Requested feature overview description.

We could need the ability to "lock" the tags on any given post, in order to prevent malicious tag edits.
The simple solution to prevent any form of tag edit to a locked post, but what would be more useful would be an option to force specific tags to always be on a post, and to prevent specific tags from being added to a post.

Why would it be useful?

Prevention of tag wars. When an admin rules a tag needs to be on a submission, or that a tag needs not be on a submission then locking the tags would prevent users from removing the tag without an admin realizing it.

What part(s) of the site page(s) are affected?

All submission pages.

User Level(s)

Mod+ for specific locked tags. Priv+ for the option when all tags edits are prevented.

+1. I wholeheartedly agree with this. And not just because of the tagging war that recently happened, but all of the tagging disputes I've seen or been in, in general.

However, can you explain what the priv+ part means?

So Priv+ will have like a Lock Tags check box similar to the Lock Rating check box and Mod+ will have like a separate field they can enter permanent tags and -tags into?

Siral_Eurgh-xan said:
+1. I wholeheartedly agree with this. And not just because of the tagging war that recently happened, but all of the tagging disputes I've seen or been in, in general.

However, can you explain what the priv+ part means?

Probably stands for Privaledged members get to edit when an image is otherwise "locked" as a whole

At some point in the past I proposed an admin_ruling tag, that would indicate that a post has had an admin make a decision regarding the tags of an image. It was shot down, I think, for reasons I don't remember, except that I didn't agree with them at the time.

However, I think it's worth bringing up again, because it would help, somewhat, in these cases.

• It is a way to use our current system to flag images which have been in a tag war, and thus a way to find such images easily to see if they've been changed.
• It is an indicator to users to check the comments before making a change to the tags (rather than potentially punishing users for not reading comments - which is something that is not required).
• It adds an extra layer of protection against vandalism, being that a vandal might not think to remove that tag (being not directly related to the changes they're trying to make), and would also add extra evidence of intentional vandalism if it's removed.

I don't really have any objection to tag-locking, but I think this is an option to consider as well, with the added advantage of not requiring any new code or what have you.

Since nothing is ever perfectly tagged, I suspect that a full lock would result in a lot of extraneous comments and dmails about tags that are either missing or mistagged.

I'd expect to get a lot of dmails akin to "post #4923842 is missing the 4_toes tag, add it".

Genjar said:
Since nothing is ever perfectly tagged, I suspect that a full lock would result in a lot of extraneous comments and dmails about tags that are either missing or mistagged.

I'd expect to get a lot of dmails akin to "post #4923842 is missing the 4_toes tag, add it".

+1 for mentioning that, because there is no doubt that this will happen. I am for locking individual tags as well, because you can simply lock tags in a way to fit the discussion that takes place on the post. There's not much of a point in locking tags that have nothing to do with a debate, and if there happen to be inapplicable tags, they cannot get removed by regular users.

Take for example a debate about male vs ambiguous_gender. If male ends up as the most appropriate tag, someone in charge can change it to the right tag and then lock it that way.

However, now that I mentioned that, it would perhaps help if there was a possibility of preventing certain tags to be added, such as the in this scenario incorrect ambiguous_gender. Then again, users might try to add something that looks like it just to be annoying, such as ambigous_gender, although that probably doesn't play a very big role.

There are many pros and cons that need to be taken into consideration with this one.

Siral_Eurgh-xan said:
However, can you explain what the priv+ part means?

Privileged and above, because everything someone at priv done can be done by anyone with a higher account level.

DragonFox69 said:
So Priv+ will have like a Lock Tags check box similar to the Lock Rating check box and Mod+ will have like a separate field they can enter permanent tags and -tags into?

No, either or. Either we have a checkbox for priv and above that allows the locking of all tags, or we have a new field for mod and above that allows specific tags to be locked on or off.
Having both makes very little sense.

