Admin Post: Link Collections and Playlists Are Coming!

[dawn_felagund]

This year, we hope to significantly expand what fanworks we are able to host on our site. We are preparing to build the next two fanwork types: playlists and link collections, and we'd love to hear from you about what features you'd like to see our site offer for these fanworks!

Playlists are collections of songs selected around a fannish theme. Currently, we are planning to offer the following fields when you post a playlist fanwork:

• Link(s) to a completed playlist (i.e., set up on Spotify or YouTube)
• Links to individual songs with a notes field for each song. The notes field allows unlimited text with formatting.
• Audio genre selection; if you choose "Music" as your genre, you will be able to select a music genre as well.
• Album cover art.

Links collections are exactly what they sound like! They can be used for myriad purposes—rec lists, collections of resources and references, collections of images and music for mood or inspiration—and will allow links within and outside the SWG. Currently, we are planning to offer the following fields when you post a link collection:

• Link, link title, and link description fields. The link description field allows unlimited text with formatting.
• Link collection genre selection (e.g., rec list, research, inspiration).

Both the playlists and link collections will have access to the fields available to all fanworks: title, co-creator, language, summary, fanwork notes, character, relationship, rating, warnings, challenge, and completion status.

Is there something you'd like to see offered for playlists and link collections that we don't have on our list yet? Comment here or, if you're on our Discord, the #town-hall channel is currently discussing playlists and link collections and welcomes feedback there as well.

Comments

[fiachairecht]

I am beyond delighted by the playlist type! A couple thoughts —

* Are you planning to have the genres be a choose-from-dropdown selection, or a write-in thing?

* Possibly dependent on the answer to the above, will we be able to sort/filter on music genres? I imagine that would be more difficult with written-in genres, but maybe not.

* Any chance we could get two album art fields, for front cover (usually a graphic/edit with title) and back cover (usually a artsy tracklist)?

* If playlists are related to a fic, will there be a way to link them, or would we just put a link in work notes?

* Kinda just thinking out loud here ... how do mixed fic+playlist works fit into this? They're usually a playlist with a drabble or fic section associated with each song, and while I can definitely see myself putting a drabble in each song's notes field, I can see it getting unwieldy the longer the fic/section. Is that a common enough work type to be treated separately? Posting the fic and the playlist as separate but linked works might suffice, or providing links to the songs throughout a larger work that was just posted as a fic. But it would be nice to have some way to search/filter for fic+playlist works in general, hm...

Thank you for all the work you put into this <3

[dawn_felagund]

Are you planning to have the genres be a choose-from-dropdown selection, or a write-in thing?

They will be a dropdown selection, similar to how we have genres for the other fanwork types now. When I started this endeavor, I was advised by someone who knows Drupal professionally not to allow open-ended tags on the kind of server we use because of possible performance issues. We also just don't have the staff to "tag wrangle" as AO3 does to make the tagging system usable from the visitor's end. However, I will be soliciting help/feedback in writing the genre list, so hopefully everything you all want will be there. (The genre list also isn't set in stone and we do update it when we realize we have obvious omissions!)

Possibly dependent on the answer to the above, will we be able to sort/filter on music genres?

Yes! They will be part of the "Browse Fanworks - Genre" page: https://www.silmarillionwritersguild.org/genre Clicking on a tag on a fanwork will also take you to a list of all fanworks with that tag.

Eventually, I will need to figure out how to make the Find a Fanwork page (https://www.silmarillionwritersguild.org/find) more friendly to non-written fanworks, but I will likely wait till all of the types are built to do that. But it is on my radar.

Any chance we could get two album art fields, for front cover (usually a graphic/edit with title) and back cover (usually a artsy tracklist)?

It's definitely possible from the tech side! Let's do it!

If playlists are related to a fic, will there be a way to link them, or would we just put a link in work notes?

For now, it would have to go in the fanwork notes, but I've started thinking about building this feature for all fanwork types, similar to what AO3 has. When I get all of the fanwork types built, this is on my agenda to work on. (After these two, I have Video and Multimedia on my to-do list, though see below about Multimedia ...)

Kinda just thinking out loud here ... how do mixed fic+playlist works fit into this?

This is another longer-term objective of mine. :D I would like to offer what I have called a Multimedia fanwork: essentially, you can combine any/all of the various fanwork types on the site into a single fanwork. Fic + playlist is an obvious one; fanart + fic is another I think would see a lot of use, or meta + link collection, or ... However, I have experienced a bit of a setback in this area: the module I was planning to use to do this apparently doesn't work with the module we use for multi-chapter functionality. So what would have been an easy build just became more challenging, though not yet deemed impossible. I need to do a bit more research and experimentation on how to make it happen (I jotted down notes for a possible approach just the other day, in fact).

