Rat Creature's Journal

...I'd make people stop using weird symbols in their delicious tags only to influence the sorting, or make them look pretty or whatever causes people to stick random symbols and brackets into their tags. That kind of thing just makes it harder to browse, subscribe and search by tag, and to generally find and use the bookmarks across the site (outside of one specific account where you see the sidebar, so it doesn't matter much that they randomly put some §, @, ', (, ~ into a tag to make it cryptic).

Even without it there are already significant variations, but if I want to look for say Kirk/Spock slash fic I can reasonably guess to try the tags "kirk/spock", "k/s", "spock/kirk", even "pairing:Kirk/spock" is not too bad, because that is relatively common syntax for those who like hierarchical tags. But sticking completeley random symbols in just sucks.

I realize the tag bundling interface on delicious is so broken that it is a pain to sort tags, so I get the impulse to just arrange tags in groups by putting symbols in. But that makes so many other things harder. *grumble*

I've seen some fans say that these days they primarily use delicious to find fanfic to read rather than following fic comms or watching archives directly. I also do that when I search for specific stuff and look for tags, but I don't really use the social network functions. Every now and then I try adding someone, especially if a rec comm also keeps track of their recs on delicious, but somehow I never really stick with it. (And only part of the reason is that delicious often tends to crash or freeze my browser if I view it with javascript enabled, which I suspect is because it can't deal well with my large number of tags or something. It's really quite pathetic -- ~4900 tags is not that many.)

So do any of you use delicious' network feature? Which people (or comm accounts) do you follow to find new fanfic? Currently I'm particularly interested in ST:AOS (though TOS also to some degree), SGA (*clutches*), Merlin, Supernatural (non-Wincest, non-RPS only), and Numb3rs, but as I'm really multifannish and fickle in my interests I'd be interested in what you follow for other fandoms too. Do you have any recs whom I should follow there?

ETA: And please feel free to point out your own account if it fits what I'm looking for.

Why do they now have a tag limit?? Worse, the delicious FF extension doesn't inform you of this, it saves the tags properly and you see them if you look at it in the extension (so not cut off like too long notes), they just don't work for the tag searches, meaning I didn't notice while tagging via the extension and have no idea for how many of my bookmarks the tags don't work properly and which one I'd need to edit down to the more essential tags without going through them manually. This sucks. *grump*

In the complaint and suggestions forums one of the delicious people mentioned that the new search engine can do NOT-operators. So while putting for example putting "slash-pwp" in your tag field to show you all slash you bookmarked that is *not* a pwp doesn't work, you can now search your bookmarks with "+tag:slash -tag:pwp" and get that result. Maybe everyone but me already knows this, but in case you missed this feature like I did, I thought it worth pointing out.

Also I've seen comments by the poor beleaguered "community manager" intern (who has been really quite nice through this fiasco) that they will bring the "unbundled tags" display back soon. I still think they should have noticed that their users actually want to keep this feature before launching their new version, but it's something at least.

Because I'm quite frustrated with the delicious redesign (now revamped without dots -- unfortunately they didn't stop there), I looked at alternative services. Only to find them even worse or just too different in purpose.

Netvouz has no tag bundles, though you can sort the bookmarks themselves into hierarchical folders, but it looked still quite promising, except that once I had imported my delicious bookmarks I found out it allows for only twenty tags per bookmark. If you have seen how I tag you see how that would never work for me. Well, at least it had a bulk deletion feature and I could clean up my truncated bookmarks easily and abandon that service.

Similarly, "Mister Wong" looked promising at first (apart from the stupid name) in that it clones delicious' tag bundles feature, and it even has a rudimentary bulk editing function to change the privacy settings and delete more than one bookmark at a time, however it only allows twelve (!?!) tags per bookmark, which is a ridiculously low number for how I use tagging. So I didn't even look further how it compares otherwise.

