NOOOO DELICIOUS NOOOOOOO

[cimorene]

Delicious is currently non-functional. kronos999 investigated the features and lack thereof and lays out the horror in more detail, but lowlights include

• Names of other people to save a bookmark are no longer associated with the tags they gave it at the url page


• Network is gone (in its place is a list of links to people you follow, but you have to visit their pages individually)


• Tag subscriptions are gone


• When filtering by tag, you can only see the latest 10 results for each tag(-combination). There is no ability to page back.


• Searching the entire site by tag is supposed to work, but apparently isn't necessarily (even if the tag in question doesn't contain a special character), and the results are sorted funny.

Not unrelatedly, Diigo censors tags by automatically privatizing bookmarks with keywords like 'porn' or 'sexy' attached.

And it's nice that the people at Pinboard are fandom-friendly, but here's the thing. I already pay for journaling. That isn't a big deal. We could do it. The problem is that what I want, and what I think a lot of us want, and what delicious was close to achieving, was a fairly fandom-universal option, a social network of fandom links that was open to everybody. And a fee threshold is simply too high to be that universal solution.

I mean, it's hard enough to get fandom people to migrate away from a place that's spit in our faces as many times as Livejournal without also adding any other causes for reluctance to the mix (rather poetically, the fandom delicious community, Deliciously Mad, is still on livejournal).

I haven't been able to export my bookmarks from delicious for the past few days (although I have full access to my account!). I'd been figuring the exporter was just overloaded with everyone else jumping ship; but now I seem to see that other people have been exporting successfully. Now I'm wondering if the problem isn't simply that mine are timing out because I have 4,000+, which is more bookmarks than the average bear. IDK. Just hoping that the exporter starts working for me again soon, unless someone has another suggestion. (I saw from mecurtin that the hostsfile workaround tested by brownbetty had failed for at least one person, so maybe stopped working? - and also since I can at least access my bookmarks on new!delicious (although not very well what with all the abovementioned lack of features), I presume they will eventually be capable of exporting them.

ETA: I got them using the api as per seperis's post here.

ETA on the subject of AO3's possibilities as a replacement for delicious

The short version is "They're miles and miles away from that", but we've been told here that it's being put back on the high priority list for them, which is something. Right now the functionality isn't ready, but if we're looking at long-term planning for a fandom-specific bookmarking solution anyway then it's worth considering one extremely useful feature of AO3:

TAG-WRANGLING.

And the tag wranglers already do that at AO3; sharing the tagging system for bookmarks and the archive would have the major advantage of eliminating the need to (for example) search for "mckay/sheppard", "john/rodney", and "sheppard/mckay", not to mention all the people who name their tags something like "pairing:sheppard/mckay" or "pairing:john.sheppard/rodney.mckay". Tag-wrangling lets the tagger call it Snarry or Cherik if they want to, and still lets the searcher find everything that's actually about the same two people.

And as someone who (used to) spend a HUGE amount of time on Delicious, with links in my bookmarks sidebar to over 20 "Recent [pairing] Bookmarks" and "Popular [pairing] Bookmarks" pages, I found the lack of canonical tags really, really annoying.

Comments

[pocketmouse]

Seperis also has methods for exporting, check her posts.

[cimorene]

Oh, thanks! <3

[brownbetty]

The hosts file workaround has, so far, succeeded for everyone who has reported back, although it needed some fiddling for one person.

[cimorene]

I got them from the API, but the output isn't quite the same and they are strangely somewhat out of order. Maybe I should do the hosts file thing too...

[laurajv]

yeah, delicious is crazymaking. seperis has been posting some ways to access things via the API, which might help you?

Much as I love tag-wrangling (and yeah, HELLA useful for pairings), it has its drawbacks. (bonding, soul bonding, forced bonding, and male bonding...are not the same things. For example. ahem. possibly I am revealing a great deal about what I look at on the AO3?)

[cimorene]

Hahaha. Well, I can see that. (That is an interesting conundrum actually! I mean, I love bonding fic, but if you're looking for forced bonding you don't want soul bonding. Maybe. Maybe a 'related tags' thing that would do like a little note at the bottom of the search - 'Also try X and Y!') Anyway, at least in terms of fandom and pairing names I think it's better than the alternative... providing you can get the person-power.

[pocketmouse]

I agree. Tag-wrangling means it would be useful for stuff like not having to search by all the different pairing combinations, but all the other random stuff people tag with? anything like length or commentary or whatever? All that would end up as freeform tags, which wranglers have pretty much no control over. All those tags, and we can't even tell people about typos? A disaster waiting to happen. And I doubt there'd be any way to give people a list of tags that they've used, like delicious and these other services have.

[cimorene]

1. AO3 stories are automatically labelled with their length. That doesn't show up in bookmarks ATM if I remember rightly, but that could be changed. Would be handy, too, considering the popularity of length tags...

2. I don't think there's anything wrong with freeform tags per se, or with combining them with wrangled tags, if there were a way to manage it.

