galleries by interest

It's perfectly understandable that any pre-set list of shows in a broader category is going to fall short of completeness; an implementation of mod additions would be necessary for it to work. Would a new category of limited power mods who could do only this be possible?

I fear a top titles only guide would allow great galleries like
http://shosho.rubberslug.com/
to be unfindable under the system, when I think it's several million times as interesting as yet another DBZ/CCS/Inuyasha gallery.

or my site that lists comic art though id be covered by sm some of the others listing comic art wont be how about NON ANIME

Ted kind of made my point in that I was thinking that maybe a listing/sorting by year would also be included. It may mean a little more work for the gallery owner but really, it's easily researched.

[quote]
I fear a top titles only guide would allow great galleries like
http://shosho.rubberslug.com/
to be unfindable under the system, when I think it's several million times as interesting as yet another DBZ/CCS/Inuyasha gallery. [/quote]

Agreed, that's the kind of gallery that needs more exposure and not less. Did I meet this guy at Anime Expo last year? I think I did. I need to ask if he's the same person because I own him a sponsorship.

There won't be anything "unfindable" as we're keeping the alphabetical list. Also, no one will be pigeonholed into one or two specific things.

Think of this new sorting as "tags". We're starting with about 100 tags. Tags are focused at the moment on matching series titles (inexact matches, don't worry). Any given gallery can show up under more than one tag. No, that's not ideal, but it's the best we've got to work with.

I'm sorting right now based on the sum of hits in all the items in a series that matches a given tag. (Read that twice if it doesn't make sense.) Rallihir, for example, is sitting on top of the CCS category. I think Xelloss (Anime Cel Incognito) is on top of Slayers.

The reality is that we will be dealing head-on with the popularity vs. artistic/historical importance issue regardless of what we do. There's a number of audiences that this site serves and the "mainstream anime" (that's a weird oxymoron) culture will always be a big one.

We absolutely need to branch out towards Western stuff, older stuff, comic art, and the like. This opens up a lot of gray areas. Example: I don't know how much to focus on fanart. DeviantArt and others have that covered pretty well. Original art? Another big "I don't know".

This system will be more understandable once I get enough progress to release. Gallery browser is almost done. Working on porting the market and the forums over in the next few days. I think that's enough to preview. I don't want to release it just now because it's just going to cause a bunch of discussion on things that I know aren't done yet.

If something prevents me from releasing this by next week, I'll take a bunch of screenshots that we can talk about. Rest assured with 100% confidence that the Big Redesign that we've been bouncing around for a couple of years is finally happening though, and soon.

The value in a broader category setup would be its ability to go beyond simple titles tho. We could all search for any of the listed titles now anyway. I run searches for titles I have interest in on occasion, I'm sure others do as well. Other than mentioning that these however many titles are the most populated on Rubberslug (and maybe pulling in alternate spellings for a consolidated search), I'm not sure how this would guide people's experience very much. Grouping like series would on the other hand give people incentive to investigate series that they didn't know were related to series they do know (thematically, by studio, etc.), as well as giving people jumping off points for groups of series they do not necessarily have a pre-existing interest in. It would take effort on the part of users to maintain and expand those categories, but it seems worthwhile having guides involved in guided experiences. If you can code mod alterable category searches, I'm sure there's plenty of people who would be willing to work on categories in their areas of expertise. I know I would.