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MNBlockHead
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Join Date: Dec 2014
Location: Twin Cities Area, MN, USA
Posts: 1,325

Old January 7th, 2016, 07:09 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Madmaxneo View Post
There is also the "Suffix" entry that could be used to designate mundane or one of the categories you mentioned.
I would caution you to be careful with using prefixes and suffixes to categorize articles and topics in this way. There are plenty of discussions about the best use of these fields in the forums, but here are my thoughts, based on my hard lessons learned:
  • Prefix and Suffix are just text fields. You have to type everything in and can't have a pick-list. This makes it more likely for typos to cause mischief and is less efficient in terms of data entry.
  • Sorting and foldering in the navigation pane has diminishing returns the more content you enter. Once your realm gets large and complicated enough, you'll find that the ability to filter based on tags is a life saver.
  • The consensus on prefixes seems to be, and my personal experience echos this, that the best use of prefixes is to enter map area/room numbers. Most of my content I create myself, so I didn't see the wisdom of this until I started entering some purchased content from PDF.
  • I find suffixes are better used for metagaming information not in-game categorizations. For example, my main use for suffixes is to enter a short name for the adventure the topic belongs to. This is information that I like to see in the navigation pane. Also, given that I generally enter blocks of content for the same adventure at a time, tag snippets don't really add any data-entry efficiencies and typos are less of an issue because I'm entering the same content in the field from one topic to the next within a short time period.
  • Suffixes and Prefixes do not aid complex searching. Since you cannot limit a search term to a specific field, the search term is searched for in all content. But, with tags, you can select multiple, specific tags in your query, allowing for sophisticated filtering if you've put together a good tagging scheme.

Just some considerations based upon my experience. YMMV.

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Last edited by MNBlockHead; January 7th, 2016 at 07:14 PM. Reason: typos
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