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I think the categories for your stories needs some serious work, they don't all seem logical. The current categories are:

Fantasy

Sci-Fi

Modern

School Based

Edutainment

Mystery/Puzzle

Fan Fic

Love/Dating

Quizzes

Everything Else.

The problem I have with these categories is that some of them seem unecessary and/or confusing. For instance, if I wrote a story about a kid in high-school about a kid who finds a way to contact aliens from the school library,  is it sci-fi or school based? "School-Based" is a setting. It's like having an "Outdoors" category, or a "Beach" category. In my opinion, school-based should be gone and the stories in there re-assigned to the appropriate category. Another problem category, in my opinion, is the Edutainment category. Is this really necessary? Perhaps a historical category would be more appropriate? War stories and the like could easily fit into a historical category, but might not actually be educational. I'd also recommend changing the Love/Dating to Romance. That is what Love/Dating stories are, afterall.

And is the word "adventure" really necessary? I know the site used to be called My Adventure Game and all, but a lot of stories aren't exactly adventures. Ducky Park, for instance, could have fit easily into a Modern category, but because the category is Modern Adventure, it didn't seem like an appropriate fit.

Those are my thoughts anyway.

I didnt read everything completely, but i got the gist of it. and basically when MAG was turning into CYS, alex and i talked about the categories, and at the time i came up with suggestions for new names, alex said he was gonna keep it as it was until he could devise a completely new system later on.

I dont remember what the names were, but i have a new idea in mind. Alex wants the articles section to be "tag" based, so if the article involves the adv editor, it gets an "ADV" tag, and if it ALSO involves scripting, it gets a "scripting" tag, therefore making it easier to narrow down articles.

I think we need to do the same thing with the games, make them tag based... (notice how im leaving this open-ended, and for the games page, we could just have top games, and then you can browse by tags, and such... but i want more ideas to flow in about this!)

not to mention that the Edutainment was originally the more popular category, if i remember correctly. most of the stories in that category are some of the oldest on the sites.

nate

Excellent points! Solo mostly nailed what my response would have been... my life is starting to finally settle down (woo!) and I'm hoping to implement the ideas of Tags.

Idea is, stories can be in a Genre (what categories will be called) and can have Tags.  Genres are pretty much well defined (Modern, Sci-Fi, Mystery, etc), and Tags will be like "Educational" or "Movie Based" or "War Based", etc.

No one's yet mentioned:

If we change the categories, we'll have to re-do the featured games as well.

I like that, October. Sometimes less is more.

This idea stated by October makes the most sense to me.  I'd like to see it implemented.

That is pretty much the idea, have very broad categories, and then tag the specifics. I just wonder if this would get done before the articles section, which really needs to be tidied up!

Really? I found it very easy to navigate.