InsaneJournal

Tagging systems and organization!

Okay, so you want to keep your game organized. You want to be able to see easily who's being active, what places, or people or things are being used, visited, or played the most. Make it easy on yourself and your players: use tags. For an example, in my games, I use tags everywhere. In the main community, in the mod journal, and in the ooc. Depending on your layout, you can cloud the tags, and see at a glance what tags are used most often. You can also use the tag page to see how many uses each tag has. I've found it makes it easy for players and mods both to see when's the last time a tag's been used. In some of my past my games, I did something called round-ups, in which we posted in the OOC, on a monthly basis, with what our characters were up to. It made it easy for new players to catch up on plot, and for current players to follow threads they weren't in, especially if they're dragging on a bit. I found that having tags made the round-ups go far easier, because each player could click on a character's tag and see what they'd done. I also use !complete and !incomplete tags, so we can all see with ease which threads are done, and which are still chugging along. Tags will obviously change according to your game type. In another game I ran, their were many different locations to visit, and we had tags for each one. It was easy to tell what places get a lot of love, and which ones needed more tourists. ;-) Obviously S2 layouts are far more tag-friendly, and specific layouts let you see tags in the sidebar, for even greater ease. But remember, even in S1 layouts, tags still work, though they're less easy to access. Consider how you want to set up tags when choosing a layout. And keep in mind, the easier and more convenient things are for your players, the more likely you are to continue to grow. Now that this is way tl;dr, I'll stop, but if anyone has anything to add or question, you know what to do!