So. Obviously we support regular species names, like wolf or jaguar.

We seem to support common copywritten fictional species--like pikachu, or earth pony.

We seem to support popular open fandom species--like sergal or chakat.

But what about.. uh... species that are basically two animalnames squished together? tiger-horse and tiger_polarbear and dragon_wolf?

.. some are kinda popular. Some are actually real world hybrids, like ligers and coywolves.

I'm trying to tidy up some redundant species tags and some of the dragon_rabbit_peacock_lynx_wolves are triggering me.

If we were to make a tag for every hybrid combination, that'd be one helluva lot of tags and you're gonna see some weird ones.

Yeah, hybrids aren't usually tagged. Unless they're common, such as folf.

But as far as I know, we don't have clear rules for tagging fictional species.

It's definitely okay in cases such as sergal or pikachu. But the one-off species are problematic, especially if it's just something like a character listed as Species: Dragon-fox on a model sheet. Is that a fictional species, or just a hybridization? It's not always easy to say, but generally I think that those shouldn't get a species tag.

Real-world hybrids are fine, commonly accepted hybrids are fine. Those things with <100 posts? Bad.

Also we don't need both tigon and liger. There's a difference, but it's a technicality (which species is which parent) and physical differences that are irrelevant anyway.

And mule is aliased to donkey and that makes me sad.

Eh, I don't see the harm. We already have stuff like cabbit and jackalope, so what's wrong with smaller tags?

Strikerman said:
Eh, I don't see the harm. We already have stuff like cabbit and jackalope, so what's wrong with smaller tags?

How much smaller? Many hybrids, especially ones with more than three species, only have one image each. Many fakémon are hybrids as well. Should every one of those have their own tag as well?

BlueDingo said:
If we were to make a tag for every hybrid combination, that'd be one helluva lot of tags and you're gonna see some weird ones.

As I actually love werid hybrids, those were great, thank you :D

My "favorite" real tag I've seen so far is probably red_tiger_pangdillo or andean_tiger_glider :D

regsmutt said:
Real-world hybrids are fine, commonly accepted hybrids are fine. Those things with <100 posts? Bad.

Well, the problem of course is if no one tags folpit, there could be a thousand folpit posts quietly untagged. But, it is a fair point :)

Also we don't need both tigon and liger. There's a difference, but it's a technicality (which species is which parent) and physical differences that are irrelevant anyway.

Agreed. it's a lion/tiger. For every liger and tigon, there's at least one of these: post #1313185 Liger's the better known.

And mule is aliased to donkey and that makes me sad.

Aww... yeah, that's pretty dumb :(

Strikerman said:
Eh, I don't see the harm. We already have stuff like cabbit and jackalope, so what's wrong with smaller tags?

the issue in allowing smaller ones too is that it gets super messy, difficult to maintain and difficult to search/blacklist when you have often multiple tags for every hybrid combo people come up with

Commander_Eggplant said:
the issue in allowing smaller ones too is that it gets super messy, difficult to maintain and difficult to search/blacklist when you have often multiple tags for every hybrid combo people come up with

Not to mention all the aliases that'd be needed to maintain those. As demonstrated by liger/tigon.

Dragon_wolf, wolf_dragon, dragonwolf, wolfdragon, or wolf-dragon? All are currently tagged, and that's just one combo. (Some of those might be character or artist names, who can tell...)

I suppose that we could agree to tag the species in alphabetical order and with an underscore to avoid conflicts with nicks (so 'dragon_wolf' would be preferred), but I bet that'd still result in a lot clean up.