Thank you so much for this comment and the detailed feedback! This is not a fanwork type that is super familiar to me, so I appreciate it much!

[fiachairecht]

Ooh, thanks for such a thoughtful reply. Happy to help!

They will be a dropdown selection, similar to how we have genres for the other fanwork types now.

Awesome! Honestly, as fun as freeform genre tags would be the more I thought about it (and given my feelings about how the freeform tags on AO3 are used these days) the more I think this is the best idea.

They will be part of the "Browse Fanworks - Genre"

Hm, would they just be added directly to the alphabetical list? I feel like it has the potential to get quite long, I think my preference would be for playlist genres to be separated out.

Let's do it!

Yay!

When I get all of the fanwork types built, this is on my agenda to work on.

No rush, I'm delighted to know it & multimedia works are on the list :D

[dawn_felagund]

I definitely think, once we have multiple fanwork types with their own unique genre lists, it will make sense to have both. I mean, both already exist, just currently I don't have links set up on the site anywhere to take visitors to a list of just audio genres, for example. But that's an easy addition since the site creates those lists by default.

[zdenka]

For playlists, I agree with kimaracretak that two art fields would be good! Could there also be a general notes field as well as one for each song? I sometimes have comments on the playlist as a whole, or want to say what challenge it was created for, and I generally want to give credit to the cover art sources.

Will people be able to select only one music genre? What if the songs are from different genres?

[fiachairecht]

Ah, I'd wondered about the general notes field as well, but by the time I hit post yesterday I'd decided that the work notes or fields would probably serve the same purpose.

Multiple genres is a good idea! But I'm also having the terrible image of me scrolling through like six dropdowns to add All the genres I sometimes manage to fit into one playlist haha. That's why I was musing about write-in genres above.

[dawn_felagund]

The two art fields are happening! :D Two requests out of two comments is good enough for me!

Playlists (like all fanwork types) will have the Fanwork Notes field, which will appear at the top of the playlist.

You will be able to select more than one genre for all genre fields. If you're familiar with the new SWG site, the audio genre list is already in place for Audio fanworks; the music genre list will behave the same way. Also, the genre field is always optional, so if the mix is so eclectic that tagging by genre isn't going to be useful to visitors, it's possible to just skip that field entirely.

Thank you for the questions and feedback! ^_^

[zdenka]

Awesome, thanks! :D

Oh, okay. Having the standard Fanwork Notes field sounds fine.

Hmm, yeah, I regularly put opera and folk music and symphonic metal in the same playlist, so I might just skip that field. :) Or maybe have something like "Mixed Genre" be one of the dropdown options? That way I'd feel okay about tagging just one or two of the genres plus "Mixed Genre" and not feel like I had to be completist. But I'm not sure it matters to get that granular about it. Thanks for the explanations!

[dawn_felagund]

Here is my very rough first draft of the music genre list if you see anything missing (or wording that should change to be clearer):

Alternative
Blues
Classical
Country
Electronic/Techno
Folk
Heavy Metal
Hip-Hop
Instrumental
Jazz
Latin
Pop
Reggae
Rhythm & Blues
Rock
Vocal

No need to reply, of course, but I wanted to make sure you had the chance to give input if you wanted. ^_^

[zdenka]

I'm not really an expert in music genres, but here are some random thoughts which you can take or leave:

-It seems like there should be something for musicals?
-Where would you put someone like Enya -- New Age, maybe? (I mention her not only because I like her but because she's vaguely Tolkien-adjacent, being on the soundtrack of one of the LOTR movies . . .)
-What about Asian pop music, like jpop/kpop/cpop -- where would that go? Those are really popular.
-What about something like movie soundtracks -- would, e.g., the main Star Wars theme really fit under Classical?
-I feel weird about "World Music" as a genre, because it's like putting everything that isn't in the Western/European tradition in one box, even if it's widely separated musical traditions from opposite sides of the world. But suppose I had a track of someone playing the guqin (traditional Chinese instrument) -- where does that fit?

(Like I said, feel free to ignore if that's not helpful.)

[dawn_felagund]

This is all excellent, thank you! I've added Musical Theater, Soundtrack, K-pop/J-pop/C-pop, and New Age. I'm leery on World Music for the same reason you identify. Would Traditional catch those kinds of tracks?

[zdenka]

Glad it was helpful!

Hmm, "traditional" would make me think of stuff like Child ballads and other older/anonymous works. I'm not sure I have a better suggestion off the top of my head, though!