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kbs666
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Old November 20th, 2016, 10:43 AM
I've come back around to snippet tags and I seem to be missing something somewhere. I cannot seem to make RW auto assign snippet tags for me. I have to manually force a scan of each snippet to get them assigned and that seems to defeat the purpose. Is there a setting I've missed?

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rob
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Old November 20th, 2016, 02:37 PM
Snippet tags are a special animal. We only utilize them in two contexts, and we made the assumption that users will only utilize them in the same ways that we do (if at all). If that assumption is wrong, we'll have to re-visit them.

The first usage is with tagging content for publishing that spans multiple "volumes". For example, consider something like a Pathfinder AP, where there are six chapters. There are instances where topics (e.g. NPCs) appear across multiple chapters. All of their chapter-specific details will be separated across the chapters that are individually published, but those details will ideally be included within the same topic in RW. In order for us to release that material incrementally, we must ensure that only the snippets from each chapter appear. So we need to tag individual snippets for this purpose. This would be extremely annoying for users to muck with, so we've assumed users won't be bothering with this use case.

The second usage is with tagging text that is typically handled by tag-based snippets. Earlier this year, we introduced "hybrid tag-based" snippets. These are snippets that can be used either as selectable tags or as label-based text snippets. When migrating lots of text across from published material, it can be very tedious converting the text into selected tags. For most users converting material themselves, this usually isn't all that important, so they don't bother. However, for all the content we publish, we want it to be as useful as possible, so getting all the tags into place IS important. This becomes even more important when users purchase lots of content from us, since they'll want to filter and search it quickly to find what they want. This is where hybrid tags come into play, along with snippet tags.

When we bring the content over from a book, converting it to individually selected tags is just as annoying as it is for users. Hybrid tag-based snippets allow us to leave the text alone, eliminating that annoying step. Once the topic is fully in place, we then do a scan of the topic for tags. The scan is limited to hybrid tag snippets so that we don't get every instance of the word elf or wizard trying to match. Once we're done, we have the topic fully tagged for filtering and searching, with each tag associated with the proper snippet so that it accompanies the snippet upon reveal, and without having to convert everything across to individually selected tags.

This tagging process on snippets is something we do only after the topic is otherwise finished. So it doesn't need all the complexity of remembering each tag that was/wasn't detected, and where each tag was found within the text. As such, auto-detection of snippets always assumes that it starts over from scratch for a given snippet. This eliminates lots of work for us under the covers, while it still gives us exactly what we need in the end. The caveat that comes with this is that the user needs to explicitly trigger the process. Since it wipes all previously auto-detected tags and starts over, it's something that users must explicitly control. In addition, since this is only really designed for use with hybrid tag-based snippets that are configured for label-based text, and there are likely very few users who are employing this configuration, this is something that should only ever be done for a user that truly wants this behavior.

This technique is fully available to users, exactly the same way that we do it.

Hope this helps!
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kbs666
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Old November 20th, 2016, 03:14 PM
I can understand those use cases.

I propose that two other use cases are also possible.

3) The very large realm built by a GM over a long period of time. Every tool that lets the GM and players search the realm more efficiently starts to matter as the number of topics and the age of the realm increases.

4) The hybrid realm. Soon people will be combining elements from realms built with snippet tags with stuff they built themselves and a disconnect between those pieces that have snippet tags and those pieces without will result in less than satisfying search results.

Now that I, and anyone else reading this thread, know I can take steps to deal with this in the future. But it just seems to me that if there is the functionality to force a scan of a snippet by hand it should be possible to create a setting to cause every snippet to be scanned every time a topic is save just as is done for links. This is probably what people expect.

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rob
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Old November 20th, 2016, 03:53 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by kbs666 View Post
3) The very large realm built by a GM over a long period of time. Every tool that lets the GM and players search the realm more efficiently starts to matter as the number of topics and the age of the realm increases.
I don't see how this connects with snippet tags at all. Searching and filtering identifies TOPICS that contain tags - not individual snippets. Since the tags all end up on the topics via the snippets, there is no difference between the two mechanisms.

Quote:
Originally Posted by kbs666 View Post
4) The hybrid realm. Soon people will be combining elements from realms built with snippet tags with stuff they built themselves and a disconnect between those pieces that have snippet tags and those pieces without will result in less than satisfying search results.
Again, I don't understand how this applies. If users are leveraging standard tag-based snippets, then all of those snippets (and their topics) are being tagged EXACTLY the same way as when hybrid tag-based snippets are used with auto-detected snippet tags. So combining elements using the different mechanisms will yield exactly the results that user's want.

