Not sure how many people actually read my journal, but I did realize that I'm kinda short on the Fannish 50 challenge (only 22 things so far posted to my TAG), and I found myself doing something that I've done countless times before, but I figured I'd open up to discussion to see if anyone else does this or am I just crazy? Or anal. Lol, probably the latter.


Anyway, so needless to say after I went on to moviefanfiction and somehow ended up in the batfic community. As I was glancing at them, I noticed several entries (or a hell of a lot) do not have any tags (which I will admit is a pet peeve of mine), so I was OK, I need to fix that - so I tried adding tags... And I could add tags that were only already there, which fine OK.... Am I alone in doing? Going to random communities and adding tags? I know I tend to look at tags first in communities, most of the time to look up either fandoms I'm craving or character/pairings I like, so I kinda hate when no tags are available or I notice no one using them.

Also, am I alone in creating like a lot of tags for each of my communities? Like I would think you pre-create the tags, especially if you want them by alphabetical like moviefanfiction, or by character such as batfic? I mean I know these particular communities isn't active much but still. 

I mean I get missing certain characters (especially newer or less written about characters) but I would assume at least the most popular/common villains or characters would at least have their tags (Edit: Actually they ended up having nearly all the characters I needed to tag {except for Damian apparently? or I just couldn't find the correct tag format}, but anyway I've seen the same thing happen in other communities before). I know not all places like to add pairing tags which is fine. Like for mcu100 and xmen100 I have over 400/500 tags between any potential characters/pairings/universes used. Same goes with tvfanfiction which has 400 tags and uc_xmen has over 300. Not sure exactly how many are used at them, but at least the options are available.

I'm pretty sure LJ had it where if you were only a member and not an admin, you'd only see what's been used before and I think that makes people think the tags aren't there or exist thus no one even tries to tag them. I wish there was a way so you could see everything that is available. I thought if you hit the "Tag Entry" option after you post (even if just a member and not an admin) you could see them anyway but that didn't end up being the case with batfic - I had to do trial and error on getting the correct tags to show up. Granted it's been a long time since I posted works to communities at livejournal so maybe I'm remembering wrong.

I know some communities like to leave their communities open to people adding tags on their own such as marvelrarepairs or marvel_fanworks to name two that I know of which is kinda great - at least people tend to tag their stuff... but it also kinda causes choas? Because someone forgets how the format goes or doesn't pay attention and then suddenly you have multiple tags of the same character or fandom or whatever.


What do you prefer?

** I am in no way trying to insult the communities (or their respected owners) spoken about here, they are simply used as actual examples of things I've seen countless times in the past. Honestly it's also a bit to promote them a bit as well so more people can post to them.