As useful as this feels at face value, I'm going to strongly protest against this move for the same reason I made a conscious decision not to do this when I did the attribute overhaul last year: There is value in having SCP articles thematically searchable because that's part of a visitor user story. There is no value in having Tales thematically searchable without a major overhaul of the site's functionality (aka moving off of Wikidot) because allowing such unstructured search without certain contextual data is harmful to the Tale-oriented user story.
To put this UI/UX problem in laymen's terms, if the third page of a Tale series comes up on a search and that's what a person reads within that series for the first time, then you run the risk of ruining the series author's presentation. The only way to get around this is if series come up on searches in their entirety rather than individual Tales; then, it's a conscious decision on the user's part rather than a user story flow issue.
SCP Articles do not have the same problem because they are fundamentally standalones; while they may share themes or GoIs, they are assumed to be able to exist in a void, thus you can never ruin someone's reading experience by reading them out of order.
As for issues with specific tags:
- I'm curious what separates snippet vs plot as I can't think of any instances of the former that aren't creepypasta, and as the context of the Foundation setting is inherent to tales, these tags feel highly redundant.
- The fact that fable supersedes two mutually exclusive tags is indicative of a data normalization problem, which reinforces the above point.
- All of the genre tags in general (action, comedy, romance) are on an extremely slippery sliding scale and that's a huge cause for concern because in free-form fiction it's damn near impossible to set a solid threshold at which point any of these do or do not apply, thus defeating the entire point of a binary tag system. All attributes were created with a firm yes-or-no applicability in mind.
- report worries me on its own because it could easily be mixed up, caught between, or otherwise misused with regards to the existing supplement attributes such as exploration, incident, or interview.
In summary, I just can't feel good about this idea from either a personal nor professional standpoint. As I mentioned before, this wasn't an oversight, it was a conscious decision to omit attributes for Tales and I'd much rather see a more sophisticated system of hub pages — or at least a major overhaul of the existing hub(s) — whereby users can explore certain Tale genres within their respective contexts rather than a free-form search.
Just to provide more context, consider this analogy:
If you went to a bookstore and asked for a romance novel, you would not be handed a cut-out chapter of a larger book that just happens to contain romance elements. If you're sufficiently interested in a mixed-genre book to read it, then you would read it from end to end, as the author originally intended. This is how Tales work.
If, however, you wanted to look up a romance poem then you wouldn't mind being handed a snippet out of a larger collection of poems, because in the vast majority of cases each of these poems are standalones and don't require each others' context to work. While the author may prefer that you read some of them in sequence, that is the exception and not the rule. This is now SCPs work.
