Is there any difference between their usage?
Past discussion here, new thread opened to avoid 4-year necropost:
https://e621.net/forum/show/6518

I was going through my favorites today on order:tagcount_asc to help tag up some of the less well-linked of the images I enjoy. Something that I soon encountered was this image:
post #312173

Now, I substantially improved the tagging on it, but after added spread_legs I was curious whether I should also add presenting based upon the spreading wiki page. When I looked at the presenting wiki page, it said "For more subtle come-ons, inviting, seductive, or teasing may be more applicable." I looked at inviting's wiki page, and immediately felt I was staring down an ambiguous tag.

What's the deal here?

It seems like presenting was meant more for not-so-subtle shots with genitals exposed and inviting was meant to be more general. To me, it looks like the tags (definition-wise) almost run like this:

• Inviting: Someone laying on the bed in no particular pose beckoning another character to come have sex with them.
• Presenting: Crotch up in the air in a "fuck me now" pose.

Now, the wiki (last updated in 2012) says a little bit that might help clarify it for us a bit:

Or in other cases, a friendly beckoning for some other form of contact, be it a hug or a cuddle

...which is that sort of dual-definition thing that they tried on some tags before we realized that doesn't work very well for searching.

Now, I'm not against keeping the tag (or getting rid of it), but it may be something we want to consider. What we need to ask ourselves is not "how does this compare to presenting?" but "how do presenting, inviting, seductive, and teasing compare? Are they definable? Are they useful?"

I can't answer all of these, but here are my thoughts on this:

• Presenting is defined, widely tagged, and has several tiers of implications to support its use.
• Seductive is mostly visual, it's an attitude and a sort of pose. This should be easily definable.
• Teasing is a bit vague, but it could probably be used sexually or non-sexually. I suspect that it is probably best used in only certain circumstances such as comics and orgasm_denial, but that's just my guess. I don't think this really relates that well to the other tags to be honest.
• Inviting is pretty vague. Its use overlaps with both seductive and presenting (albeit in different ways). Trying to define it is tricky because people seem to use it (at least colloquially) as a "come hither" kind of word...which only seems to work (definition-wise) in certain circumstances.
• We might be able to expand it's use to include presenting, which frankly seems like it should be a sort of invitation by definition. However, I'm not sure of the point of doing that.

Looking at inviting -presenting (~1000 posts), what I see at a glance could probably fall mostly under presenting or seductive anyways. There are a only a handful of posts which look like they could use inviting but not apply to any of the other tags. Here's one example:

post #512269

I don't know what to do with the tag itself, but ignoring that, most of these should be tagged presenting or seductive anyways. I think if there's enough left with inviting -presenting -seductive it should either be:

• Kept, and presenting should be implied to it based on definition (as far as I can tell).
• Aliased to presenting (or similar), because we use that tag a lot more anyways, and it's probably the closest we've got.
• Aliased to invalid_tag or something else.

Note that these are just my thoughts, and I'm probably slightly biased to using the presenting tag.

I agree with parasprite, I feel like the inviting tag is a bit vague.

Personally I'm leaning toward just aliasing it to seductive, since I believe that is the idea, but I haven't gone through the posts, so perhaps there's enough pictures that are inviting without being seductive to make it a useful tag. I'm on the fence about it, if I had to choose I'd go that way.

parasprite said:

• Inviting: Someone laying on the bed in no particular pose beckoning another character to come have sex with them.

Yeah, that's how I've been using it, though not limited to bed. And I don't think we have any other tag (or do we?) for that type of posts, so I'm not for aliasing it away. Maybe it could be implicated to seductive, though..

Presenting should be limited to blatant ones. "Stick it in" types of posts, nothing ambiguous about it. If someone's just reclining on bed naked, it's not presenting.

The one that I'm most unsure about is teasing. It's tagged in various ways, and all seem to overlap with other tags. I've mostly been using for images such as this, though that doesn't quite match the wiki...:
post #549152

I've been using them as:

• presenting: A specific pose with the character on all fours, presenting their hindquarters

• inviting: When a character is acting seductive, usually beckoning another character or the viewer over, whether in a bed, a bathtub, or whatever