Clawdragons said:

At some point in the past I proposed an admin_ruling tag, that would indicate that a post has had an admin make a decision regarding the tags of an image. It was shot down, I think, for reasons I don't remember, except that I didn't agree with them at the time.

However, I think it's worth bringing up again, because it would help, somewhat, in these cases.

• It is a way to use our current system to flag images which have been in a tag war, and thus a way to find such images easily to see if they've been changed.
• It is an indicator to users to check the comments before making a change to the tags (rather than potentially punishing users for not reading comments - which is something that is not required).
• It adds an extra layer of protection against vandalism, being that a vandal might not think to remove that tag (being not directly related to the changes they're trying to make), and would also add extra evidence of intentional vandalism if it's removed.

I don't really have any objection to tag-locking, but I think this is an option to consider as well, with the added advantage of not requiring any new code or what have you.

That sounds like a bad idea. People see the tag but won't bother checking if it has been added by an admin or not. Admins have to continually check if it has been added by non-admins or has been tampered with otherwise.
This gets worse because we can't search the tag history for anything that happened to a specific tag, so if something got removed and we don't remember the specific post we have no chance of finding it.

NotMeNotYou said:
No, either or. Either we have a checkbox for priv and above that allows the locking of all tags, or we have a new field for mod and above that allows specific tags to be locked on or off.
Having both makes very little sense.

Ahh, I get it now.

+1 to the latter (I think the former would be very likely to cause the problem pointed out by Genjar).

NotMeNotYou said:
Privileged and above, because everything someone at priv done can be done by anyone with a higher account level.

I'll rephrase myself: what will they be able to do? Will they be able to lock up to X tags, or specific types of tags? Obviously, an admin can overrule, but will someone be able to find out which privileged locked a tag? What are the limits in place for them, compared to an admin.

Siral_Eurgh-xan said:
I'll rephrase myself: what will they be able to do? Will they be able to lock up to X tags, or specific types of tags? Obviously, an admin can overrule, but will someone be able to find out which privileged locked a tag? What are the limits in place for them, compared to an admin.

All tags. Same function of the tag locking for all level that have access to it. I guess it makes a note in the mod actions or tag history.
As I replied to Dragonfox69, that is for the option where only all tag edits can be prevented from any submission.

Tagging jobs can always be improved, even when they're done by a mod. Nothing good can come from preventing that by completely locking a post's tags down.

I have no problem with a mod+ ability to lock specific tags on or off.

Another feature that might be helpful would be to have an "admin notes" field, used to record rulings on tag wars and the like, that's displayed prominently above the tag edit form. That way, the rationale behind a ruling would be obvious.

Maxpizzle said:
Another feature that might be helpful would be to have an "admin notes" field, used to record rulings on tag wars and the like, that's displayed prominently above the tag edit form. That way, the rationale behind a ruling would be obvious.

Hidden comments work pretty well for that.

Hudson said:
Hidden comments work pretty well for that.

I'm confident Maxpizzle meant that it'd be visible to everybody, including normal users, not just the admins.

I know wikipedia does something similar to this, but also has an expiration date, which may be a useful addition to this feature.
Also considering there is note lock, rating lock, and status lock, assuming that ouroborus implemented that(Not sure if Ouroborus is a heavily modified fork of Danbooru or a recode), I don't see why this would be a problem to implement.

If you mean whole tags, it'd be relatively simple, just a new boolean value in the database. Singular tags on the other hand, probably need a whole new table for that, plus a method for locking tags(Maybe lock:tag_name? Assuming it won't mess up categorized tags).

Anyway, +1 from me, if people won't stop being babies, take away their rattles.

NotMeNotYou said:
I'm confident Maxpizzle meant that it'd be visible to everybody, including normal users, not just the admins.

Yes, this is what I meant.

I'm for this with some added guidelines for when locking is appropriate if it is Priv+.

Usually images undergoing tag-wars tend to be rather well tagged overall so "missing tag" issues should be minimal if used in those cases. However, I worry about people preemptively locking tags to avoid issues without first ensuring thorough tagging in place.

