I have thought about this idea for some time now but not totally sure how it would work. The secondary problem with tags is not every story has Tags. Some of the oldest stories on the site where created before the site even existed. There would need to be some kind of check in place but what if readers could add tags to stories. Maybe have a something that would allow an author to turn it off, set to must approve tag, or free for all mode where authors can add tags freely.
This is Pandora's box. Free for all allows for sabotage from trolls. Even without that we'll get dozens of tags per chapters, with slight variation on the same theme. And even with must approve, someone could spam notifications on authors. Can you imagine what it would be like if dozens of people started adding tags on stories with thousands of chapters. It also opens the question. Should the owner of the story be the one to approve the tags, of the author of the chapter? And what happens if one disagrees strongly with the proposed tag? Rule number one, never set something in place without thinking of how it could fail or be abused, because others surely will. So nope, nope, nope!
It could maybe work but there would need to be some tweaks. It would work best if, when a person went to add a Tag, the system would check the other tags already on the story and suggest ones that are similar. For example we don't need to have Futanari, Futa, Dick Girl etc all on the same story or have multiple spellings of the same thing on it. Also it would be best if the reader tags are hidden by default and the user has to turn them on to be able to see them. Since that would get around the spam problem. You could also have them ranked based off how many people have submitted that tag.
First of all, that would increase the number of reader tags being submitted. If it doesn't go through until the writer or editor enables it, there's no point of reference for other users to know the tag they're proposing has already been supplied for judging. Now the writer and editor have more work. And mind you, this hinges on the assumption every reader actually takes the time to read all of the visible tags before supplying one. Given that many users can't even find the report button, I'm not about to trust them to read a wall of tags. Second, that doesn't resolve the spam issue. Sure, the readers are fine since they don't have nonsense misdirecting them, but what about the editor and writer? They'd have to weed through all those suggestions to see if there's something useful. So far, all you've done is propose more work to achieve identical results. Now yes, a system to compare and catalog tags would resolve these complaints, but we'd also need to increase its capabilities to also remember denied tags and be able to compare those in the same way. And since even Google, a system designed by a "large and vigilant team of professionals," doesn't always connect "blond" and "blonde" and hold them as equally valid, I seriously doubt CHYOA will do much better. And this is before we begin to discuss how this additional programming will affect the rest of the site's processes and what would need to be purchased for negative consequences to become minimal at worst. Third, how exactly would the ranking help? "Oh, look. This thread has a stripper. I think I'll tag it 'stripper.'" Repeat for every thread that user reads that involves a stripper. And every other user does the same thing. At best, we'd have the exact same list we always did. At worst? Suppose the stripper is just two or three threads very far down the road and only exists in one specific branch. If this minor use of stripper is in a story more popular than a story set in a strip club or revolving around the life of a stripper, this ranking forces the more apt stories to lower slots on the list. In fact, this is something of a problem now. I'm not entirely sure how the sorting is done, but simple searches of various tags revealed stories with limited branches using certain tags outrank stories that pivotally employ the same tags. Ranking tags would only further jumble it all.
