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

[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?