Would also need to make sure that alias/implications could still affect locked tags normally.

NotMeNotYou said:
That sounds like a bad idea. People see the tag but won't bother checking if it has been added by an admin or not.

The point of the tag is that it warns you to look in the comments and see what tag the admins decided on. I genuinely don't understand your objection here. It doesn't actually matter who added it, what matters is that a decision was made in the comments, and this tag is just a warning for users to check them.

Admins have to continually check if it has been added by non-admins or has been tampered with otherwise.

There is no point in a user adding it to a post that doesn't have an admin's decision in the comments. It would relate to nothing, and would be removed pretty quickly by any user who happened to notice that there wasn't such a decision in the comments.

This gets worse because we can't search the tag history for anything that happened to a specific tag, so if something got removed and we don't remember the specific post we have no chance of finding it.

Again, I'm not sure your objection here. The current system has that problem. This is designed to make it easier to find such posts. Sure, it won't work 100% of the time, but in those times when it fails to work, you are no worse off than you are in the current system.

I really don't understand your objections here. It feels like maybe you think I'm proposing this tag as a replacement to a decision stated in the comments, rather than in addition to such?

Wodahseht said:
Usually images undergoing tag-wars tend to be rather well tagged overall so "missing tag" issues should be minimal if used in those cases.

Not so. The whole tag system is substantially different from how it was two years ago, and it will keep evolving. There's always new tags, and changes to how we tag something. New disambiguations, and so on.

It would also hamper tag scripting. The eight tag search limit is problematic enough already, and having to fit in tagslocked:false into my project searches would make it much worse.

Clawdragons said:
I really don't understand your objections here. It feels like maybe you think I'm proposing this tag as a replacement to a decision stated in the comments, rather than in addition to such?

A tag like that can only work without additional drama when backed and curated by the administration, everything else invites drama. You give way too much credit to the average user's willingness to double check anything.

Your idea sounds good on paper, but in reality it will be abused within the same week.

Genjar said:
Not so. The whole tag system is substantially different from how it was two years ago, and it will keep evolving. There's always new tags, and changes to how we tag something. New disambiguations, and so on.

I know there will be issues. *Any* sort of tag-lock has the potential of those issues. Just saying that limiting where/when it is used will keep the occurrence of those issues to a minimum.

Siral_Exan said:
+1. I wholeheartedly agree with this. And not just because of the tagging war that recently happened

Did I miss out on some juicy drama? Dang

NotMeNotYou said:
A tag like that can only work without additional drama when backed and curated by the administration, everything else invites drama. You give way too much credit to the average user's willingness to double check anything.

Your idea sounds good on paper, but in reality it will be abused within the same week.

But again I'm not understanding what sort of abuse you think is going to happen.

People put it on images that it's not appropriate on? Easy fix to clean up, and clear tagging vandalism, so the users get a slap. People remove it from images it belongs on? That's a bit harder to fix, but even so, we're no worse off than we started.

And, giving too much credit to users to double check things? I'm the one advocating giving them an extra warning, because I don't expect them to check things. From my perspective, it feels as though you're the one giving too much credit, expecting users to check the comments of contentious images with no warning whatsoever.

Either way, admins are making rulings in the comments. Either way, users will get slapped for making unauthorized changes to the images tags. Either way, those images will require some sort of monitoring. This just makes it easier to notice, find, and monitor those cases.

Fenrick said:
Did I miss out on some juicy drama? Dang

I don't know if you are joking, my sarcasm detector is slightly busted. But, if you aren't, this , pretty much. The posts in question are the big tag war.

Siral_Eurgh-xan said:
I don't know if you are joking, my sarcasm detector is slightly busted. But, if you aren't, this , pretty much. The posts in question are the big tag war.

