Description:
A "whitelist" would be a list of tags you add to your settings, similar to a blacklist, that ensures you see posts with certain tags, adding a unique colored border on the thumbnails of whitelisted images, and a dropdown menu on the side that lets you see which whitelisted tags are on the page, and the ability to hide posts EXCEPT for whitelisted ones, exactly like the blacklist.

It would be useful because:
Thumbnails are small. It's often very difficult to see the contents of an image from the thumbnail alone. With the absolutely huge amount of images that are constantly being added, daily users often miss posts they would otherwise want to see because they cannot tell the artist, characters, fetish, etc., from the thumbnail alone, and pass it by.

For example, say I have a thing for size difference, h0rs3 animations, and male foxes, so long as they aren't girly. I could add the following to my whitelist:

size_difference
h0rs3 animated
male fox -girly

The result would be that when I make any search, the posts with tags I know I like will be highlighted with a colored (probably white) border. All posts with the size_difference tag will be easy to see. Any h0rs3 animation is a breeze to tell apart from the other ambiguous "Flash" thumbnails. And every post that features a male and a fox, but doesn't have the "girly" tag, would have that beautiful border that lets me know it has tags I want to see.

The obvious argument against this feature would be that people can simply make a search for specific tags. Yes, we can do that. But it would be very time-consuming to make separate searches for every single tag someone enjoys. A whitelist would allow people to say ahead of time "I like posts with these tags, I want to see them", and get to the images they prefer more quickly, especially when making very general searches.

This would affect:
-The settings page, where a whitelist box would have to be added and implemented.
-The search system, which would have to add colored borders around posts with specific tags on a per-user basis
-The tags list, where a new drop down menu would need to be added, similar to the blacklist dropdown, for users to select items on their whitelist to show.

Or fix tag subscriptions

Lance_Armstrong said:
Or fix tag subscriptions

... which is still limited to privileged+

actually i really like this. it would not only be useful for regular users, but it could also be used as tool for tagging porject stuff. for example images are often missing character count tags and i could put there -solo -duo -group -zero_pictured and see instantly what images are missing them when i skim through first few pages

I, for one, actually like this idea. Perhaps implimenting this, along with something like this, would make for an awesome way for users to interactively use the website.

Siral_Exan said:
... which is still limited to privileged+

The limitation could be dropped if performance was overhauled.

If I implemented this for myself, I would probably make it group posts rather than having a toggle.
That is, the page returns a bunch of results, then they are grouped into whitelisted (shown first) and non-whitelisted; order would otherwise be preserved (eg. if you asked for order:score, then sorting inside those two groups would naturally be by score.).
I think that would be a nice compromise that avoids adding more UI elements, and could also perhaps avoid the need for separate coloring of thumb borders.

EDIT: although coloring of thumb borders might be nice for in pools or when someone posts a thumb in a forum thread.

You could just search all those tags at once. I don't feel like this feature would be useful.

Tag subscriptions, instead, should be made available to all users. But apparently they need to be fixed otherwise the site would suffer from bad performance.

TheKatYouNeverWanted said:
You could just search all those tags at once. I don't feel like this feature would be useful.

Tag subscriptions, instead, should be made available to all users. But apparently they need to be fixed otherwise the site would suffer from bad performance.

There is also a tag limit and the inability to make OR statements; it would be impossible for someone to search all of their preferred tags at once, and even if it were possible, they would most likely return no images because there is no post that has every single combination of tags they want to see.

A lot of people, myself included, make very general searches, like "male -female" or "-m/m", in order to see all content of their preferred orientation. If people were looking for something specifically, they may do so, but this feature would mostly impact those who want to see the majority of what's posted, but don't want to click on the post to make sure it has tags they want to see.

As stated above, there's also the added utility of being able to create whitelist elements that highlight improperly tagged posts. A helpful community member could add a series of negative whitelist items that all posts should have at least one of, and when a posts has none of them, it gets highlighted.

Aejann said:
There is also a tag limit and the inability to make OR statements; it would be impossible for someone to search all of their preferred tags at once, and even if it were possible, they would most likely return no images because there is no post that has every single combination of tags they want to see.

A lot of people, myself included, make very general searches, like "male -female" or "-m/m", in order to see all content of their preferred orientation. If people were looking for something specifically, they may do so, but this feature would mostly impact those who want to see the majority of what's posted, but don't want to click on the post to make sure it has tags they want to see.

As stated above, there's also the added utility of being able to create whitelist elements that highlight improperly tagged posts. A helpful community member could add a series of negative whitelist items that all posts should have at least one of, and when a posts has none of them, it gets highlighted.

We have something resembling or statements implemented in the blacklist already: putting an entry in a different line. I don't see how different it could be from how the blacklist uses what are essentially or statements.

I still think this would be a good idea though. It would allow someone to see what they prefer when it's not unwanted enough for them to blacklist it.

If you used both the blacklist and whitelist, you could have it so even things that are allowed according to the whitelist are filtered out if they are on the blacklist.

I know this is an old thread but nobody else has said it yet: there is no need for a whitelist because (to my knowledge) typing "-female" into the blacklist should work the same as typing "female" into a whitelist

FurryMcFuzzball said:
I know this is an old thread but nobody else has said it yet: there is no need for a whitelist because (to my knowledge) typing "-female" into the blacklist should work the same as typing "female" into a whitelist

no it doesnt work like this. for example if i have
-female
breasts
in my blacklist, it still hides every post with the tag "breasts" even despite of the -female in the blacklist. i would have to put
breasts -female
instead. but excluding the one specific tag from every single blacklisted thing becomes ridiculous when you have for example 50 things in your blacklist.
whitelist is meant to highlight the whitelisted things with a special border and show the whitelisted content even if they fall under tags listed in blacklist.

I still say instead of whitelists or blacklists you should have better, more mature users who don't need either, but eh that's just me.

FibS said:
I still say instead of whitelists or blacklists you should have better, more mature users who don't need either, but eh that's just me.

Why would you think people do not need a blacklist?

The reason this isn't added is because it's a super easy way to abuse the tag limit.

You can only search 5 tags at the moment. So say I search these 5:

House, bed, sex, male, female,

With a whitelist, I can do this:

Whitelist becomes:

house, bed, sex, male, female,

Regular tag search becomes:

anal_beads, condoms, forced, skirt, panties

I can now search twice the tags or more because they added a whitelist feature.

If you had a whitelist that only allowed you to add a single tag. That might work better and be more difficult to abuse.

Cynosure said:
The reason this isn't added is because it's a super easy way to abuse the tag limit.

You can only search 5 tags at the moment. So say I search these 5:

House, bed, sex, male, female,

With a whitelist, I can do this:

Whitelist becomes:

house, bed, sex, male, female,

Regular tag search becomes:

anal_beads, condoms, forced, skirt, panties

I can now search twice the tags or more because they added a whitelist feature.

If you had a whitelist that only allowed you to add a single tag. That might work better and be more difficult to abuse.

i dont really see that as any kind of issue. the search limits are not there just to limit people for shit and giggles. its there to limit server strain.
blacklist and it's opposite whitelist do not put same kind of strain on the servers as searching tags.