In the past few days e621 has see an unusually high influx of (in my opinion) very poorly made and even grotesque images such as post #1386257 post #1386271 post #1385506 and many more. Now if I'm not mistaken, e621 is supposed to have a quality control feature meant to keep posts such as these to a minimum. so my question is this: if a post is completely non appealing in every way and is clearly going to get nothing but downvotes then why don't the admins simply remove them to keep up quality standards?

Autumn-Ferret said:
post #1386271 post #1385506

These haven't been approved yet and will likely be deleted.

Autumn-Ferret said:
if a post is completely non appealing in every way and is clearly going to get nothing but downvotes then why don't the admins simply remove them to keep up quality standards?

It depends on what you mean by "non appealing". Gore, scat and political content get downvoted a lot but there's no rules against uploading those. Poorly drawn stuff usually gets deleted.

Autumn-Ferret said:
In the past few days e621 has see an unusually high influx of (in my opinion) very poorly made and even grotesque images such as post #1386257 post #1386271 post #1385506 and many more. Now if I'm not mistaken, e621 is supposed to have a quality control feature meant to keep posts such as these to a minimum. so my question is this: if a post is completely non appealing in every way and is clearly going to get nothing but downvotes then why don't the admins simply remove them to keep up quality standards?

The first one, while grotesque, is of sufficient quality. The other two were removed by Nmny.

Low quality: what they said ^

Gross images: e621:blacklist

CCoyote said:
Autumn-Ferret, I agree with you. And at a certain point, I think it's going to drive users away. I find myself downvoting vastly more posts than I upvote.

I have an extensive blacklist, but that only works when people know now to tag. Proportions are beyond the pale, morbidly obese subjects are consistently labeled as "slightly chubby;" a phallus the size of an elephant's thigh gets tagged as just large; breasts can be six times bigger than their owner's head and they get tagged as just big; and a subject can appear with more muscles than Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime, and it just gets tagged "muscular." The hyper tag is vastly underused. Blacklisting is a great idea, and I try hard to use it, but it simply isn't effective at screening out all the stuff one doesn't want to see.

Beyond that, I do feel like the quality standards are in the basement. I get that art is subjective, and god knows paraphilias run the gambit of human imagination, but art does have design standards. When someone throws up a drawing that's just BAD, we all know it when we see it. But there it stays, defended by the "furry isn't real" crowd chanting "it doesn't have to be realistic." It makes me nutty.

Anyway, that's just my educated opinion. Autumn, I'm glad you said something. This has obviously been on my mind awhile.

Plenty of things aren't tagged properly on several images. If you see a post that needs improving, improve it. If you see an uploader who repeatedly makes these errors, bring it up with them.

Strikerman said:
Plenty of things aren't tagged properly on several images. If you see a post that needs improving, improve it. If you see an uploader who repeatedly makes these errors, bring it up with them.

Although I do believe that some uploaders are simply lazy, some of them simply don't know all tags and the features to find them. Here are three responses I got from uploaders when I told them that they weren't tagging properly, all very positive and friendly
despite that I maybe weren't always :/

https://e621.net/comment/show/3603481

https://e621.net/comment/show/3606223

https://e621.net/comment/show/3606673

The site has been hosting "grotesque" images for ages now, and there's still plenty of users around. I'm sure they can stand seeing a cheese grater in an asshole every once in awhile or a severed head.

Pyke said:
The site has been hosting "grotesque" images for ages now, and there's still plenty of users around. I'm sure they can stand seeing a cheese grater in an asshole every once in awhile or a severed head.

Those images don't even affect me anymore. Seeing the cheese grater pic was like "ew what the fuck" the first time, but now it's like "oh look it's the Cheese Grater Pic™ lol".

BlackLicorice said:
"oh look it's the Cheese Grater Pic™ lol".

Aka, the ONE post I have blacklisted.

Generally speaking, assume tagging mistakes are not malignant. Uploaders upload because they want to share art. That's a great step. and no one says that they have to tag EVERYTHING. It's good if they do, but the nature of this sort of website assumes that other people will contribute as well.

