Prelude

Now, before I start, I'd like to clarify that this is in no way proposing a rule for mods to enforce, it's just a call to action for something we as the e621 community can do to make searches easier.

The proposal

So, TWYS is under fire again. For the most part the discussion is going in the same direction it always does, with people yelling at the mods and other people yelling back. But I personally think we're overlooking a good solution. I'd like to propose to the e621 community that we start tagging lore tags in the description.

What would that mean?

'Lore tags' are tags that would not be tagged under TWYS but would be tagged under TWYK(tag what you know). For example, let's take a recent post featuring two canonically male characters, but is tagged male/female.

post #1546674

Whether or not you think this post should be tagged male/female is irrelevant. The point is that under e621 rules, it is tagged as male/female. But if one were to click on the post, you would notice the description has tags in it, specifically these ones:

Lore tags:
lore_male/male
lore_girly
lore_anal_penetration
lore_anal

So, what are these tags? These tags are tags that would be considered missing if we used a TWYK system, and my proposal is for users to start doing this every time they find a post where TWYS interferes with the lore of the characters.

Why would this be useful?

Currently, if you want to search for girly characters, characters that appear too feminine will be excluded from your search. However, e621's search engine is quite powerful, meaning if people tag descriptions properly, you can find these posts by searching ~girly ~desc:lore_girly, giving you any posts that either appear girly to TWYS or are canonically girly characters. Girly can be replaced with any tag you may wish.

How do I tag these?

Since standardization is the only way to make this type of thing would work, here are some baselines to follow:

• Start your lore tags with 'lore_'
• Currently, description searching has a bug that causes searching for multiple instances of words to act as if you were using ~, this is a good way to make sure people find posts that are tagged rather than descriptions that simply contain the word 'girly'.
• Only use tags already in the default tagging system.
• Inventing new tags would just make things even more complicated. If you want to suggest a new tag, make a forum post for it.
• Always_use_underscores_instead_of_spaces_for_tags
• The search engine will count multiple words as separate tags unless you use underscores, this goes for tags in descriptions too.

The issues

Now obviously, this is far from perfect. For starters, moderators don't actually monitor descriptions at the moment, so we would be on our own for this. Secondly, as mentioned above, searching for keywords in descriptions has an odd bug that only allows for one list of keywords at a time, so no searching for multiple tags. Thirdly, not everyone will know about this. However, tagging enough posts will get people curious about why those tags are there, and eventually more people will learn how to search for them.

The discussion

With the proposal out in the open, let's discuss it! Is there something I missed? Do you hate that I'm proposing an actual solution because it stops you from yelling at the mods? Do you think this won't help much? How much tagging should be done in the description? This is a place to have those conversations. All opinions are welcome. (just like, don't be a dick.)