OK, here's the deal: am I the only person to ever wonder how the fuck difficult it is to tag your product properly so that when I select multiple filters on a search I don't get a hundred and fucking one things that I am not interested in?

Am I wrong in thinking that it's a simple query of SELECT * FROM PRODUCTS WHERE RULE_SYSTEM = 'X' AND PRODUCT_TYPE = 'Y'? If so, I can only conclude that it's because the uploader thought 'yeah, I know these are floor plans, but I'm going to say they are a Core Rulebook because if I fling enough shit at this, somebody is going to stumble across it and there is a 0.000001% chance they'll buy it anyway'.

If that's your 'marketing strategy', you are a) a cunt, and b) not getting another red cent from me again, and lord knows my wife takes EVERY opportunity to tell me that if I'd invested the money I've spent on gaming pdfs over the years... I'd have enough money to *buy* DriveThruRPG and hire a squad of big-titted Patagonian strippers to spank my monkey first thing in the morning THEN spend the rest of the day manually editing the fucking database to make sure the items are tagged correctly.

Quote from: Derabar;965848OK, here's the deal: am I the only person to ever wonder how the fuck difficult it is to tag your product properly so that when I select multiple filters on a search I don't get a hundred and fucking one things that I am not interested in?

Am I wrong in thinking that it's a simple query of SELECT * FROM PRODUCTS WHERE RULE_SYSTEM = 'X' AND PRODUCT_TYPE = 'Y'? If so, I can only conclude that it's because the uploader thought 'yeah, I know these are floor plans, but I'm going to say they are a Core Rulebook because if I fling enough shit at this, somebody is going to stumble across it and there is a 0.000001% chance they'll buy it anyway'.

If that's your 'marketing strategy', you are a) a cunt, and b) not getting another red cent from me again, and lord knows my wife takes EVERY opportunity to tell me that if I'd invested the money I've spent on gaming pdfs over the years... I'd have enough money to *buy* DriveThruRPG and hire a squad of big-titted Patagonian strippers to spank my monkey first thing in the morning THEN spend the rest of the day manually editing the fucking database to make sure the items are tagged correctly.

The tags have some very general options (for example Core Rulebook and PDF format for example). There are also lots of very narrow options. I suspect some of this may just be a product of those very wide categories that everyone clicks because every product falls into them. I usually only select two to three tags (product type, format type and the genre). I can't imagine anyone who selects all of the tags is getting positive results from it. Are the products you have in mind showing up with dozens of tags on them?

Can't say I've spent that much time on different options, but the floorplans result on a core book search is real and I really can't see any possible justification for such wilful mis-tagging - they are not even remotely the same type and if you let people stretch definitions to that extent, you might as well remove the filters entirely as they are useless.

Here's a different (but related) example:

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?filters=1600_2140_0_0_0&language=en

If the link works, it is Rule System: Savage Worlds and Product Type: Core Rulebook.

257 hits. Including, on the first page,  'Deadlands Reloaded Figure Flats' by Pinnacle.

I call bullshit unless I've got a seriously different opinion on what constitutes a 'core rulebook' to publishers. And I imagine if you did it for any of the flavours of D&D it would be much, much worse.

And thanks for replying with an industry perspective on things, most enlightening.

Some of the automated updates in the past screwed up some categorization by no fault of the publishers. But, yeah, I've been bitching about this for years. I go looking for a specific type of item and have to weed out the miscategorized stuff.

Make sure you complain to OBS. They do care about this issue and every other year either do or issues warnings to publisher to clean up their tags.

Thanks all, and apologies to those of you with sensitive natures for the fruity words about the matter in my original post. Having been stuck staring at a badly designed database at work all week, a quick bit of escapism by browsing the catalog was my plan, only to discover that art was imitating life.

Unless they changed things recently, you are only able to use 3 different tags. So there isn't too much tag spamming, unlike say Steam. On the other hand, they don't seem to have a category for floor plans, so publishers just put anything under their category.

What drives me crazy is they not only don't have any category for things like floor plans, they don't have them for art vs stock art (or stock floorplans).  I'm more careful now, but when I first started self-publishing on a couple of occasions I bought art instead of stock art and when I went to look at the terms of the license, oops, I discovered my mistake.

And not really related, but what also drives me crazy is all the really crappy 3-D art. Some people just take a bad 3d model of a woman, put some bad 3-d clothes on them (not much) and call it art

Do a search for "D&D" product type "core rulebooks"... I dare you.

If I don't know the publisher or close to the title of what I'm looking for, I've given up on finding it there.

Quote from: Derabar;965883Thanks all, and apologies to those of you with sensitive natures for the fruity words about the matter in my original post. Having been stuck staring at a badly designed database at work all week, a quick bit of escapism by browsing the catalog was my plan, only to discover that art was imitating life.

You left us with the mental image of Patagonian strippers, so it's all good.

Quote from: Derabar;965856Here's a different (but related) example:

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?filters=1600_2140_0_0_0&language=en

If the link works, it is Rule System: Savage Worlds and Product Type: Core Rulebook.

Could it be doing a search for Savage Worlds OR Core Rulebook?

"Deadlands Reloaded Figure Flats" would legitimately meet the criteria for Savage Worlds.

Edit: Nope, it's doing AND. I tried "Storyteller" and "Western" and got 9 products, all of which are Werewolf Wild West.

On a separate rant: why they hell can't LULU properly categorize their rpg/OSR stuff? I have better luck just clicking on the pop up ads in my email, than using LULU's search engine.

Quote from: CRKrueger;965924You left us with the mental image of Patagonian strippers, so it's all good.

I'm trying to imagine the distinct benefit from them being Patagonian. Oh no, I absolutely don't mind the mental exercise! So far I've narrowed it down to being able to give a hand(ie) in tempo to a tango while withstanding a constant 20 mph strong breeze.

Patagonian strippers would not be something I'd pay to see.

They're not alone. The big app stores from #Apple, #Microsoft, and (for fuck sake) #Google have exactly the same problems.

Quote from: RPGPundit;966093Patagonian strippers would not be something I'd pay to see.

Argentine vacation planned?