This was a fundamental design goal for hybrid tag-based snippets. As far as filtering and searching is concerned, tags are tags. It doesn't matter how they get assigned. So a topic containing a normal tag-based snippet for the race "dwarf" will be located exactly the same as a topic containing a hybrid tag-based snippet that contains the text "dwarf" and that has the tag auto-detected. I recommend you give this a try and see for yourself. It may resolve any confusion that is still lingering here.

Quote:
Originally Posted by kbs666 View Post
Now that I, and anyone else reading this thread, know I can take steps to deal with this in the future. But it just seems to me that if there is the functionality to force a scan of a snippet by hand it should be possible to create a setting to cause every snippet to be scanned every time a topic is save just as is done for links. This is probably what people expect.
I believe you're overlooking a critical factor here. When snippets are scanned for tags, ALL EXISTING AUTO-DETECTED TAGS ARE THROWN AWAY. Using your suggestion, that means you would have to re-select all the snippet tags every time you saved the topic. I'm pretty sure this is NOT what users would expect.

In order to do what you propose, we would have to track exactly where every tag was detected in every snippet, just like we do for links. That's the only way that we can preserve all the previous tags when the next scan is performed. We explored that option, and it's a LOT of extra complexity. For a highly questionable ROI when compared to all the other things we could be focusing our energies on.

As I indicated up-thread, we may need to re-visit how we deal with auto-detected snippet tags in the future, but there needs to be a clear justification for all the work involved. That means a commonly employed use-case that has not emerged among users thus far.
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kbs666
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Old November 20th, 2016, 04:21 PM
I think we're talking across each other.

What are snippet tags for except to make searching for topics that contain snippets with those keywords more efficient?

For instance if a snippet contains
"The scruffy ranger's name is Aragorn" and it gets tagged with Class:ranger then if I ever need to find ever ranger in my realm it should the topic no matter what the topic is.

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rob
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Old November 20th, 2016, 05:59 PM
I think we have a fundamental philosophical difference here. If I'm searching for all instances of the word "ranger" throughout my content, I do NOT want to use tagging. I instead want to use the full-text search engine built into Realm Works. So I type in the word "ranger" and all of those various topics are located.

Remember that all tags specify a domain in RW. So the "ranger" tag is in the "class" domain. If a user is filtering on the "ranger" tag in the "class" domain, he's going to assume that he'll get back all the NPCs that are designated as being a ranger. He's not going to expect to match the topic that contains "The scruffy ranger's name is Aragorn", since that topic could easily be a scene where the PCs first meet Aragorn and the text simply includes the descriptive term.

I want tagging so that I can quickly identify all the NPCs in my realm that are rangers. So I only want to tag NPCs that have the word "ranger" in the "class" snippet. I don't want to tag a topic for a barbarian that hates rangers as being a ranger. I can readily think of some even more glaring examples where the keyword is used in a purely descriptive manner. For example, the description for the "wizard" class might have the text "a wizard is a lousy fighter". I certainly would NOT want the "wizard" topic showing up for the tag "fighter".

Coming back to your example, if the text "The scruffy ranger's name is Aragorn" appears in the NPC topic for Aragorn, that topic will also contain a "class" snippet that contains the "ranger" tag, so the topic is already tagged exactly as I want it to be. Tagging the topic multiple times, while valid, introduces unnecessary bloat and overhead to everything, so I would want to avoid that.

This is a core philosophical approach adopted within RW and all the content we're putting together. If users want to utilize RW in other manners, they certainly can. However, RW won't be tailored for such purposes, especially if that tailoring would require lots of extra work and yield questionable benefits to users.

I hope that makes sense.
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DaFranker
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Old November 21st, 2016, 06:13 AM
kbs666's example might not have properly expressed what he's trying to do.

If I'm reading correctly, what he's trying to achieve is very similar to what you guys are doing when you use hybrid tagged snippets as tag containers (as opposed to creating new snippets all over the place for each tag you want to add).

The thing is, as users not only do we also find it annoying to create extra tag snippets manually, it's also extra clutter within the topic itself when looking down through it, and remembering to reveal the appropriate snippets when you've revealed a new text snippet about something is extra cognitive workload for a GM.

In the example, if I'm interpreting this correctly, kbs666 has a topic called "Scruffy Ranger" with true name "Aragorn".

Within this topic, there's a snippet that says "The scruffy ranger's name is Aragorn", and he wants the "Class:Ranger" tag to be tied to this snippet. This is both because adding a Tag snippet right under this saying Class: Ranger is redundant since the text snippet already says so, and because it's extra work every step of the way (at creation, when looking through it to find what the players know, when revealing, etc.).

