Yep, "sex" is a useless tag. It should not exist except when augmented with other words. Nobody is going to search for that, and if they do, it'll return so many results as to be pointless. It's like sites that include "miscellaneous" as a category because nobody thought things through!
Taxonomy is difficult to get right and provide both meaningful choices to authors for selection, and meaningful results to story seekers.
Besides removing and merging misspelled tags, the reason for the slow, iterative tag progress since moving to Lush 2, was because I and other mods spent hours - and I'm talking hundreds and hundreds of hours - painstakingly going through the ones that had combinations, ensuring they were split into two or more separate tags and then reassigning those to any affected stories so the nuances of the terms weren't lost. It was a massive chore and I, for one, could only do a few hours at time without going bananas and/or losing the will to live.
Examples include standardising things like:
mother/daughter
mother+daughter
daughter and mother
daughter/mother
daughter,mother
mother,daughter
Etc etc
Into just one tag:
mother and daughter
Bearing in mind that there were misspellings like 'mther and duaghter', you can see this is a laborious process.
Further, any existing tag with tangentially related or circumstantial combos that would be better served by their own combinations to aid searchability were split into new tags like this:
mother/daughter threesome
-- threesome
-- mother and daughter
mother,daughter
--
-- mother and daughter
Daughter mother uncle cock sucker
-- mother and daughter
-- uncle
-- cocksucking
There are arguments for and against doing it this way, mostly subjective. Perhaps some people might prefer "uncle and daughter" to be a tag, and "mother" to be separate. We could accommodate both. We could even separate them all and you'd have to pick all three individually, but with only a maximum of 10 tags per story allowed, that eats into the allocation.
So, some popular combos make a lot of sense. But somewhere we need to draw the line so we don't get hundreds of similar tags that all have one story in them. That doesn't help authors assign them, nor does it help readers find them.
Compounding this is the fact that, at the moment, the tag search is only mono-tag. I would like (and I think this is on the development radar when the overall search facility is bolstered) the ability to search by more than one tag, and each time you add a tag, it filters the results to include stories with all of them featured. So you can add and remove tags to your search criteria to narrow or widen the search to find exactly the type of stories that you wish.
To do that, we need a meaningful taxonomy that uses broadly acceptable terms that the majority of people will search for. Not everybody thinks alike, so that takes time. A lot of time.
There's also no notion of synonyms in our tag system yet. In general, that is a vastly underused concept in site search systems across the web. I might search for 'blowjob'. And if I search for that term, I would want to see all stories with that tag show up first, because that's the word I used. But after those, I would like to also see stories that contain tags:
blow job
fellatio
cocksucking
cock sucking
bj
oral
oral sex
giving head
Okay, we might standardise on some of those and get rid of the two-term phrases in favour of single words (or vice versa) but the point is that if we could synonym words behind the scenes, tag searches suddenly explode with possibilities when doing multi-tag searches. Yes, result sets are larger overall, but if the results favour exact terms first and synonyms second, it a) opens up stories to people who haven't used the exact same term, and b) allows authors a richer set of tags to choose from, without overloading them. So, when assigning a tag, if you type 'fellatio' when assigning tags, it could offer the synonyms too, as you might prefer one of those.
There's a further notion that we should include (and somehow notify the system) of misspellings in the synonyms. So if someone mistypes 'masterbation' in their tag search, it will ignore the tag, since we've flagged it as a misspelled synonym, and instead search for 'masturbation'. Same when assigning tags: misspellings can be autocorrected by virtue of the "standard" spelling being the one assigned to the story. That really helps everyone - authors and readers - as it keeps the tag set down to a manageable level, while augmenting search results.
Have we lost a lot of this nuance in the recent tag cull? Sadly, yes. Quite how we reintroduce meaningful tags for stories from authors that have long since left is unknown.
All we can really do at this point, with the help of current authors checking their stories and massaging their own tags to reflect the content, is gradually start to rebuild the tag set upward; being mindful at all times that the end goal (alongside keyword matching improvements) might be multi-tag searchability from a semi-curated and sensibly-maintained pool of terms that we can hopefully one day expand to include synonyms and misspellings, to build a world class search facility at Lush.
