User Content Curation Tools - A Discussion

[Xideron]

I am on mobile so my response will be brief and not carry the nuances of my longer posts.

For the blacklist and opt-out approach to work, an onboarding segment with required user interaction will have to occur. This can be refined over time, but the idea is that players will end up in an instanced room with a bot NPC that first warns them that Wolfery has some adult content that may be extreme, and then can guide them through the process of opting-in to any content they want to see as well as configuring their filtering levels.

This will result in a myriad of configurations, like the following:

• a player that leaves all the extreme content filtered and chooses to not see players with those tags ( what most people are talking about in this thread)
• a player that leaves the extreme content filtered but doesn’t filter players ( obscured tags, doesn’t see their LFRP status, etc. )
• a player that chooses to modify their filtered content and chooses to enable certain tags at the category level. ( eg. Violent category enables things like slapping, choking, etc. )
• a player that enables granular tags and opts in to slapping, but not choking.

Cub + explicit tags would be a separate category in and of itself, and would potentially require the review of some tags as well as the development of others and the expansion to state whether or not tags with the same name are for SFW or NSFW interests.

For example, I do think there should be a difference between SFW ageplay+biting and NSFW ageplay+biting because the former can be a slice of life rolelplay about a toddler going through the terrible, teething two’s wherein they ankle gnaw their babysitters and that shouldn’t be excluded by default.

Tl;dr: more tools and refinement of existing concepts to help the tools work better

EDIT: Also, yes, every player has to go through this setup on first login after implementation and will then be poofed back to the room they came from.

[Alexander_Riven]

Yeah, you’ve got it down. The implementation I have in mind would be more nuanced and have a lot of onboarding involved than a lot of other people here fear.

[Aoineko13]

Opting in, the way you described it there, sounds like by saying I opt in, that the player is being asked if they wish to engage, opposed to I am not opposed to others who wish to engage to the point I do not wish to see them at all.

With this onboarding process proposal, I think it should still be opt in even more so. Then clicking the opt out is asking “does this offend you and you wish it did not exist.”

I wish to clarify I still believe spoilers is better, but if this is the chosen option, I wish to get my two cents in opposed to putting my foot down and just saying no, and having no say at all. Doesn’t mean I am in agreement with it, though.

[Toma]

@Alexander_Riven

This is easily solvable by just having said characters see a red tick next to the blocking individual’s profile - a “do not approach” thing that resolves the ambiguity.

Being able to see if a player has me filtered out would satisfy my concern about accidentally interacting with players who I might be invisible to. I think this should be a configurable feature (some players might not want to see indicators that they are filter-blocked, but I would).

@Alexander_Riven

If they’re fine with nonsexual roleplay with a cub character, then they probably won’t have checked the block option in the first place. You seem to misunderstand what the block option is for in the first place - the people fine with non-sexual interactions with sexualized cub profiles aren’t who it is for.

A lot of the discourse arguing against this solution seems to share the traits of misunderstanding the use case or bringing forth easily solvable problems as a reason why it can’t be implemented. You don’t wanna be blocked. I get it. But some other people do, in fact, want to block you.

I don’t think this is impossible to implement, but I wouldn’t consider it “easily solvable” either. The nuance of the implementation details are complex and deserve careful consideration (hence this thread~)

I’m actually okay with being blocked by folks who are intending not to see my character(s). The two design goals I value are:

1. Ensuring players know if someone doesn’t want to RP with them. (This was already addressed above with your red ticks suggestion.)
2. Ensuring the semantics of a filtering system is accurate so that when players use filters to hide characters with specific content/interests, characters without that content do not get inadvertently impacted (hidden) and vis-versa.

Number 2 is why I was asking about what constitutes a sexual tag in my prior message, and so I appreciate that we’re considering the complexities of this.

Past discussions about ambiguity of tags (or lack of specific default tags) were met with an understanding that players can use custom text to communicate more clearly. These proposals would transform tags from a communication tool into the basis for content filtering, so developing more concrete meaning of tags (and shared understanding of what they define) is a problem we can no longer hand-wave away.

@Xideron

For the blacklist and opt-out approach to work, an onboarding segment with required user interaction will have to occur. This can be refined over time, but the idea is that players will end up in an instanced room with a bot NPC that first warns them that Wolfery has some adult content that may be extreme, and then can guide them through the process of opting-in to any content they want to see as well as configuring their filtering levels.

I have seen this type of process work well in twine-games (where users select the content they want to include in the beginning). This also has greater discoverability than placing these options in a UI menu that a player may not ever stumble upon.

@Xideron

Cub + explicit tags would be a separate category in and of itself, and would potentially require the review of some tags as well as the development of others and the expansion to state whether or not tags with the same name are for SFW or NSFW interests.

For example, I do think there should be a difference between SFW ageplay+biting and NSFW ageplay+biting because the former can be a slice of life rolelplay about a toddler going through the terrible, teething two’s wherein they ankle gnaw their babysitters and that shouldn’t be excluded by default.

This is well-put. I think it would also help to consider the ambiguity of what tags are describing, as this is another area where it gets tricky:

Tags can describe various details such as:

• Qualities or attributes of a character
• OOC preferences of a player
• IC preferences of a character

The tag list UI does try to indicate these using categories like:

• Character Attributes
• Character Attributes (Adult)
• Preferences
• Preferences (Adult)

However, players frequently use tags differently than how they are represented by their categories. Others add the tags without ever looking at the tag list (though seeing the tag description might clue them in.)

Are there approaches that could make it more clear what a tag is expressing (in cases where we can no longer rely on humans reading tag text)?

Some other examples of edge cases:

• non-sexual is in the adult category, and is intended to communicate that characters don’t want sex. It’s also used to indicate that players enjoy SFW RP. It may be surprising to search non-sexual and come up with profiles that also include kink-oriented tags.
  • So if we imagine a tag filter that includes allow-listing tag combos, allowing cub + non-sexual might provide unexpected results.
• cub has been proposed as a default tag indicating that a character is a cub. If a player wants to express that they like roleplaying with cubs, and they set cub on an adult character, the assumption that cub denotes cub characters breaks down.

I recognize that the above examples are not how those tags are originally intended to be used.

I’m unsure about whether it’s actually worth trying to make the tag system that robust (and more complicated), and could make peace with tag-based filtering an imperfect solution.

I don’t have a specific solution in mind, but one possibility could be for each tag to include an indication of if it is describing a quality of a character, a preference of the player, etc.

Another possibility could be to define tags separately for preferences vs character.

[Alexander_Riven]

I think tags already have a short description under them. “Cub” having the description of “Is a cub” would suffice. That said, you are right that people might have a tendency to not read the tags they are applying - maybe slight color variations would work on top of making them listed under different categories?

Hm. On top of that, it would also be nice to have something to designate whether one would like to be the purveyor or recipient of certain acts. Maybe an icon or little texture to the right side you could add? Lots of wonderful UI choices to use for disambiguation.

[Aoineko13]

Hm. On top of that, it would also be nice to have something to designate whether one would like to be the purveyor or recipient of certain acts.

I have wanted that too.