AniDB

IMO you should be constructive or shut u... Well, whatever. Maybe I can pursuade you with another example...

Mecha currently has 358 animes. Mecha covers quite a wide range of stuff though. It's find for giving an idea about what an anime contains, but pretty much useless for finding similar stuff. If I want to find an anime with say, Power Suits, like bubblegum crisis (because I liked that), I have to sift through all these and read the descriptions? It's pretty easy to subdived mecha into...

Mecha:
:Power Suits
:Piloted Robots
:Androids
:Cyborgs
:Robot Helpers

...and then further subdivide those again. Sure, doing it for every anime in the db is a big task, but this can be a gradual process. In fact, I think I can promise you can go on using the db and not even notice the changes, as (to pacify peli publicly) the particularly sub topics will be default hidden.

Rar

Rar, I didn't say the whole system sucks, so you should SHUT UP and try to understand what I say before bitching. A response like Ultima did would be much more appropriate than your random mostly stupid response. I sometimes wonder why you ask people to read your posts when you don't even care to read other people's posts.

Anyway, answering to Ultima that seems to be more open to discussions, I do think that some people might get confused with all the numbers and the amount of text shown. I was thinking in something more like

Genres: Action, Sci-Fi [subgenres]

And after clicking subgenres a pop-up or whatever we want will show the full subgenre definitions for the anime, including maybe settings and target audience.

I thought this was to make the classification (and quick overview of it) easier, not more complex. The problem now is that you have lots of genres that don't apply much. The new proposed system won't fix that as you will have to read 4 lines of genres to get an overall idea of the main focus of the series and read their values.

Rar wrote:In fact, I think I can promise you can go on using the db and not even notice the changes, as... the particularly sub topics will be default hidden.

*sigh* And we'd just stopped shouting at each other again...

Rar

Well, yes you bring up a good point. I guess it would be horendous to a regular user to have a whole bunch of descriptive genres and ratings flung at them.

Genres: Action, Sci-Fi [subgenres]

And after clicking subgenres a pop-up or whatever we want will show the full subgenre definitions for the anime, including maybe settings and target audience.

We can still do that. As pelican suggested before, we could have profile options to keep more descriptive genres out of sight if the user wishes. I'm not quite sure how exp is willing to display the new system (like genres ratings and the like), however I'll improvise:

[Simple]
Rurouni Kenshin OVA 1
Genres: Action, Samurai, Drama, Romance
(Without genre ratings I guess)

[Maybe the user can have a button to see 'More detailed classification'' if they want? I'm not sure, anyways it could open a new window or something so they'll be able to see the complex data]
-Setting: Past::Historical::Japan (Edo Period)
-Target Audience: Seinen
-Genres: Action::Martial Arts::Samurai, Drama, Romance
(With genre ratings)

[Complex]
Rurouni Kenshin OVA 1
Classfication
-Setting: Past::Historical::Japan (Edo Period)
-Target Audience: Seinen
-Genres: Action, Action::Martial Arts::Samurai, Drama, Romance
(With genre ratings)

Perhaps the user can pick and choose and vary the complexity of the classification they wish to usually see in their profile options. It should be easier on the eyes, be more simple, and won't make users that liked the old system run away. Think something like that would help?

For main genres i would prefer minimal number of genres like this:

Audience (set different from others)

Action
Adventure
Comedy
Drama
Fantasy
Hentai
Historical
Romance
Science Fiction
Others

Horror/Juvenile goes into Fantasy, Sport into Action, Mecha into SF,
some hard to place properly genres into Others like: Ecchi, Dementa, Ghibli, school, detectives, maybe Adventure too - it could be hard to find subgenres for Adventure.
There still left Music - if it's too big genre for Others, maybe in another main genre Art or in genre Activities (then it could have also Sport and Games).

As for showing genres, when there will be stars, why not use them.
In simple setting show only genres with at least XX (4?) stars and with complex setting show all genres with rating.

Adventure should probably be a subgenre of Action, too. It always seems to have its roots in Action; I can't think of a single anime where it's otherwise...

Horror as a subgenre of Fantasy? Doesn't seem right to me. Much of horror anime is actually science fiction based, and besides, Horror is one of the traditional 'main' genres in literature, movies, et all. Should probably be a main genre.

Here's the list of the main genres that seem to be acceptable to everyone, so far:

Action
Comedy
Drama
Fantasy
Historical
Romance
Science Fiction

If there aren't any objections, I suppose EXP can go ahead and add those to his list...?

The following ones evidently still need to be discussed:

Horror
Shoujo/Shounen
Hentai/Yaoi/Yuri/Ecchi (...I still say it'd be simplest to make them subgenres of "Mature" or "Adult" main genre...)
Mystery (...many anime have some degree of mystery, and it's hard to fit in the Detective subgenre elsewhere...)
Music
Sports (...should probably be a subgenre of Action...)