Tying the Class:Ranger tag to the snippet already telling us that he's a ranger would reduce clutter quite a lot, but since there's no simple way to auto-assign those tags to the snippets then the extra work of manually assigning tags to snippets makes it much more front-loaded work than the above options.

One glaring example of this is when you have some very major NPCs with a lot of mental traits, a lot of physical traits, a lot of social traits, some fake identities, a lot of mental traits (but they're really crafty and good at pretending to be someone they're not)... and you want to reveal only parts of this at a time, only certain traits at a time. You end up with a giant pile of "redundant" snippets:
  • Tag: Social Trait: High-born
  • Maximillian is a high-born noble of Waterdeep, a privileged member of the Jorismar family.
  • Tag: Social Trait: Rich
  • Maximillian is filthy rich. He owns several estates personally, and is heir to all the estates of his family.
  • Tag: Social Trait: Poor
  • In truth, the estates own by Maximillian are the only ones seeing any profit, and he constantly has to support the rest of his family financially. Once he inherits the family estates... let's just say he'll be pretty poor then.

See what I'm doing? I want a staged ring of information about Maximillian here where not all aspects of his social status are revealed at once, but in order for that to also translate to the tags and to searching capabilities I have to create double the amount of snippets, with extra clutter, and it's that much more work whenever I come back around and make some changes - then I have to make sure my tag snippets are still always just above the snippet with that information. I also have to reveal or hide two snippets instead of one.

This isn't a big deal for me personally right now, because I use RW solely for my own organization as a GM and I won't have any players ever seeing any of this directly until content exporting is officially out in the stable branch. However, it's definitely something I've looked at and figured could be a problem for this use case.
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rob
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Old November 21st, 2016, 12:25 PM
@daFranker: Thanks for the detailed example!

In this situation, I believe you can already do exactly what you want. With one limitation. And there's a trick you can already do to alleviate this.

For the snippet "Maximillian is a high-born noble of Waterdeep", you can assign the tag directly to the snippet and eliminate the separate tag-based snippet. Alternately, you can trigger a scan of the snippet that will auto-detect the tag. Either way, the tag gets added to the snippet.

The limitation here is that you need to explicitly trigger a scan for tags on the snippet when you add it. Or, you can do what we do, which is perform one scan of the entire topic after it's in place. After the initial scan, you would need to trigger a scan of individual snippets when they are added/modified, but that would probably be infrequent for things that need to be tagged like this.

Is this perfect? No. The tradeoff is that we'd need to spend many weeks plumbing all the logic through to track which tags have already been detected and where - like we do for auto-detected links. And, based on our experiences, the signal-to-noise ratio for tags is VASTLY lower during auto-detection across all content. The names of tags occur widely throughout typical content, and usually in places where they should NOT be assigned as tags. That's why we only scan specific snippets for tags, and that's why the option to scan a topic for tags includes this constraint.

So that's also the trick here. If you want to use tags via the method you've suggested above (embedded within prose), you can switch to having hybrid tag-based snippets display as label-based text. This is a preference setting. When you do that, the "Social Trait" snippet appears as labeled text and you'll enter the text "Maximillian is a high-born noble of Waterdeep" within the "Social Trait" snippet. When your topic is finished, you can scan for tags and limit the scan to hybrid tag snippets. That will only the scan the Social Traits snippet in this instance, keeping everything lean and efficient. And if you end up modifying the topic again such that you need to do a full scan of all the hybrid snippets, you'll only need to go through a handful of them, where the signal-to-noise ratio is nearly 100%, making for a smooth re-scan of everything. This is the approach we use.

Hopefully, this example makes more sense this time around. It works extremely well, and we've not run in any issues using it ourselves on quite a lot of content.
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Vargr
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Old November 21st, 2016, 12:27 PM
I am obviously missing something as I can't imagine using tags the ways you are describing.

My loss, I am sure, but it just illustrates the myriad ways to use the tool.

Vargr
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Legend has it, that the Tarrasque is a huge fighting beast, perpetually hungry.
Sleet entered History when he managed to get on the back of a Tarrasque only to be ridden out of History shortly after.

Using Realm Works, Worldographer (Hexographer 2), LibreOffice, Daz3D Studio, pen & paper for the realm World of Temeon and the system LEFD - both homebrewed.

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kbs666
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Old November 21st, 2016, 02:39 PM
This was my second try at making sense of this feature and I don't think I'm any closer to understanding it enough to make good use of it.

Rob, I do appreciate your patience in trying to explain how you use it and what you intend for it to do.

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