I'm not new to E621; been lurking for years, but I've recently become a registered user to try and keep track of any odd uploads of my characters. However, I wanted to slowly start and try uploading to the site, and so I uploaded an image, tagged it, and was surprised to find out that my character's names were listed as regular tags (not the usual green text).

Is there a way to do that without adding the extra "_(character)" at the end of their names? Any help would be appreciated!

Add character: to the tag you want to make into a character, then submit the post or edits. It’ll change the tag type to character, and you won’t have to use the suffix or use character: afterwards.

Thank you so much!

The reason the "_(character)" suffix is used (and it's a manual addition, not something automatically appended by the server) is to differentiate between the artist and their furry persona, or when the character's name is also a word used for other purposes as well (for a hypothetical example off the top of my head, a character named "Rose" that doesn't have a last name to make it unique from the flower).

(There may be other reasons, but that's all I can think of as of this post.)