Requested feature overview description.
Please provide a way to view the thumbnail of the first page of each pool on e621. This could be an option for e621.net/pool/index , or it could inhabit its own page.

Why would it be useful?
In my experience, trying to casually browse pools on e621 is a frustrating experience. You can either do a search with inpool:true, which returns a collection of thumbnails with no indication of which belong to the same pool; or you can go to e621.net/pool/index , where you receive a 1-entry-per-pool listing, but with no thumnails.

Imagine visiting https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=comic with no images. Still do-able, but not a very intuitive, at-a-glance experience. Less than optimal to be sure.

What part(s) of the site page(s) are affected?
It would affect 1 or more pages under the "Pools" portion of the site.

Well right now we have the cover_page tag you can use to search the post listing for these but it's pretty undertagged.

Since tags like front_page are already aliased to cover_page I don't see the harm in using cover_page as a catch all tag for the opening pages of pools, whether it is a proper cover like:

post #1019116

or just straight into the action like:

post #1035941

Or we could always change the alias from cover_page to 'first_page', then we could just add the cover tag too if it's a proper cover to boot?

^ first_page seems worse than front_page, because it implies a specific number. So you could easily have the page that shows a number 1 not being tagged first_page, and the page that comes before it -- the cover page -- being tagged first_page. An excellent strategy for confusing people.

DragonFox69 said:
Well right now we have the cover_page tag you can use to search the post listing for these but it's pretty undertagged.

Since tags like front_page are already aliased to cover_page I don't see the harm in using cover_page as a catch all tag for the opening pages of pools, whether it is a proper cover like:

post #1019116

or just straight into the action like:

post #1035941

Or we could always change the alias from cover_page to 'first_page', then we could just add the cover tag too if it's a proper cover to boot?

I didn't even know about this tag. Is there a way to automatically apply it to the first post in each pool?

Or maybe, there should be a way to search by index within a pool instead of trying to maintain a tag.

I tag cover_page on the first post of the pool regardless of whether or not it's a proper cover, but I agree there needs to be a way of searching for proper cover pages separately.

toboe said:
I didn't even know about this tag. Is there a way to automatically apply it to the first post in each pool?

I don't think so. If there were a way of automatically finding the first post of each pool, we wouldn't need to have this discussion in the first place. ;)

toboe said:
Or maybe, there should be a way to search by index within a pool instead of trying to maintain a tag.

This would be ideal, I think. Something like poolindex:0 or poolindex:first. This works around having to come up with a good name for the new tag.

savageorange said:
^ first_page seems worse than front_page, because it implies a specific number. So you could easily have the page that shows a number 1 not being tagged first_page, and the page that comes before it -- the cover page -- being tagged first_page. An excellent strategy for confusing people.

Hmm, very good point.

My thinking here is that finding one tag that is absolutely clear for this purpose would be pretty difficult, as each one has it's own pros and cons, and, like you said, the whole tag set could end up in danger of becoming extremely convoluted if the wrong one is used.

You think we should just stick to cover_page as a catch all (at least for now until someone can think of the right tag to use)?

^ cover_page for genuine cover pages, poolindex:first for 'the first page in X, whether it's a cover or not'

Contingent on admin feedback about the feasibility of poolindex:first.

^^
-1 on poolindex:0 , because non-programmers won't necessarily think of #0 as the first item (do we have any other metatags that use 0 in this way?). 1-based indexing is probably more generally digestible here.