demo / library categories in BYOND Discussion

ID:260890
 
Jul 29 2010, 5:44 am
I'm not sure how people are expected to find libraries and demos. Currently there are 2275 resources in the libraries & demo section. Wading through all of them to find what you're looking for seems like a bad idea. The 527 games on the hub are split into 5 categories, but the 2275 libraries & demos are all thrown in the same bin.

The search function isn't very helpful: "pixel movement" gives 9 results, "pixel move" gives zero. None of the search strings "load map", "swap map", and "swapmap" give any results. You practically have to know SwapMaps by name to find it.

A lot of people put a lot of work into making demos, and I imagine that a lot of that work has gone to waste because nobody will ever be able to find it. I was recently looking through the demos and found this, but I'm sure there are many demos out there that nobody will ever see again because of bad search results. If demos could be tagged with what relevant topics they relate to (icons, interface, administration, lighting, maps, equipment, text, etc.) it would be a lot easier to find things. If you could narrow the list from 2275 demos on all topics to 100 demos that might be what you want, looking through the entire list is possible.

I imagine this has been mentioned before, are there any other ideas about this? Anything in the works?
#1 Jul 29 2010, 6:27 am
Giving hub entries a limited number of tags they can use (like say five) is an idea we've been bandying around for a while. Although it would have to be retroactively applied to some old entries that still see a lot of use but aren't being updated, I think it's the easiest way to categorize.

Lummox JR
#2 Jul 29 2010, 6:42 am
In response to Lummox JR (#1)
Lummox JR wrote:
Giving hub entries a limited number of tags they can use (like say five) is an idea we've been bandying around for a while. Although it would have to be retroactively applied to some old entries that still see a lot of use but aren't being updated, I think it's the easiest way to categorize.

It's likely that one category would be much more popular than the others, so with only five tags people still might have to look through 600-700 demos. I don't see the harm in having more categories and user-defined categories. Even if people misattribute a tag to their demo, looking through 20 items (10 of which are unrelated to your search) is better than looking through 2000 (1990 of which are unrelated).

I flipped through the first few pages of demos to come up with that list of categories. It would take a while to assign tags to all of them, but I think it's worthwhile. I'm not sure how many have broken download links, so it might not be bad at all.
#3 Jul 29 2010, 7:00 am
In response to Forum_account (#2)
Well user-defined is the main idea. We'd want to give users the opportunity to define their own tags, but also to use an existing tag so there's some homogeneity. Probably what I would do for the more popular tags is have an expandable list (perhaps cached over a short duration) of the most popular secondary tags associated with them. In particular I'd want users to be able to search for combinations of tags and be able to exclude tags.

By limiting each entry to only so many tags, it also forces them to be as descriptive and diverse as possible or else get buried in similar entries.

The way I picture this working, as admins we would also have the ability to combine tags that were obviously meant to be the same, such as "projectile" and "bullet" and "projectiles" for demos involving projectiles, but we could leave the subsumed tags linked to the originals for searching purposes so that searching "bullet demo" would still pull up everything with the demo and projectiles categories.

Lummox JR
#4 Jul 29 2010, 7:03 am
In response to Lummox JR (#3)
Ah, ok. I thought you meant that there'd only be five distinct tags that could be used, not that you'd limit it to 5 tags per demo.
#5 Jul 29 2010, 6:06 pm
The problem isn't so much that things need categories and tags. The problem is that the BYOND search engine, in pretty much every section of the website, is complete fail, and makes it nearly impossible to ever find anything.
Half the time, even when I know exactly what I'm looking for, I can't manage to pick out whatever criteria BYOND's tiny little search engine brain uses to deem that material relevant.
#6 Jul 29 2010, 6:38 pm
In response to Falacy (#5)
Falacy wrote:
The problem isn't so much that things need categories and tags. The problem is that the BYOND search engine, in pretty much every section of the website, is complete fail, and makes it nearly impossible to ever find anything.
Half the time, even when I know exactly what I'm looking for, I can't manage to pick out whatever criteria BYOND's tiny little search engine brain uses to deem that material relevant.