Frankly, that's the topic, to which that link is, hilights other problem, which relevant to this locking issue. Let say there is artist private character, that might be in current situation not obviously be female. Or male. Or herm. And tagged wrongly. SOme trans tags, like cuntboy or dickgirl may be considered insulting, especially in case of such mistagging. People tag differently.On one hand, the site's idea wa that tags are crowdsourced. On other hand artist got right to controlhow art is presented. e621 doesn't provide the latter, except declaring it DNP. Frankly, quite a few good, famous artist declared themselves DNP here for that EXACT reason, because they can't control it. I and my mate ran into that issue myself, when my mate was tagged wrongly, and we seriously considered to blacklist e621: in most cases a herm would look as dickgirl, because it's rarely possible to show both genitalias, and mate utterly hates that term used on e621 as tag.

Locking tags might be useful, if artist would be able request that from the administration, best way to do that to have some web form for quick request creation (that would require to have account of course, associated with artist).

Lock would be useful to designate author of picture , gender and characters.

Ofc, that _may_ break tag-what-you-see policy, but ALL people see things differently, for starters, so that policy was tottering from the beginning, and a number of people would argue that the very idea of locking tags breaks it too.

Tbh, I do not envy e621's staff.. they are in position of beurecracy apparatus in democratic country. I.e.,there are declared freedoms, while their function is to restrict those freedoms, which generates regulations and rules, that become cumbersome over time and are inflexible. Apparatus gets bashed from two different camps, as a result. Whole tag implication thing is the example.

I only want people to not wrongly tag my submissions, and then get punished for trying to correct it; that's my greatest fear because yes, people have erroneously tagged a certain blacklisted tag on more than just a few occasions.

Swiftkill said:

Frankly, that's the topic, to which that link is, hilights other problem, which relevant to this locking issue. Let say there is artist private character, that might be in current situation not obviously be female. Or male. Or herm. And tagged wrongly. SOme trans tags, like cuntboy or dickgirl may be considered insulting, especially in case of such mistagging. People tag differently.On one hand, the site's idea wa that tags are crowdsourced. On other hand artist got right to controlhow art is presented. e621 doesn't provide the latter, except declaring it DNP. Frankly, quite a few good, famous artist declared themselves DNP here for that EXACT reason, because they can't control it. I and my mate ran into that issue myself, when my mate was tagged wrongly, and we seriously considered to blacklist e621: in most cases a herm would look as dickgirl, because it's rarely possible to show both genitalias, and mate utterly hates that term used on e621 as tag.

Locking tags might be useful, if artist would be able request that from the administration, best way to do that to have some web form for quick request creation (that would require to have account of course, associated with artist).

Lock would be useful to designate author of picture , gender and characters.

Ofc, that _may_ break tag-what-you-see policy, but ALL people see things differently, for starters, so that policy was tottering from the beginning, and a number of people would argue that the very idea of locking tags breaks it too.

Tbh, I do not envy e621's staff.. they are in position of beurecracy apparatus in democratic country. I.e.,there are declared freedoms, while their function is to restrict those freedoms, which generates regulations and rules, that become cumbersome over time and are inflexible. Apparatus gets bashed from two different camps, as a result. Whole tag implication thing is the example.

This idea wasn't intended to stray from the TWYS policy. In fact, this would help users realize that this really is the way we tag on e621.

That some artists request a DNP status because they don't like the tagging policy on e621 is a shame, but this system is the best we have right now and I doubt it will get replaced or (majorly) altered, even if it costs us art.

Hudson said:
This idea wasn't intended to stray from the TWYS policy. In fact, this would help users realize that this really is the way we tag on e621.

That some artists request a DNP status because they don't like the tagging policy on e621 is a shame, but this system is the best we have right now and I doubt it will get replaced or (majorly) altered, even if it costs us art.

As I said, "what you see" is subjective by nature, and while this function isn';t indtended to stray from it, people would claim that is, because they see what admin doesn't. "What you see" depends on personal expierence and open-midedness. I saw people tagging pictures gay when they see femenine male. Or tagging female lizard as cuntboy, because no boobs :P And they honestly belive that's what they see and that's a right thing.THAT kind of behaviour might be adressed by proposed function.

