You're already familiar with what a tag suffix is for, right? One suffix I see very often is the "(mlp)" suffix, for the "My Little Pony" series. The problem with this particular one is that it's used on practically EVERY character from the series. This is highly redundant and very unnecessary, as many characters from the series have unique names that aren't used elswhere.

Characters like "Spike", "Daisy", and "Snails" need the suffix, since these names are also used with other characters/objects. Characters like "Twilight Sparkle", "Rainbow Dash", or "Pinkie Pie" don't need the suffix, since there aren't any other tags that have these names in them.

Likely started by bronies for their brony reasons (no offense), many sites have already aliased tags to the suffixed ones. I highly doubt anyone would care after this long, but I just wanted to throw an insignificant concern into the open.

The reasoning for keeping the _(mlp) suffix:

• Allows for wildcard searching *_(mlp) (another example of this being used is the *_(artwork) tags).
• Gives a distinction between official characters and original characters (even if a few tags are used inconsistently). This is a problem for sorting as it's not always immediately obvious whether a given character is canon or even related to mlp at all.
• There's a shitload of bronies on this site. The sheer amount of posts is a mess to keep track of even with good tagging. To put it in perspective, the my little pony tag has almost as many posts as the cum tag does (82000 vs. 86000).
• I suspect it might help other sites (or rather their crawlers) automate how they are aliased and implicated, but that is just my guess. I know at least a few sites pull the tags directly off of here (rule34 was one of them iirc).

I won't say whether these are good reasons or not, but it does actually serve a purpose.

Mostly the reason is that MLP tends to break rules, and then people throw a shit fit when we call them on it, and we give up and let them keep things the wrong way.

parasprite said:
The reasoning for keeping the _(mlp) suffix:

• Allows for wildcard searching *_(mlp) (another example of this being used is the *_(artwork) tags).
• Gives a distinction between official characters and original characters (even if a few tags are used inconsistently). This is a problem for sorting as it's not always immediately obvious whether a given character is canon or even related to mlp at all.
• There's a shitload of bronies on this site. The sheer amount of posts is a mess to keep track of even with good tagging. To put it in perspective, the my little pony tag has almost as many posts as the cum tag does (82000 vs. 86000).
• I suspect it might help other sites (or rather their crawlers) automate how they are aliased and implicated, but that is just my guess. I know at least a few sites pull the tags directly off of here (rule34 was one of them iirc).

I won't say whether these are good reasons or not, but it does actually serve a purpose.

I don't think there's a need for searching *_(mlp) when there's already the my_little_pony tag. We can also distinguish between original and official characters with the original_character tag.

Like parasprite said, the *_(mlp) suffix actually serves a purpose on this site because it's what distinguishes actually canon characters from the thousands of original characters who do not get to use the *_(mlp) suffix. So if someone wants to search only the canon characters, they can wildcard search *_(mlp). And it also helps the people who aren't fans be able to know when it needs to be tagged by original_character rules or official-character rules. Since FIM has a very large cast where even some of the more casual fans don't realise the difference between a lesser known canon character and a well known fanon character, I think it also saves a lot of headaches by not being subtle about it and clearly defining which ones are actually canon. I think the added clearness is worth a little extra suffix on a few character tags. And being more subtle about it hasn't functioned nearly as well when it comes to MLP tagging policies.

Kaeetayel said:
I don't think there's a need for searching *_(mlp) when there's already the my_little_pony tag.

You can't pull up a list of tags with my_little_pony. Look here to see what I mean.

Kaeetayel said:
We can also distinguish between original and official characters with the original_character tag.

I do agree with this. However, the original_character tag doesn't help very much when there are many characters present. This doesn't really matter for searching (unless you don't want to see them), but it helps a lot with tagging.

parasprite said:
You can't pull up a list of tags with my_little_pony. Look here to see what I mean.

Yes, he can.
In fact searching by implication to fim gives less OC who shouldn't be tagged with mlp suffix.

furrypickle said:
Like parasprite said, the *_(mlp) suffix actually serves a purpose on this site because it's what distinguishes actually canon characters from the thousands of original characters who do not get to use the *_(mlp) suffix.

There's fim tag for posts that contains at least one canon character/species/whatever. At least that's how it supposed to be used.

IMO mlp characters/places/species/whatever shouldn't have mlp suffixes by default. We're not tagging things like lucario_(pokemon), so I don't see a reason why we should make exception for mlp. Either remove suffixes from mlp or add them to everything else.

Also mlp suffix doesn't not really serve purpose to tell whether it's canon thing or not:

Firstly *_(mlp) search is really messy and contains a lot of:
- non canon OC
- tags that should be killed with fire like pinkiepool_(mlp)

Secondly some stupid fanom tags were accepted with mlp suffixes because bronies (pinkamena_(mlp) and few other stupid tags). They are not canon at all, yet still they have mlp suffix.

So basically - currently mlp suffix means nothing, so I agree with OP.

Granberia said:
Yes, he can.
In fact searching by implication to fim gives less OC who shouldn't be tagged with mlp suffix.

I forgot about searching for implications. Never mind then.

Granberia said:
IMO mlp characters/places/species/whatever shouldn't have mlp suffixes by default. We're not tagging things like lucario_(pokemon), so I don't see a reason why we should make exception for mlp. Either remove suffixes from mlp or add them to everything else.

I really whouldn't mind that as long as it served a purpose. I'm not sure that either really do though. I've generally lost track of pokemon (I last owned the cards around 150) and gave up on trying to tag them.

Though OC is much more of an issue with MLP than it is with pokemon. Edit: Also crossovers, not that it matters really.

Granberia said:
Firstly *_(mlp) search is really messy and contains a lot of:
- non canon OC

Agree 100% here. It's a project I've been meaning to get on but haven't yet.

Granberia said:
- tags that should be killed with fire like pinkiepool_(mlp)

• Last post over a year ago
• There's only 8

Agreed and retagged character:pinkiepool.

Granberia said:
Secondly some stupid fanom tags were accepted with mlp suffixes because bronies (pinkamena_(mlp) and few other stupid tags). They are not canon at all, yet still they have mlp suffix.

I don't see why this is such a recurrent topic. Not that I agree with it having the _(mlp) suffix, I just don't see why anybody cares that it does or doesn't. It's really weird to me.

Granberia said:
So basically - currently mlp suffix means nothing, so I agree with OP.

No, it means something. Just not very much.

I suspect it got started as a trend and just became enough of a habit that it got applied to everything. That coupled with a lot of people having a revulsion to OC's and trying to ostracize them...which is probably why a few characters (milky_way_(mlp)) were sort of accepted into psuedo-canon, but most weren't.

I'm somewhat for pulling the tag if I didn't make that obvious...I probably didn't.

parasprite said:
Agreed and retagged character:pinkiepool.

To be honest when I said that it should be killed with fire I meant it. I hope you don't mind that, because I was lazy, I removed it after you made effort to rename it. Sorry.

Granberia said:
To be honest when I said that it should be killed with fire I meant it. I hope you don't mind that, because I was lazy, I removed it after you made effort to rename it. Sorry.

Be my guest.