Things need categories and tags *because* the search is inadequate. But it isn't entirely the website's fault. Some of the hub entries have very poor descriptions. If your search doesn't match a substring there, it's hard for the website to know what you were thinking.

I found that you tend to get better results (or at least more results) when you put asterisks in your search. It would be nice if this was included in the search "tips". One of the search tips suggests searching for "health meter" (in quotes), which yields two seemingly-relevant results. Searching for *health meter* (with the asterisks) gives 13 results, all of which appear to be relevant.
#7 Jul 29 2010, 6:38 pm
In response to Falacy (#5)
Falacy wrote:
The problem isn't so much that things need categories and tags. The problem is that the BYOND search engine, in pretty much every section of the website, is complete fail, and makes it nearly impossible to ever find anything.
Half the time, even when I know exactly what I'm looking for, I can't manage to pick out whatever criteria BYOND's tiny little search engine brain uses to deem that material relevant.

I actually had an epiphany today as to how we can improve the search engine. It would fit in well with the tag concept, but it doesn't rely on that, and it would also pave the way for some improved methods of searching text. This isn't something we'll be implementing immediately, but Tom and I have been wanting to overhaul the search for a while now and this finally gives us a good place to start.

Lummox JR
#8 Jul 29 2010, 9:06 pm
In response to Lummox JR (#7)
It would be beneficial if the titles were included in searches. There is no reason why a search for 'swap' or 'map' shouldn't return SwapMaps. Sometimes I can remember the resource title and nothing much about the description. Sure, it falls on the publisher to make sure that search terms relating to their resource find their resource, but you shouldn't have to type out a list of key words to make sure you put into your description if they're part of the title.

I feel that when I search for swap I should find SwapMaps, even if it had no description at all.
#9 Jul 30 2010, 4:29 am
In response to Vermolius (#8)
Vermolius wrote:
It would be beneficial if the titles were included in searches. There is no reason why a search for 'swap' or 'map' shouldn't return SwapMaps. Sometimes I can remember the resource title and nothing much about the description. Sure, it falls on the publisher to make sure that search terms relating to their resource find their resource, but you shouldn't have to type out a list of key words to make sure you put into your description if they're part of the title.

I feel that when I search for swap I should find SwapMaps, even if it had no description at all.

I think the titles are included, but you need to get an exact match ("swapmap" doesn't match "swapmaps" in this case). If you search for "emotecheck" (with or without the quotes) you'll find this, but the string "emotecheck" is only contained in the hub entry's title.

To get a partial match on the title you can use asterisks. Searching for swapmap* gives you the results you'd expect.
#10 Jul 30 2010, 4:42 am
In response to Forum_account (#9)
Forum_account wrote:
To get a partial match on the title you can use asterisks. Searching for swapmap* gives you the results you'd expect.

The asterisk mode should be the default though. Having to put ""s around everything if you want exact matches.
#11 Jul 30 2010, 5:17 am
In response to Falacy (#10)
Falacy wrote:
Forum_account wrote:
To get a partial match on the title you can use asterisks. Searching for swapmap* gives you the results you'd expect.

The asterisk mode should be the default though. Having to put ""s around everything if you want exact matches.

I agree. There are some simple methods we can apply to this to improve results.

Lummox JR
#12 Aug 26 2010, 6:37 pm
Any news on this? This doesn't seem like an outlandish request but it's been quiet for a month. A tagging system exists for blog posts, by doing absolutely nothing you're still 80% of the way there.
#13 Aug 26 2010, 7:03 pm
In response to Forum_account (#12)
Forum_account wrote:
Any news on this? This doesn't seem like an outlandish request but it's been quiet for a month. A tagging system exists for blog posts, by doing absolutely nothing you're still 80% of the way there.

The new system is in the works. The project was derailed by numerous bugs in the last few weeks.

Unfortunately, at the moment blog posts and hub entries use a completely separate infrastructure. One of the long-term goals is to combine them under the same umbrella so we can have a consistent and efficient system for tagging and searching.