The tagging system itself is excellent, it's people that aren't ;P

fox_whisper85 said:
I only want people to not wrongly tag my submissions, and then get punished for trying to correct it; that's my greatest fear because yes, people have erroneously tagged a certain blacklisted tag on more than just a few occasions.

Are you poninnahka from DA?

Maybe for specific tags. A full lockdown kind of goes against the whole "anyone can fix tags" thing of the site

This is starting to feel like 5 years ago, and that is not a good thing . . .

CamKitty said:
Maybe for specific tags. A full lockdown kind of goes against the whole "anyone can fix tags" thing of the site

This is starting to feel like 5 years ago, and that is not a good thing . . .

You mean 7 years ago :P
And noone want to lock ALL tags, I think.

Swiftkill said:
Are you poninnahka from DA?

Nope, not him.

Swiftkill said:
You mean 7 years ago :P
And noone want to lock ALL tags, I think.

What happened 7 years ago exactly?

Just out of curiosity.

A big issue here that could fix a lot of tagging arguments here is just changing the damn offending tags like dgirl and cboy which seem to be the number one thing that keep getting brought up time and time again for good reason.

People clearly don't like the terms themselves. Get rid of the offending issue and suddenly less arguments.

People are always gonna argue over it but ffs it's one less problem to deal with.

I really gotta finish compiling a good case for this issue.

Otherwise. Locking tags is actually better than just allowing tag wars to continue and banning people as a result.

So I agree with this with one caveat.
Have a report or request system to deal with people who believe a tag should be changed and have a clear strongly cased argument as to why it should be. Then have the administration discuss it and deal with it as need be.

GDelscribe said:
A big issue here that could fix a lot of tagging arguments here is just changing the damn offending tags like dgirl and cboy which seem to be the number one thing that keep getting brought up time and time again for good reason.

I don't personally recall a tag war over "offensiveness of a label," just over whether an unseen penis/vagina should be accounted for even though you can't tell from picture it is there. Or whether lore of a species overrules usual physical sexual characteristics for categorizing. So I don't see why you are trying to bring your crusade here instead of leaving it in the thread already made for it.

---

That aside, perhaps instead of locking individual tags or all tags it'd be possible to set up to lock a tag category (artist/copyright/species). Since sex/gender seems common fight-point, perhaps a category for those tags could be created that could then be locked specifically while still allowing other tag edits to continue unhindered.

This category could also potentially contain pairing tags: male/male, anthro_on_feral, etc.

Not thinking of any decent titles for such a category yet though. Nothing I come up with has been short, clear, and distinct enough to avoid confusion.

I don't think there's ever been a tag war over a particular tag not being liked. Tag wars tend to erupt from one person tagging what they see, and another person re-tagging what they know. Chakats tended to set off some conflicts since everyone "knows" they are herms, but you can't often tell from the picture, so they get tagged female. Another big point of contention are girly males. You or I might know the character is male, but if it looks overwhelmingly female, it gets tagged female.

That's why tag locking would be effective, an admin could make a ruling and lock the tag, denying people something to argue over.

Wodahseht said:
I don't personally recall a tag war over "offensiveness of a label," just over whether an unseen penis/vagina should be accounted for even though you can't tell from picture it is there. Or whether lore of a species overrules usual physical sexual characteristics for categorizing. So I don't see why you are trying to bring your crusade here instead of leaving it in the thread already made for it.

Actually Swiftkill was the one who brought it up in the first place. And this tagging war came up because of the argument in general that this character shouldn't be tagged with cboy because they are female. Because a lot of people don't like the label. Plain and simple.

Also, the issue arises also from the fact that there are absolutely no clear true guidelines on what is one or the other. We have a list of guidelines and rules that explain how the tags are meant to work but sometimes they just sorta get ignored because they're really subjective anyway.

So it drops down to the admins to decide but you still have people displeased with the tags so they change them. And then get in trouble.

