Soitgo.es News

New Feature: User Tags!

Greetings once again!

We've had a fair amount of positive announcements this years noting milestones and new features and this one is no different.
Officially announcing: user tags!

You may have seen a recent poll regarding "a manual tag option". While user Kaius (who submitted the poll) had no idea of our ongoing development of such a feature, the results proved to us that we were developing something the community would find useful. Let's start with the How-to.

Every link on the site will now have an additional section near the bottom, just above the comments area, labeled "User Tags". The user tags are more descriptive than the current link tags (720p, BDRip, Textbook, Andorid) and any user can add them, not just the link creator. The link creator WILL receive a PM letting them know who added a tag and what tags were added, so they have the option to delete/modify the tags as they see fit.

User tag abuse is strictly prohibited. Right now we're allowing everyone to add tags. We will take a look at the tags being added and reassess in a couple months. If we see a lot of "joke tags" coming from Probation users, we may dial it back to contributing users only.

Examples of GOOD tags: music/movie genres, series names (The Lord of The Rings), musical artists, authors, a collection name (Criterion, RiffTrax), 4K, VHSRip

Examples of BAD tags: Joint's Favorite Movies 2015, Dead Link, Bieber Sucks

The general idea is that you want to use tags that group links other users would may find interesting together. Yes, the advanced search could pick up a lot of this with the "exact phrase" and "in title" but that only works if the uploader puts all these things in the title, which is not always the best option. It also allows us to do some extra things with the user tags - more on that below.

Additionally, SIGMIS (the automatic Movie Info Scraper built into the Add A Link) will now also add the pertinent user tags to a link. A new button for TV shows has also been added but will only add the user tags (and poster) if the series matches (green glow) a series in SIG.tv.

Speaking of SIG.tv, we've added some additional info to the SIG.tv links lists. When you click a series you'll now see a small blue arrow to the right of the name. Clicking that will show/hide the series banner and a bunch of additional info about the series including the overview, network the show airs on as well as various links to IMDB and other sites about the show. Example

Some other fun things that come with user tags:
Tag page. This page will show all the (major) tags on the site and can be filtered by month and week as well as how many times the tag has been used. More popular tags are shown larger.

IMDB SIG Search Chrome Extension. This adds a little button onto IMDB pages that you can click to search SIG for that movie. This shouldn't be used as an absolute search - ie if you click it and it doesn't find anything, that doesn't neccessarily mean the movie is not on the site. This extension depends on the IMDB ID number (ex: tt0238942). SIGMIS will auto-tag your link with this number, but if the movie isn't tagged, the search won't return anything.

That brings us to the good news/bad news:
We were able to auto-grab and add a ton of tags to the current links. How many exactly?

11,633 movie links - all of which are tag with at least the IMDB id number and at most, the IMDB id number, the movie genre and the top three billed actors.

12,664 music links - pretty much only the artist, but additionally the genre for the top 20 artists with the most links on SIG.

33,914 TV links - IMDB id, network, series genre and series rating (TV-MA, TV-14, etc)

There's 67,000 links on-site between those three categories. There's no way we would be able to go through every single one and add the appropriate tags, so we automated it. We're about 95% confident with our tags. All this means is that there is a chance you click on the IMDB id number for the Mean Girls movie and among the links is the movie Inception. No links were deleted or modified, they just may have a few wrong user tags. We knew there was no way we could launch this feature and ask for help back-tagging 80,000 links, so we took a huge chunk out of it (58,553 - that's 72%). That being said, as you browse the site, if you come across a "Lord of the Rings" book, consider adding the "Lord of the Rings" user tag so that all the hardcore LotR fans can one-click find all the films, books, comics, tv shows, etc.

Here's some other tags we've auto-added:
Commentary | RiffTrax | Gucci Mane | Hip-Hop | Criterion Collection | Oscars 2016 - Best Picture | Oscars 2016 - Best Original Screenplay
(and we'll continue adding to these, especially the award shows)

Long announcement for a simple feature. Hopefully this makes the links a little more "discoverable" instead of needing to know exactly what you're looking for.

Some other news:
We're going to start enforcing the inactivity period. If you haven't logged in within the past year, your account will be deactivated. We think that's more than fair. Use it or lose it.

Price of invites will increase at the end of the year to 40 tokens. Inflation.

Polls seem to be doing pretty well, we've had some interesting ones, to say the least. tvbot5 is closing in on 5,000 links and therefore retirement. We've seen solid community growth with the addition of nearly 500 new users in the past three months. TheJIDF is consistently picking up the slack when tvbot5 drops the ball (which we apologize for). RepeatingMeme spent a lot of time transferring links from a now defunct link site. And finally, we just hit 80,000 links! The milstone link goes to Lord Magus2112 for his Nightwatch link. Congrats everyone!

Finally, be on the lookout for a new icon in the top bar. We're aware that tvbot hasn't been living up to its "Employee of the Month" status lately. While we work behind the scenes to try and remedy that, we're going to add a feature to make sure when individual episodes get missed, we can make sure they're added asap. We won't make another announcement for it, but it should pop up soon.

Cheers!

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//staff