DonGato wrote:I thought this was to make the classification (and quick overview of it) easier, not more complex. The problem now is that you have lots of genres that don't apply much. The new proposed system won't fix that as you will have to read 4 lines of genres to get an overall idea of the main focus of the series and read their values.

As was already said the main focus is NOT to make the anime page easier to understand. The main point is that we want better ways to search for similar animes (adv. search, anime hint).
That's why we want to have as much (sub)categories as possible while still remaining on a usefull level. I don't see a problem with one anime having 30 (sub)categories added.

It remains to be seen how we'll display such information. But I think that it's possible to have different detail levels without too much effort.
I.e. per default only categories+subcategories with at least X stars might be shown in a flat style (subcategories without their leading tree part). Then there could be a link which opens a popup with the full information. (the layout for that page might be worth some more thoughts)

BYe!
EXP

Ultima, as you show in both your examples most genres will be shown. The only difference is that main genres where subgenres are attached will not be shown.

The problems I saw:
- We already know a series might have between 10 and 20 genres and subgenres and that is a lot of info to show in the current anime page.
- If you want to show the weight of those you will have to show their rating and that will take even more space and confuse the average user.

As I said, my proposition is simple, or we ditch the rating system (that would mean less work and less problems as you agreed it will be difficult to set and we already have the problem of how much subgenres will be a healthy decision) or we hide it in a second page with all the subgenres so we show only main genres in anime page without any weight.

This request started to simplify the genres that until now were growing into a big mess, I really don't know when it turned in 'make even more big and complex'.

Just see how IMDB do it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090605/ (I'm not a visionary as this system is already used in other sites ). BTW, I think they went nuts with all the possible subgenres. -_-;

Regards.

EDIT: in response to exp...

I got a different impression of this request from the people who started it: http://www.anidb.net/tracker/view.php?id=86, and I don't think hiding genres/subgenres with less weight will fix fully the issue as subgenres will be shown anyway. As I and other people said if you want such level of detail you should read the synopsis or a review.

DonGato wrote:I got a different impression of this request from the people who started it: http://www.anidb.net/tracker/view.php?id=86, and I don't think hiding genres/subgenres with less weight will fix fully the issue as subgenres will be shown anyway. As I and other people said if you want such level of detail you should read the synopsis or a review.

You can't search synopsises or reviews in databases in an easy way.
(you can't type in 'sports, basketball, action' and have it find all entries with just that. For that a subgenre system, adding entries to searchable stuff is _needed_)

I never opposed the subgenres feature request and even promote it, and if you read through all my posts you should have understood that. I oppose the way it's supposed to be done. As I said, a secondary pop-up with all the subgenres will do and searching through them would be ok (don't know if the server in its current state can keep having more updates but that's exp call).

Don, everyone has said that the very specific topics will not be cluttering up the anime page unless you want them. Stop panicking...

Rar

If that's true I have no problem. But that's not what Ultima's example or exp explanation indicate.

DonGato wrote:Just see how IMDB do it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090605/ (I'm not a visionary as this system is already used in other sites :P). BTW, I think they went nuts with all the possible subgenres. -_-;

Interesting example.
It shows quite clearly that we need the category ratings/weights.
Bc otherwise it would simply be totally unclear how much of a certain aspect is actually present in an anime.
And I also think that it demonstrates quite nicely why multiple levels and a tree like structure are a good idea. Their page is so unstructured that it's hard to get any info out of it.

DonGato wrote:I got a different impression of this request from the people who started it: http://www.anidb.net/tracker/view.php?id=86, and I don't think hiding genres/subgenres with less weight will fix fully the issue as subgenres will be shown anyway. As I and other people said if you want such level of detail you should read the synopsis or a review.

well, we can add a profile option which allows one to specify if subcatogories should be displayed on the animepage or not.
However, for caching reasons I'd rather not provide too many options concerning the categories. Having two ways of displaying the info (with or without subcategories) wouldn't be a problem though.

BYe!
EXP

The subgenre idea sound good but it also mean that looking for anime in a particular genre should also allow the specification of a minimum weight or else it will make some extremely popular genre absolutely unuseful.

Example: I want a new romantic comedy so i make a search for romance. I get the real romances with stuff like gundam seed that have the minimum romance level. The information i am looking for is suddenly impossible to find.

Except for that im all for it and i dont care about a huge genre tree if its well made.

I think Historical should be a subgenre...
Also, I'm not so sure about the timelines... for example you can't say that Naruto is 'Past' since you can see advanced technology there, and Samurai 7 for example... it has mechas and airships... most fall into the 'alternative' universe or setting

I'd agree with the following MAIN genres:

Action
Comedy
Drama
Fantasy
Hentai
Romance
Science Fiction
Thriller

Ecchi falls under comedy, no?
I'm having my doubts about Thriller or Suspence or whatever other synonym one can use, mostly because I don't know where else to put Horror animes, if such things even exist... If not, then no problem