Mind Control Comics Forum

The technical website improvement that would most benefit my reading would be a character tag system.

Example in a webcomic: https://www.yafgc.net/

In this system, the author tags each page with the characters who appear on that page. Clicking on the tag displays other pages with that character tag.

This system helps me keep track of which characters are which and remind myself of their back story relevance. It makes it easy to answer questions like "who is this again?" or "what was this character up to last?" or even "what is the history of the plot arc associated with this key character?"

In many ways, a character tag system is significantly better than a character bios page, since it's always up to date instead of dated back to the last time the author had time to update the bios. It also avoids issues with spoilers: if you are reading issue 10 and need to remind yourself of this character's twist in issue 5, you can do so without that twist being spoiler for anyone still on issue 3. The tag system also works great when there's some unintended ambiguity in recognizing characters (like a changed artist), and you can always skip tagging a character when ambiguity is intended.

For MCC, the huge number of different series, the long time between updates for some series, the propensity for most of the characters to be attractive women (so not as distinct from each other), and the occasional artist change all contribute to me having a relatively hard time identifying characters compared to most comics. I'd also guess that Daphne has proper scripts for everything, meaning which character appears on which page is already written down. Tagging older pages might be a hassle, but a partial rollout of the system wouldn't be a problem (e.g. only go back and add tags for long running series, and only when those series have a new update).

The business case for this is that occasional subscribers can be prompted to resubscribe by new releases to series they enjoyed. However, a new update to a long series isn't exciting if it's going to be a pain reminding yourself who all these people are. This also helps make the ultra-long series that are popular with longtime subscribers also appealing to new and occasional subscribers. Finally, it adds a feature that incentivizes a subscription relative to reading PDFs.

I'm sure it's a bigger technical challenge to add tags to the MCC site than to a comic site running a less customized platform. Hopefully the technical challenge is moderate and a worthwhile investment.

Oh that's slick. Would super help something like Expanded Universe.

The actual implementation isn't that bad. (Really, having our own custom system makes it easier, not harder.) It's mostly the rather steep amount of data entry: It's not just a matter of uploading the script and tagging-software-goes-wrrrr.

We do it already as the hover text for EU!

I meant the ability to click on a metadata tag and be served all of the pages with that character. Makes it really easy to reread a storyline.

Definitely understand that it would take a bunch of manual entry; I'm just saying it would provide a lot of value.

And I, for one, really appreciate it. But I can see that it would be a lot of work.

Totally off topic: I find myself wondering what European Union Standard would cover hover text.

(EU) 2016/679 of course in thios case; after all, identities are revealed.... ;)

Aaaaaahhhrgh! Skewered by an intelligent and humorous answer to a ludicrous question.

This concept makes me infinitely sad, because personal reasons.


Could volunteer out the bulk of the work, but that obviously has its own perils and development costs.

I think character tags will be very usefull.

To see the evolution of characters for example. Or thread evolutions.

:'(

I just discovered this feature was put in. Thanks a ton! It's awesome and it has already helped me understand what's going on in SJI right now.

Can some help me
Please explain how can this be used ?

How can i see the tags ?

Thanks in advance  :)

They are currently available for Saint James Infirmary, Expanded Universe, and An Education. You can find links on the Title page for each comic, and on the header and footer of each page. Down at the bottom of each page, there's a list of the characters, and a link to the characters' pages.

Thanks you Daphne

for the fast reply and for the help

I have a suggestion for another feature on top of the character tags.  Right now, at the bottom of the comic there is a list of the characters in that comic, and the name of each character links to a page listing all the issues in which they appear.

How hard would it be to put arrows around each character name linking directly to the previous and next issues containing that character?  Like this: "<Bob>".  That would make it very easy to follow a given character thread.

I think this would be really handy for Expanded Universe, which often hops from thread to thread with little warning.

It seems like the information needed to do this is already in the database, so I'm hoping it would be fairly straightforward UI work to implement.

There is something of a gap between "all the data is in the database" and "the UI is easy to build," but we'll see what we can do!