Series Tag Standardisation

MrMonday

Hello,

JNC has a relatively large catalogue, and luckily does support tags. However, the tag support is... less than helpful at times.

I will demonstrate with an example:

I quite like Goodbye Overtime, and if I want more stories of a similar vein, I can peruse the list of tags for the elements I like (e.g. "nobility", "isekai") and find similar series. However, it has the "political intrigue" tag... which is fine on its own -- I don't think it's incorrect as a tag for the story -- but unhelpful in its implementation because if you click on the tag, as of right now, the only other series match is Oblivious Saint. Again, not inherently a bad match, but it doesn't include The Water Magician because the specific tag on that one is "political scheming" rather than "political intrigue", even though for the life of me, I couldn't tell you what difference is supposed to be implied. It also doesn't pick up the newly-added Old Knight, New Post, because that one's got a tag of "political drama" instead of either "political scheming" or "political intrigue".

The search-by-tag is substring search, so luckily I can catch all of those together by searching for "tag:political"... but not only does that require awareness of this issue and awareness of the nature of tag searching, but even that search won't capture one of my favourite of the more recent (relatively speaking; I know it's been months at this point) JNC pickups of Imperial Reincarnation or some of the older goodies like Conqueror from a Dying Kingdom or Bibliophile Princess because all of those eschew the newer tags in favour of the (IMO better/more generic) "politics" tag.

Even if I throw my hands up in the air in frustration and just do "tag:politic" (which is not a common word and not one most would reach for), that still wouldn't really get me everything... because it wouldn't capture things that are e.g. only tagged as "intrigue" and not "political intrigue" (e.g. The Villainess is Dead!, The Trials and Tribulations of My Next Life as a Noblewoman)

My ask is twofold:

Collapsing all mostly-synonymous tags to a standardised common set. This already exists to some extent with some genres and themes (e.g. "fantasy", "romance", "isekai"), but even that doesn't seem perfect -- Flung into a New World, which dropped its first part today, uses "fantasy world" as a tag instead of "isekai" or "fantasy" specifically, despite those latter two being widely used.
Remove substring tag search. This one is arguably tangential, and I'm also willing to bet it may not be as simple as the first ask, so I view it as optional, but search via tags is actually hindered by potential string overlaps -- in the example I gave above, it's partially helpful because I can search for "tag:politic", but it also leads to the problem outlined in https://forums.j-novel.club/topic/7584/please-change-the-bl-tag, which can also be found when, for example searching for "tag:magic", which captures "magical weapons" and "magical items" as well -- perhaps a benign example, but a story that has no/limited magic except for a selection of items/weapons that are magical (e.g. The Mythical Hero's Otherworld Chronicles) isn't really the same as a story like, say, An Unruly Summon, which is very interested in spellcasting and magic systems.
By making tag search "exact match" rather than "substring match", you can maintain natural language tags without hindering discoverability. Alternatively (with exact match), you could implement some kind of "tag folders/categorisation" system, e.g. a tag with text "magic/hard-magic" vs another of "magic/magical-weapons". Any story with either could automatically receive an additional base tag of "magic" as a result of having one of the sub-tags, so if someone really wants to search by the super-tag of "magic", they can, but if they specifically want, say, stories that dive into how the magic works like An Unruly Summon, they can specifically click on "magic/hard-magic" to find other examples.

P.S. -- I'm aware that this is not a new problem, and found an older post that seems to be pointing at the same/similar issue (https://forums.j-novel.club/topic/6446/a-universal-tag-list-system); however, that post was made in 2022 and hasn't been updated since, and I wasn't sure what the etiquette on necroing posts was, so I figured it was safer to make a new post and explicitly reference the old one.

Geezer Weasalopes

@MrMonday
Necroing is fine; if JNC staff desire a topic be dead they lock the topic. And they do lock topics.
Having it all in one topic makes it easier for JNC to consult, or at least that's my take on it.

Having said that, yeah, it'd be nice if there was, say, a standard thesaurus of tag terms JNC used so they were consistent in how they assigned tags.
If readers could access it that would be lovely, but even if it were JNC staff only...consistency is good.