(side note: it might be easier if the e621:tagging_checklist was linked on the uploading_guidelines page or the e621:tags page... )

People respond well to polite corrections, cheerful advice, and gentle suggestions. Jsut keep in mind they're not here to ruin your day, probably. They've just made a mistake. Typing huge instead of hyper's an oops, not something that leaves someone malevolently cackling.

Just remember that there are only so many moderators, administrators and janitors and despite all best wishes, they really can't be here all the time to make sure everyone tags absolutely everything. The best bet would be to avoid the newest posts. things that are a day old are more likely to be tagged correctly. but even so, most, if not all, opeopel here are volunteers, man. they/we try our best, but there's a LOT of tags out there. and one man's hyper is another's 'big'.

I mean, I wouldn't even begin to know how to consider thigns like a horse's dick. That seems pretty big by default. How much bigger does it have to be before it's big? or huge?

SnowWolf said:
I mean, I wouldn't even begin to know how to consider thigns like a horse's dick. That seems pretty big by default. How much bigger does it have to be before it's big? or huge?

Size tags require other things to compare it to, as it's almost impossible to tell exactly how big something is in an image. It's why breast size relies on head size*, eye size size relies on face size, head size relies on body size, etc. It's all relative.

_{^{* It should rely on body size IMO since that's what they're usually connected to and characters with massive heads (eg. Blythe Baxter) completely mess this system up by being able to have breasts that are both smaller than her head (ie. big_breasts) and large enough to qualify as hyper at the same time which would lead to huge_breasts being added despite being a mistag in this situation and have no way to remove it due the implication chain, but whatever.[/sub]}}

Imo I do kinda think this site should adopt the rules of FurryNetwork about tagging certain commonly blacklisted terms like gore, feces, and young.

CCoyote said:
What I hear you saying is, essentially, it's good enough. No need to fix anything? Which dismisses wholesale the points Autumn and I were making.

"Gross" fetish images are not indicative of low quality. Full stop.

CCoyote said:
That's fair. Actually, the discussion of the grotesque stuff is less of an interest to me personally, and I let myself get off topic there. Separating the two topics, there's still a lot of really low quality stuff, and it's still exceptionally difficult to filter it out.

It would be a shame if that point, though, got in the way of proposed solutions like white-listing.

You can add order:score or score:>x to your searches

for example

female order:score date:week

male score:>25

Also order:favcount or favcount:>x

CCoyote said:
Thanks, I'll give that a try. Is there a way to save searches or have them be a default view?

There's a faux way: open your settings and edit your "about me" section to include the search. It allows DText and some other people use it for similar reasons, ranging from popular undertagged tags to their blacklisted tags.

We must be on different websites, because I've always thought of e621 as the most well-organized furry site there is.

I do agree that the [size]_* tags have inflated standards that I would see brought down a notch. They should be revisited and their wikis reworded to more clearly define the upper and lower bounds for each size class. For instance, a huge_* wiki should use thumbnails to show standard hugeness, minimum hugeness, and maximum hugeness in addition to minimum hyperness and maximum bigness. Bigly. It's something I can do but doesn't much interest me, so it goes on the endless list of things I tolerate. I rewrote and expanded (but kept the bad proportions of) the hyper_penis wiki because its previous wording triggered me hard.

Somewhat off-topic. I'd like to see more leadership (i.e., decisiveness, action, results) in every single tag discussion than I see at present. Similarly, there's a tendency for analysis paralysis, something I know all too well and feed with dense posts.

CCoyote said:
Thanks, I'll give that a try. Is there a way to save searches or have them be a default view?

No. Use bookmarks or links on your profile. I have -rating:s date:1_day_ago order:score bookmarked to see new and notable prons. Just remember that with order:score and order:favcount you're relying on other people's tastes and behaviors to sort things for you. I'm often ambivalent toward the crowd's evaluation of most posts, but I'm not so full of myself to be much bothered by it. It's more of a noise filter or quality floor than objective sorting.

Internet Survival Rule [undefined]: Everyone's tastes are shit. Your taste is shit.

Actually, I don't see why one of those custom script something-or-others couldn't modify E621's default search. Probably piss-easy to make too.

You could also use a userscript to invert the meaning of the blacklist (into a whitelist), I think.

