Star Wars Roleplay: Chaos

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Factory Tags

Valik

Professor of Alchemy
Back when Tef did away with faction forums for the factory and put up his legion of faction tags I raged. I hated the change. Thought it made for inefficient searching.



Still do. Hate it. But, #TyrannyReigns and it's here to stay. So why don't we make it better? Right now we can sort things by faction which is ossum, and very useful, but it leaves a rather huge hole in organization. There are -no- filters for unaffiliated crap. Which means if I want to search for a publically available freighter and I go through "Approved" I not only have to weed through everyones personal, one of a kind freighter, but also through everyone's personal, one of a kind sword, blaster, armor, fighter etc. because the search pulls it from all forums.

There's an easy solution to this though. Remove the "Approved" tag and replace it with "Public" and "Personal". Lets people easily find things they can pull off the shelf in RP by removing the 80% of things they can't use and likely won't interact with, and gives people another filter for looking up opponent's tech in duels and other pertinent RP's.

If back-dating everything becomes an issue I can set up lists and links of what is and isn 't uniquely produced and help withthat legwork, as it's understandably a huge task.
 

Valik

Professor of Alchemy
Fabula Cavataio said:
No one uses the forum search. Why does no one use the forum search?
I can't speak for SWRP as a whole but I use Forum Search all the time. The thing of it is though, you then have to look through all of the crap of every faction, which piles up adding pages and time wasted to your search. I go to "Approved Starships" search "Freighter" and I'm going to get every freighter from every faction along with every personal freighter and the publicly available stuff. You can split hairs and say "Well, you can see that this is a Republic Ship and that's a Sith Ship" but they're still clogging up searches and making extra page upon extra page for you to go through to find things you legitimately want to look at.

On the whole it's usually not as effective as simply searching through a faction's tags, and is especially daunting when you don't know exactly what you're looking for. Nothing has been as effective as putting everything in a faction forum and then forum searching that since our move to tags, but I've spoken enough about that as is. Putting a 'private' tag up would effectively get rid of the 80% of the results no one cares about because it's unique and they can't use it.

If people on the whole aren't using Forum Search like they should I'll tell you exactly why they aren't doing it. It's because the default is a Google Site Search, you have to click the google site search to change it, and there's nothing there that indicates it's a button you can chage(ala the selection menu of sub characters). You could put up a tutorial somewhere on how to use the searches, but then you get a lot of people telling you not to treat them like idiots when you're only trying to help, and no one really reads those anyways, as evidenced by how many people with less than 50 posts we still have trying to use the Factory and ask for tags. The average person however knows what a tag is, and knows you can sort through them as that's it's whole reason for being there.

If we want to make people use Forum Search more than I believe the best solution to that is to change the default search engine from a google site search to a forum searh. If we want to make things easier for the average user I think creating a division between private and public submissions would be ideal. In the end that's my opinion I guess, and staff has the ultimate decision on the matter as they should, but I do think this would help a -ton- with sorting things, an issue that I'm sure hasn't merely been my own.
 
I use forum search! Though not normally for this reason for exactly the reason above. I don't want to know about everyone's special snowflake something while looking for something publicly available that doesn't fall under a faction.
 

Gilamar Skirata

The most important step is always the next one
Also if you search for "Anyone" or "Available" and other buzz words for public non-faction tech you get more than just tech, in fact you will probably get more RP threads than anything
 
I use the little search bar many times a day to find what I need. Really I am just dealing with it. BUT this would make the factory so much better. Because approved would be for public use, while Personal would allot to me finding something really awesome without having to be let down when I see that its "unique"
 

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