JayDee

Oh, yeah, I knew it wasn’t perfect. I’d noticed a lot of stories with the “Fic” of the old format “RapeFic” tag left behind, and realised it didn’t matter enough to go and delete it since the main part of the tag had moved. I’d also noticed the “D” but didn’t twig which one it had been part of until I just recently tried searching for a MC tag and found far more for me than there should have been.

As bad as undertagging stories can be, overtagging is another thing that winds me up. A few times I’ve seen some story with loads of my favorite tags and clicked it, and found three hundred words about a character waking up late for high school and “Lol! will have good stuff in later chapters! This was hard work getting this much down! Read and review!”

Tags are being used for two purposes, to avoid content, and to seek out content.  However, as tags were put into place so that a reader could avoid content that triggers/illegal/etc, I’d rather overtag, because if my characters are taking dumps on the page, I’d rather weed out the squeamish and tag for [scat].  A proper solution for this would to have the tags to have either a star system or similar, so the author can indicate whether it’s CYA, or a prominent feature to the story – thereby balancing the needs for the seekers vs the avoiders.

We actually, although it’s quite rare, can warn for overtagging as much as for undertagging. Both are really incorrect. 

Having said that, what you do, @Desiderius Price is what should be done. You tag for content because we can’t predict the level at which that content could be triggering. For some people, even the offstage mention of a trigger like Rape is enough to give them some very bad moments. Therefore, we require the tag even for offstage mentions. Similarly, Minor1/Minor2 content has the potential to be triggering, and neither the staff nor our users are really adequately able to make a determination as to how triggering the content is.

We’re not going to rank the trigger potential, but if the author wants to elaborate in a brief author’s note at the top of the chapter with that content, or even at the beginning of the story, that’s fine. We allow additional warnings or clarifications.