Simpy, which I used before, has some nice things like the NOT operator for tags or the groups feature for collaborative bookmarking (or it can be used for just for putting your bookmarks into different display sections without needing separate accounts, much like LJ comms, I guess), however that site rather sucks for browsing your bookmarks, because it lacks the tag bundling. Also for me it has performance problems in that it often is even slower to load than delicious, though at least it freezes my browser less often.

Diigo allows you to highlight text and images and put "sticky notes" on websites, which I guess is cool if you research something and want to annotate or keep quotes and important bits from a website, but it is not all that useful for my reading log type of bookmarks. It also has some bulk editing which is always nice, and group features for collaborative bookmarking. It also has something called "lists" to organize things, though I don't quite understand what it is supposed to do, the introduction texts babbles something at you about it being like folders, only not, but also like slideshows...wtf? (It doesn't sound like anything useful anyway, unless I wanted to present a sequence of websites to someone or something like that, which I don't.) It also has no tag bundling, and the browsing of an account via that account's tags is thus inconvenient and limited, much like with Simpy, especiallly with many tags.

ma.gnolia.com's site design is fairly awful, starting with their ugly blossom banner taking up about a fourth of the browser window height on my laptop screen without doing anything useful whatsoever. And I could tolerate that, but it doesn't seem to display the tags a user has at all, not even as a list, nor does it display related tags. I have no idea how people are supposed to browse their bookmarks there, why have tags and then hide them? So that one is out, even though their feature that they automatically cache a copy of the text content of the websites you bookmark is tempting, because obviously this would work around fanfic you bookmark being lost (to yourself anyway, the cached version isn't public) without having to save yourself.

Why isn't there a social bookmarking site that combines the good features, while skipping the crap? I quite liked the simple bookmark and tag display of the old del.icio.us, including the tag bundles for navigation, so it ought to be similar to that, only with bulk editing for bookmarks and tags (with UIs that don't crash), the RSS subscriptions and networking were good too, then on top of that the NOT operator for tags that Simpy has, and the group creation for several people editing one bookmark list would be cool, decent search and import/export functions of course, and the caching thing magnolia does to not loose content when it vanishes would be a nice extra.

Sigh.

I guess for now I just hope that del.icio.us will fix the worst of the mess in their new UI, so that the tag bundling stuff stops being broken, and the editing options come back as they were. (To segue into my ongoing rant once again, right now you don't have edit, share or delete links anymore for a bookmark you found by searching through your own -- I have no idea why they removed that, it doesn't make any sense. One of the obvious reasons you search through your bookmarks is to find a bookmark you want to do something with, it's not like that is some arcane non-intended usage hack or whatever).

Some of you may have noticed that I use del.icio.us quite a lot to tag fanfic (unsurprisingly I'm ratcreature there too). I also use a lot of tags, applying the tagging philosophy that you really can't have too many assigned to a story to easier find it again later. The redesigned site tells me it's about 3500 tags now, and I frequently add more.

Now, while I'm a bit dubious about the look of the new design, in particular that in list view the bookmarks, in particular those with many tags (and I tag stories with several dozen sometimes), take more room, I'll probably get used to the more superficial changes. However, that it now doesn't offer you a section with "unbundled tags" is really bad for me. To use recently added tags when they are merely displayed in the huge lists of several thousand other tags is quite impossible.

Their interface to bundle tags has been atrocious before, and drove me crazy (last time I sorted tags I had added into my bundles and changed some it took nearly a *day* and it weren't that many edits), so I only use it to bundle my newly added tags when I have at least some hours to become utterly frustrated, and just use the "unbundled" section to find the more recent ones again. That is now impossible, it seems.

Also, I didn't think this was possible, but the tag bundling interface got *worse*: It now won't load my larger bundles (like the "authors" bundle) at all for editing, and while it does load the smaller bundles, it now jumps you back to the top whenever you clicked on a tag to add it, so you can't even go through the list anymore without scrolling down again and again and again.