I have an idea why they might have gotten removed. I would really like clarification though. Currently there are no tags for transforming into specific animals. The game lack the various humanoid animal tags. I assume the pages got removed because they were too similar to those species tags. (Even though the game itself implies that they aren't a particular species). I was going to add all the humanoid animal combinations at some point anyways.

The game post #1390726 that was using those tags specifically refer to these beings as <animal type> + morph in the text itself. The morph part is used to differentiate between those that are of actual creature descent and those that have grown parts using the various transformative substances throughout the world. That being said I think it was primarily used to distinguish humanoid figures that had grown parts, and the animal figures, but the game never specifies that the original species had to be humanoid.

They were removed because they are already covered by other tags. Very specific tags is discouraged, wiki or tagging, as it adds little and results with only a few.

Morphing is covered with transformation, and the way you named it particularly made it vulnerable to “anthro”, as you used species + “morph”, what anthro effectively is. If people want to search for specific species (let’s say pig) in a sequence of transformation, they should use (IE) \pig transformation, with further tags to specify.

Siral_Exan said:
They were removed because they are already covered by other tags. Very specific tags is discouraged, wiki or tagging, as it adds little and results with only a few.

Morphing is covered with transformation, and the way you named it particularly made it vulnerable to “anthro”, as you used species + “morph”, what anthro effectively is. If people want to search for specific species (let’s say pig) in a sequence of transformation, they should use (IE) \pig transformation, with further tags to specify.

Anthro: Human-like or contains human-like features.
Morph: To change the form or character: transform.

I think the tags kind of imply the opposite of anthro. It implies <species> like characteristics instead of human characteristics. I did not say that the base species has to be humanoid (although I did specify anthro which is kind of the same thing, but we don't implicate humanoid for everything tagged anthro!)

That being said I was only updating the tags for people who are familiar with the transformation terminology from the game. I sure don't like having to hunt for specific alternate tags to get results for other tags. "dog anthro tf (don't know this abbreviation and you have to type out the full tag)" for "dog-morph". Essentially you could just alias these tags to their associated humanoid animal forms and that would solve this terminology problem.

You'll still get anthro to feral tfs any other types of tfs if you don't use more specific tags. But be warned that more specific tags are obscure and undertagged.

Anthro is shorthand of anthropomorphism... kinda hard to declare your tag to not be alike when it’s species + morph, just like anthropo (two prefixes) + morph.

You even admit that it’s terminology from the game. That’s way too specific for official tags. You can’t be making tags when their sole purpose is to serve you or incredibly specific (to such point where the list is literally in single digits) cases.

You’re supposed to use more specific tags because they practically assure that you will find precisely what you are looking for if you use common intuition and/or the wiki. Since you are the only person finding value in them, enough to tag them at least, I think that speaks for how much value they have to everyone else. As tags, they were worthless because there is better, and you can be more precise with more results.

I wasn't the only one to tag them. Some of the tags already existed. I was slowly adding the missing morph tags and then adding a wiki article for the tags. It is easy to track the tags when they have a wiki page.

Anyways yes this is what anthropomorhic means if you translate the parts of the word. anthropo (relating to a human being) and morphic (specific shape or form) -> Having a human-like shape or form.

anthropomorph is an unusual variant of the word anthropomorphic. The morph suffix refers to (shape or form). If there was a word for dog-like characteristics you could replace anthropo with that word and get (related to a dog - doglike) + (shape form).

I suppose I was a bit too specific by directly relating it to the method of transformation.

I think people who are less familiar with scientific designations (and I suppose did not learn about anthros and ferals from the art they browse and the communities they interact with) would try to search things like dog-like or human-like or (dog (morph, hybrid, whatever other term that is synonymous with hybrid)) as terms rather than humanoid and dog_humanoid and since those don't exist here would need to go out finding the more common terms here. Of course they are more likely to just search dog and human without any descriptions, but obviously if they were looking for a hybrid of the two that will return a larger collection of results.

Well, I should be more specific: since you made their wikis, you pretty much designated yourself as sole tagged, and you showed such a trend in your tag history that you’d be (future tense) the only one tagging them.

Anthropomorph and *species*_morph cumulate to nearly the same thing on this site: an animal taking the guise of something they’re normally not (being poetic so it sounds less hostile). Yet, the reason they were deleted was specifically an observation made by another user that they were taking to the same meaning as anthro (I noticed otherwise but was too late to call that out).

However, the specific tag “pig_morph” is too specific for this site as there is a second reason a bit less apparent: if they catch on, then more will follow for each nameable animal. Fox_morph, fennec_morph, etc., it may have been better to use nonspecifics like canine_morph as those apply to broader amounts of posts. Canine itself can apply to dogs, wolves, foxes, and many others, and being a common tag it may be worth it to create a “canine_morph” style tag. I wouldn’t use that specific phrase, maybe canine_TF or similar, to specifically call out transformation.

But I don’t speak for the best intentions of the site, you can go pester the chat room and see if anyone agrees, or wait and see if others chime in here.

I was considering to have specific transformation tags. I was only making the existing tags more complete because there were missing tags. Also I think people are more likely to include a tag if there is a wiki page for that tag. They can do a tag search and because there is no wiki page, then they will assume it's just something you shouldn't tag.

