" category as an example, just looking through it I noticed Naruto is listed under it. Yes there are characters in Naruto that wear masks, but they're side characters and their masked nature is never really a plot point. Thus, putting Naruto under that category is completely useless to a person looking to read a manga about a masked character. So you can see why tags like "Weapon/s", "Fighter/s", or "Fire" can be too broad or just generally useless for aiding in searches.

This is probably the best way to use the tags. Only add tags that illustrate major aspects of a manga to make it easier for others find that manga whenever they're in the mood for that aspect. Doing it that way isn't really all that subjective and it would probably make people's lives a lot easier.

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Cynicism at its best.