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]

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.