This feature is to lock people out from tagging it with something else when the admins have made their decision. It then opens up for people to have discussions on it etc without causing an IMMEDIATE headache and need for tag policing from admins or mods.

GDelscribe said:
Actually Swiftkill was the one who brought it up in the first place. And this tagging war came up because of the argument in general that this character shouldn't be tagged with cboy because they are female. Because a lot of people don't like the label. Plain and simple.

That's not an argument of not liking the tag itself, but not agreeing that the tag is the right one for the character.

GDelscribe said:
Also, the issue arises also from the fact that there are absolutely no clear true guidelines on what is one or the other. We have a list of guidelines and rules that explain how the tags are meant to work but sometimes they just sorta get ignored because they're really subjective anyway.

Not clear? From wiki:

• Gender
• ambiguous_gender
• male
• female
• intersex
• cuntboy - Male body, but with a pussy instead of a penis.
• dickgirl - Female body, but with a penis instead of a pussy.
• herm - Female's body, with both a pussy and a penis.
• maleherm - Male's body, with both a pussy and a penis.

The only subjectiveness is what I mentioned before about whether a specie's traits in lore should override what is generally considered to be a male body vs a female body. (And for some, what constitutes a male vs female body type.)

---

But again, this thread is just for discussing tag-locks as a potential feature. Appropriateness of specific terms or confusion of in-place guidelines should really remain in their own threads.

I said my piece and am done here unless I think of something more that's worthwhile on original topic or my previous suggestions.

Wodahseht said:

Not clear? From wiki:

The "not clear" was in specific reference to the post discussion of what constitutes a "flat chested female" and what constitutes CBoy, its not clear.

But anyway youre right that's getting off topic.

GDelscribe said:
Actually Swiftkill was the one who brought it up in the first place. And this tagging war came up because of the argument in general that this character shouldn't be tagged with cboy because they are female.

That's true but you're the one on brought it back again on this page. Like it was the main talikng point when it isn't.

GDelscribe said:
Because a lot of people don't like the label.

People disagree with it being tagged as cuntboy instead of female. Not because cuntboy is "offensive", but because previous pages say female, so this one should have female tag too. ...

GDelscribe said:
A big issue here that could fix a lot of tagging arguments here is just changing the damn offending tags like dgirl and cboy which seem to be the number one thing that keep getting brought up time and time again for good reason.
People clearly don't like the terms themselves. Get rid of the offending issue and suddenly less arguments.

... Wrong. As I said, people are arguing about character gender, not the tags themself. Even if the tags were to change to something "less offensive", such as trans_male/trans_female, people would get mad that post contains incorrect tag. For example:
post #965929 (tagged as trans_male (cuntboy) instead of female, even though artist themself said it's female)
post #266211 (tagged as trans_female/male? (dickgirl) instead of herm, even though previous/next page shows her as herm)
post #520268 (tagged as ambiguous gender instead of male, even though character over said it's male)
and many more...

Last time I pointed this out in that other thread someone was "this thread isn't about misgendering, why are bringing up here?" and you were like "yea, what he said". So, why are you bringing up it here when we are talking about locking tags (to avoid breaking TWYS rule) and not about them being "offensive"?

Not every issue revolves around these two tags.

---

Also, what about dual tagging system TWYS + TWYK? Having TWYS as primary one whereas TWYK would be secondary. TWYK would be used only when artist/character owner confirm character name/gender/etc... Search engine could be changed to search TWYS tags only, TWYS+TWYK tags or TWYK tags. Above TWYS tags would be "confirmed" tags given by artits/char owners. This would allow users to search posts that contains characters tagged under TWYS (does looks like female = it's female) and TWYK (regadless of the perespective, we know that character is defined as 'this gender') Hovewer, there would be a little problem. TWYS tags would be still available, which some people might not like. i.e. above it says it's confirmed female but bellow it says something else such as ambiguous, intersex....
Again "misgendering" them.