3. A "your tags" feature (minus fandom and pairing perhaps) would be a must, I agree. There isn't anything like that on AO3 now, but hopefully that wouldn't have to mean there couldn't ever be... although I can imagine that it might be very complicated to arrange.

[pocketmouse]

There's nothing wrong with freeform tags, from a user POV. As a wrangler, they're annoying because we can't do anything with them, so they tend to get shoved under the bed. We can't do anything to them beyond label them freeform. And a lot of wranglers find that frustrating. If we could somehow separate bookmarking tags and have them wrangled separately or something -- I dunno. I just see it getting messy fast, on the back end.

[cimorene]

Oh, I see... and the line between bookmarking tags and posting tags would have to be, er, semi-permeable, I think... I mean, it wouldn't HAVE to be, but considering the amount of redundancy that would exist between the systems, it would be good if they could share some stuff. Although I see what you mean about freeform tags. I mean, they seem sort of calculated to taunt one's OCD tendencies, in a way. But for bookmarking even more than posting, I think, they would be necessary. Maybe they ought to have a fenced enclosure or something with little screens so the tag-wranglers wouldn't be offended by the sight of them...

[pocketmouse]

Not offended, so much as frustrated that we can't sort them nicely, I think. Though hopefully, yeah, they would be created in a field so that they'd automatically fall into a metatag structure. Actually -- yeah, that might be the best way to do it. If the behind the scenes coding meant that 'anything typed into this text box gets coded as Metatag: bookmark, (maybe sub-metatag: [name of user filling out form] (so they could look up their own tags)) and then the tag, that might solve several of the issues.

[cimorene]

To the non-leet eye, that does sound useful. It would presumably make sorting through the tags that do need to be wrangled easier if you didn't have to sort through a flux of 'not-for-wranglings' that had to be individually ignored.

[anatsuno]

I understand the frustration of searching when there aren't canonical tabs but the most interesting/precious feature of delicious for me has always been it freeform tags / folksonomy aspect, and I would not want to use as a primary service a thing wot forces my tags into canonical wranglings. Wrangling does semantic things to my own semantic choices that I don't always (far from it) approve of.

[cimorene]

But the wrangled tags still display as the forms people have entered, don't they? They just link back to the canonical tag so that they come up in searches.

[anatsuno]

oh yeah, they don't get modified. Their meaning only gets affected by whatever else they get lumped into. Like the 'bonding' example higher up.. I dunno, I get that there are advantages, I just… Something about it bothers me.

[cimorene]

If their meaning is affected negatively by being linked to other tags, isn't that an example of tags that shouldn't have been wrangled together? I mean, "soul-bonding" and "bonding" are actually two different things that shouldn't be linked; that would be a bug, not a feature.

Anyway, perhaps a system that only wrangled fandom and character designations (and hence pairings) and left all the other tags alone would be ideal. Those are far from uncontroversial - at least in some fandoms I can think of... - but they're also the places where wrangling would be most useful.

[anatsuno]

true! fandom and pairing are probably the easiest and most important things to wrangle into canonical tags/drawers, and the least controversial. Leaving everything else alone seems like the surest bet though, to me.

[mirabella]

I agree on Pinboard. I'm going back and forth about shelling out for an account, but the truth is I'm so uncomfortable with setting myself and my bookmarks up on the other side of a paywall that people without money to spare will be able to look through but not come across to participate. That's not good for me either because the fewer people there are sharing links the less value the service has for me. And the more people like me there are getting accounts "just in case," the less accessible it will be for low-income fans. If Pinboard had some sort of free option it would be different, but they don't.

Not to mention the fact that Pinboard, like JF and GJ, is run by one guy out of his basement. Fandom's track record of success with that kind of setup does not exactly inspire confidence.

[cimorene]

Yeah, exactly. And if it was a site run from some guy's basement that was free I guess I would be like, okay, this site could vanish at any time, but at least it may work for the time being. Especially with the minimalist display and the lack of tag bundles, which I'm also not too keen on. But the paywall's pretty much insurmountable because, yeah, we need a bigger community because we want more people's bookmarks to contribute to the tag subscriptions.

IDK. I guess I'm going to upload the ones that I've managed to save from Delicious to Diigo for now, but I'm not happy with that solution. The censorship thing is bad enough but apparently they also don't successfully export large accounts and have been unresponsive to support requests and suggestions and questions about that, plus they like to change things in the background without telling the users? Yeah, no. Going to be regarding that just as a stopgap to preserve the stuff I've got as-is while I wait (and try to at least figure out a personal solution if nothing else).

[anatsuno]

I wouldn't deny the one guy thing because, well, it's true, but I feel the comparison is unfair because afaik neither JF's nor GJ's admins ever worked on their sites as a full time job, which Maciej does and has for over a year now.

[mirabella]

Unless he's independently wealthy, that's not much reassurance. It just means that if the profitability of the site ever drops significantly he'll have to get a day job so he can eat. I'd actually rather be on a site run by someone with another source of income to pad a little against extended dips.