Just curious - is there an easier way to source new objects so they can be collected easier and or keep names from conflicting?
For instance I'm inputting Modules A,B,C into a cohesive campaign - I would love the ability to add stuff from Module A so that Bob (from A) doesn't conflict with Bob (from B).
I can do that with custom junk in the names - but I'm not fond of how that ends up looking. I was just wondering if there was a way to set a source it would be nice - and then I was thinking it could be some kind of global thing so if I turned it on - all my new stuff would get tagged 'module A' until I turned it off or switched it - greatly simplifying my life.
Of course I'm posting this here because I expect I'm doing it the hard way and there is already something that helps/does this in which case please point me in the right direction
The suffix is definitely an option, although we've concluded that it's of limited use for this purpose. If you need to specify the suffix on everything, you've lost the battle of utility. Assigning the suffix requires lots of typing, which is tedious and error prone. So the suffix is something to be used only in specific situations. We've got an assortment of rules for this that we're using within the content we're developing, and those rules will be published soon. That document is being written now, in fits and starts, when I'm not working on everything else that needs to get done. The general rule is that suffixes are almost never used for source differentiation within story content, but they are used with some regularity on the mechanics side.
Personally, I believe that tags are the best solution for this. There's a mechanism for this that's been around for a long time. It's called scoping tags, and you can access it via the Tag button that's just to the left of the Home button above the content pane. You can setup a scoping context such that one or more tags are automatically assigned to all new topics/articles that get created. So you can setup a scoping tag for ModuleA and configure it to be auto-assigned before adding everything from ModuleA. Then do the same for ModuleB. And so on.
What we found, though, was that setting up and managing scoping tags ended up being more fiddly and error-prone than we initially anticipated. And nobody really used them. So the mechanism is definitely present and a viable option to consider, but I'm not sure that I'd characterize it as a "great" solution. To use it successfully, you'll need to be very disciplined.
Within published content, tags will be used for this purpose. Whenever you export material, each topic/article is assigned a corresponding tag. When you import that material, those topics will all possess the appropriate Import tag, which can be readily filtered upon.
One thing we changed late last year was the display of topics/articles within the Automatic Link Detection form. When there are multiple topics/articles that can match the given text, each is shown with its full containment hierarchy. This is really the absolute best way to differentiate things, in my opinion, since containment is used extensively to organize material and the containment path will clearly identify the disambiguated nature of something in 99% of cases.
The best thing about this change is that users don't have to do anything to avail themselves of its benefits. Bob1 can be distinguished from Bob2 based solely on the names of the topics up the tree above the two NPCs. Unless, of course, they both are contained by the same "Devo" topic. But that's a very special case that won't come up very often.
I'm honestly not remembering the conversation that @kbs666 is referring to wherein I'm apparently working on a solution. He's probably thinking of something that I'm viewing as slightly different from this particular question, so I'm not connecting the dots. If someone could refresh my memory, I'd appreciate it, since I don't want to drop the ball on something by simply forgetting it about due to all the crazy health-related stuff that went on the past couple months.
Hope this helps!