If you have an unusual sex position and you see that in 10 years of the site no one else has tagged this sex position, then you have to think about if you yourself should create that tag or not. This is how unusual things become undertagged.

Also I find it kind of crazy that canine_human or dog_human or any variant of the kind doesn't alias to the humanoid variant. One who think that people would be much more likely to search for those tags than humanoid. Of course I could make alias suggestions, but doesn't seem like anyone accepts new tag suggestions anymore.

I'm also open to creating a species_transformation tag and wiki. But again since no one (actually 3) decided to tag it in 10 years of the site being up, it wont have any tags until I find time to go through and fill it with stuff.

TheVileOne said:
I'm also open to creating a species_transformation tag and wiki.

Likely not worth tagging, since nearly all transformation posts feature some kind of species transformation. It'd be far easier to tag the rare exceptions instead.
^{_{(Maybe call it something like 'intraspecies_transformation'?)[/sup]}}

Tags in question:

• dog_morph
• dragon_morph
• cat_morph, etc.

There is almost no interpretation of these tags that isn't covered by combinations of preexisting tags. I can only think of one exception: transformations involving humanoids. Those should be added to the transformation wiki's table.

Just because more than one user is tagging something does not make it correct. I don't like discouraging independent tagging projects, but most new tags should be discussed on the forums before they are added anywhere. In fact, I'm almost certain that we state this somewhere in our site policies. Seeing as I can't immediately find it, I'm going to make it more visible.

Genjar said:
Likely not worth tagging, since nearly all transformation posts feature some kind of species transformation. It'd be far easier to tag the rare exceptions instead.
^{_{(Maybe call it something like 'intraspecies_transformation'?)[/sup]}}

I'm not sure how I feel about TF being the goto place to tag species to species (human to whatever or interspecies TFs). There are over 1K gender transformations. I mean idk how many of those are TFTG images, but I assume that weeding out those that aren't would involve taking out gender_transformation tag, which would nuke all the TFTG images. Also this tag includes any kind of transformation at all including future types of transformations.

I don't understand the semantics of calling it intraspecies or just species. intraspecies, animal, and species should kind of be aliased together. Although idk if humans qualify as animals. Also I suppose feral_ to anthro would count as animal. nvrm that.. >.> ambiguous

Knotty_Curls said:
There is almost no interpretation of these tags that isn't covered by combinations of preexisting tags. I can only think of one exception: transformations involving humanoids. Those should be added to the transformation wiki's table.

They exist, but the only ones tagged so far are humanoid_to_anthro and human_to_humanoid. I haven't been able to find examples for the other types (such as anthro_to_humanoid). Added it to the wiki, but most of them lead to blank tags for now.

*_to_taur and taur_to_* also exist, but are even rarer. Possibly not worth adding, the table is already getting pretty wide.

Knotty_Curls said:
I don't like discouraging independent tagging projects, but most new tags should be discussed on the forums before they are added anywhere. In fact, I'm almost certain that we state this somewhere in our site policies. Seeing as I can't immediately find it, I'm going to make it more visible.

It's hidden in howto:comment, among other places. Better visibility would definitely help.

TheVileOne said:
I'm not sure how I feel about TF being the goto place to tag species to species (human to whatever or interspecies TFs). There are over 1K gender transformations.

Many of which also feature species transformation.

Though gender_transformation is definitely a tag that needs to be discussed at some point. Many of those are tagged by outside information, and don't feature any visible transformation. And many are just mistagged crossgender.

I don't understand the semantics of calling it intraspecies or just species. intraspecies, animal, and species should kind of be aliased together.

Intraspecies transformation = same species transformation, such as human to a different human.

I think I have mentioned the main reason. If you want to separate transformation from species to species (doesn't qualify as any tag) or any kind of <creature to another creature form>, it's practically not going to be possible. Gender_transformation will implicate transformation, and it is not like you can just hide anything that just defaults to transformation and you would need a lot of exceptions for the list of tags that do implicate transformation. Every tag needs to be placed in its own separate pocket so people can apply blacklists if they wish to do so.

I think it TG is a necessary tag if that discussion comment was about possibly removing it. Everything can be cleaned up to follow the TWYS policy.

Anyways I don't think this is on topic anymore. I have my answer to why it happened. I'm sorry I didn't bring it up in the forum before creating the tags.

TheVileOne said:
I think I have mentioned the main reason. If you want to separate transformation from species to species (doesn't qualify as any tag) or any kind of <creature to another creature form>, it's practically not going to be possible.

Not sure what you mean. The latter, form transformation, is covered by the aforementioned *_to_* tags.

Gender_transformation will implicate transformation, and it is not like you can just hide anything that just defaults to transformation and you would need a lot of exceptions for the list of tags that do implicate transformation. Every tag needs to be placed in its own separate pocket so people can apply blacklists if they wish to do so.

Negative searches are a thing. You can exclude gender transformations with transformation -gender_transformation.

And if we added a tag for the rare same species transformation, it'd be easy to also search for transformation -same_species_transformation to find species transformations. Much easier than trying to tag it the other way, species_transformation would be needed for something like 90 to 95% of transformation posts.

Well it is unfortunate that a long time ago it was decided that transformation would be the thing to tag for any kind of species to species combination. Even with these grouped tags in the transformation, I suppose there isn't a tag that would display all transformations that transform "to human", or "to_feral". Using *to_human seems to work even though using * makes the search take a lot longer.