It seems to me though that neither whitelist or blacklist would be sufficient on their own. And if you proposed to have both, it isn't at all obvious which should take priority in case of conflicts.

Floating an idea : what if it was neither a whitelist nor blacklist, but an ordered set of instructions?
Supposing each line was formatted as follows:
'(s|h) [tags, in current blacklist format] [!]'

That is, either s or h to show or hide posts that match the criteria, followed by tags, optionally followed by the flag !. The flag ! could be interpreted as 'lock' or 'terminate': for an item of type s, the post would be unconditionally shown (no further lines of the list would be processed); for an item of type h, the post would be unconditionally hidden. IOW it would be a way of saying 'I ALWAYS want this shown, even if later lines might hide it' -- or the inverse.
Lines which don't have a ! suffix could be interpreted as 'I (want this|don't want this) by default, but later lines can override it' -- setting a default, in a sense.

This is a relatively modest elaboration on the current blacklist system. However, some caveats:

• I haven't thought through how the individual-blacklisting toggles on the sidebar might interact with this
• the current blacklist system doesn't support comparison operators (notably, things like score:<10 or favcount:<10 don't work). I think the idea of whitelisting in general works better when you can establish a baseline cutoff.

abadbird said:
Somewhat off-topic. I'd like to see more leadership (i.e., decisiveness, action, results) in every single tag discussion than I see at present. Similarly, there's a tendency for analysis paralysis, something I know all too well and feed with dense posts.

Well, Conversationally... about 6 years ago, I was in moderative role here. And was, rather unshockingly, often the voice of decisive action.

The problem with acting without thinking things all the way through is that you end up with problems liiiiike the hyper/huge/bigly issues. Which i, personally, am at least partly responsible for. Sorry :( ... and there have been a LOT of decisions made over the years where things are implied or aliased too quickly and damage is done. Loss of clarity happens. Worth while tags disappear.

The reason we discuss tags is because we don't always understand every aspect of things. its' easy to decide on things like snow_wolf -> snowwolf... but when you get into more complicated tags, you risk doing more damage then you help.

I'm not saying it's perfect, but there's only about half a dozen to a dozen people really interested in discussing tags right now, and it can be hard to come to a satosfactory conclusion when only a handful might reply to any given post. No shame to anyone involved, of course. the system could be improved, but any uncertainty can lead to disaster. especially in larger tags where making a change might mean that thousands of posts need to be manually checked and retagged. That requires work and that's work that there are not a lot of volunteers for, these days.

I mean, I've been doing stuff here in my free time, but I"m having fun going through whole tags that I am interested in. retag all the mermaids? okay! look at satyrs? alright! Go through 13500 vore pictures? no thanks! 49215 fellatio images? nope!!

I think things could be done more swiftly, for sure, but there's a lot more to this than "an admin makes a decision and acts."

SnowWolf said:

I'm not saying it's perfect, but there's only about half a dozen to a dozen people really interested in discussing tags right now, and it can be hard to come to a satosfactory conclusion when only a handful might reply to any given post. No shame to anyone involved, of course. the system could be improved, but any uncertainty can lead to disaster. especially in larger tags where making a change might mean that thousands of posts need to be manually checked and retagged. That requires work and that's work that there are not a lot of volunteers for, these days.

I don't really know what to say in a lot of these tag discussions, but if I got some clear instructions, then I could spend some time modifying tags in posts. Except for scat I'm not very sensitive in which posts I could consider to look through.

MyNameIsOver20charac said:
I don't really know what to say in a lot of these tag discussions, but if I got some clear instructions, then I could spend some time modifying tags in posts. Except for scat I'm not very sensitive in which posts I could consider to look through.

what you say is your opinion. :) I know that "sure that sounds good." feels like something useless to type, but it might help in some cases. :D but what especially helps is if you notice something that doesn't work "If you alias sock away, it might cause trouble with markings!" or "how do I find just sock pictures if we do this?" ...Stuff gets complicated and it's hard to see every position at the same time. :)

So, speak up, if you feel you have something to say--don't be afraid of it. :)

AS for HOW to help.. I know, at least, that if you ever ask me, I can try my best to give you clear instructions based on the task at hand. :) --it's very kind of you to offer! Thank you! :D