New Age Catagory?

I am wondering whether an additional age catagory would be useful. As it is now the catagories are (C) Child under 13, (T) Teen 13-17 and (A) Adult over 18. However many of the stories involve young addults such as 20 year old girls living at home, college students, etc. I think that a new catagory (Y) Young Adults 18-early twenties would be useful.

This appears to be a popular age group for the characters in the stories. In fact among the Favourite stories almost two thirds of the stories have characters that are in this age group. It would seem to be useful to add this (Y) Young Adult catagory so that members could easily find the stories that interest them.

Also although the guidelines say that (T) Teens are 13-17 and (A) Adults are over 18 the validators seem to be unsure as to what to do with people who are 18 or 19 since they are technically teens but legally adults.
Sometimes they are put into the Adult catagory as the guidelines say but often they are put into the Teen catagory. To make matters even more confusing sometimes they are in the Teen catagory but under Gender it shows something like M/F with the capital letters indicating that they are both adults. I think that a new Young Adult catagory would go a long way in eliminating these conflictions.

I have proposed this new (Y) Young Adult catagory to Februs but he seems to be less than enthusiastic about changing things. He is not sure if there is any demand for a new catagory.

So I am wondering if the members think, as I do, that this new catagory would be useful in helping members search for what interests them and also eliminating the confusion as to where to place older teens who are under twenty or whether a new age catagory would be useless.

So please comment and give your opinion as to whether you favor a new (Y) Young Adult catagory or not.

I would really like a category specifically for Young Adults since I mostly enjoy stories with characters in that age group. It would be beneficial for searching since I could just click on that category and probably find more stories I'm interested in reading.

The main problem would be the work involved. I'm not completely sure, but I would think each story validater would have to look through all of the stories and then add the new tag to each one it applies to. That would take a lot of time and effort for something that isn't that necessary.

Sarah89

Februs also brought up the problem of what to do about all the stories that are already in the library. I think that the easiest way to handle that would be to add the (Y) Young Adult catagory to new stories as they are validated and older stories could be changed gradually as the validaters get around to it. (Or is that spelled validator? My dictionary does not say.)

Well, that does sound like a lot of extra work in the 'backtracking' of already-validated stories--I'm not certain if it would be worth it, although it would certainly help readers who distinctly prefer stories involving young adults... --C.K.

My suggestion as to what to do with all the old stories would be to post a notice that stories validated after (the appropriate date) have the new (Y) Young Adult catagory but the older ones do not. If the validators wished to gradually re-catagorize the older stories they could do so starting with the latest ones and the notice would then be changed as they worked backwards in time.

To use the reason that there are too many stories in the Library would mean that nothing in the Library could ever change. Somehow that reminds me of the current recession caused by financial institutions that are "Too big to fail". In this case the Library would be "Too big to improve".

It's not a case of there being too many stories in the library for changes to be made as recent evidence will show with the recent addition of the sub-genre field, favourite and comment counts on individual stories, and prior to that, the addition of the content icons themselves and even further back, word counts.

However, as the library gets bigger the amount of work involved in adding yet more categories becomes greater and greater and it's all very well asking for more and more things but who is going to give up the vast amount of free time necessary to make the changes? It's very easy simply to enjoy all the library contents without stopping to realise the sheer amount of effort it takes to make it what it is.

If we look at the request for adding a "young adult" category there are at the time of writing currently 7,103 stories which have been classified as featuring adults (and there's still over 1,400 stories with no classification at all, three quarters of which are likely to feature adults so that's probably another 1,000+). Let's assume at the very least, based on the average word length of these stories, 10 minutes to read them and make the necessary update to their record, that equates to a staggering: 10 x 8,100 = 81,000 minutes!

So that's over 80,000 minutes of people's free time simply to add a "young adult" categorisation when site records show that despite offering facilities to locate stories by first letter of title, sub-genre, content icons for age, gender and sexual content, word count, author, synopsis search, last commented on, last read, most commented on, document type and so forth the vast majority of readers simply read whatever is on the Latest Loaded page. On top of which it's not even clear in a great many stories just how old the adults are.

And merely adding additional classifications to new items added to the library while hoping that someone at some point might deal with the backlog is not a good thing to do as we then end up with an inconsistent database so that's absolutely not an option we would consider. But if there's a group of people who collectively have 80,000+ minutes to spare and are prepared to do the necessary work involved then we can look into adding a "young adults" classification.

I suppose that there are a number of possibilities here, maybe an educational outreach program to a high security prison, plenty of people with time on their hands there and it could be seen as part of an adult literacy course.

Or out sourcing to China but personally an appeal by Joanna Lumley on Radio 4 is my favourite.

How much time are you going to put in Tiptopper? I hope you intend to lead by example! Personally I should have thought it a complete waste of everyones time

Personally I don't believe there are any more categories needed. It's confusing enough as it is, especially if you have multiple categories within the one story.

Surely the point of classifying adults as being over 18 is that there is no danger of straying into sex with children or teenagers, which is quite rightly banned by the library. For example, I'm writing a story wich contains sex between a pupil and teacher, whilst making it absolutely clear that the pupil is over 18. That being the case a Y category seems an unnecessary elaboration.