Requested feature overview description. A whitelist to act as a companion to the blacklist.

Why would it be useful? The blacklist is a really great feature, but sometimes it filters out things a user might want to see. For instance, suppose a user doesn't want to see art of any Pokemon except for Blastoise. It would be prohibitively tedious to blacklist every individual Pokemon except for Blastoise. And, if the user turns off the blacklist, it means that *everything* the user had wanted filtered out will appear in a search result, not just images of Blastoise. A whitelist would be a much simpler filtering mechanism.

What part(s) of the site page(s) are affected? Everything visible to a user when they search for images.

You're looking for pokemon -blastoise.

The blacklist already supports exclusions. Which are listed under tag operators in the blacklist help page.

you can already do this with blacklist by execluding tags from blacklist entries:

pokemon -blastoise
translates to "hide all posts tagged as pokemon except the ones that are tagged as blastoise"

edit: im slow :(

The blacklist is a pretty powerful creature. You can read about all of it's tricks here e621:blacklist -- but yeah pokemon -blastoise will do ya. :)

CCoyote said:
I think the responses address the example given while missing the overall point. For the blacklist to become a whitelist, you have to first be able to exclude everything[/u], then use the negative signs to reinclude what you want. Is there a way to do that?

...isn't that exactly what the search bar does? Type the tags you want and everything else is excluded.

CCoyote said:
No, the search bar looks for one set of tags at a time. A whitelist would bring up all of the images with the various tags you want.

which you could, you know, just search for

CCoyote said:
I think the responses address the example given while missing the overall point. For the blacklist to become a whitelist, you have to first be able to exclude everything[/u], then use the negative signs to reinclude what you want. Is there a way to do that?

A simple * functions as "everything" in the blacklist.

Beyond that we do offer RSS feeds for searches. If you have an RSS reader you can just automate the entire process of getting things served that interest you.

NotMeNotYou said:
A simple * functions as "everything" in the blacklist.

How? I tried adding an asterisk on a separate line of my blacklist and it does nothing. I also tried adding -female on the same line; still nothing.

MyNameIsOver20charac said:
How? I tried adding an asterisk on a separate line of my blacklist and it does nothing. I also tried adding -female on the same line; still nothing.

adding -female on the same line tells the blacklist that, out of the things the rest of the line counts, only to blacklist what does not have the female tag. in other words, the same thing except the pictures with the female tag

OK, thanks for the pointers.

However, when I search "Pokemon," nothing comes up. I have to search "Blastoise." I guess it is just semantics at that point though.

Also, for the people with complex searches: I just bookmark them.

What about this: If you want to blacklist all pokemon except blastoise, machoke, and incineroar, how would that work out? It'd be nice to search "pokemon" and only see those three.

furrymancock said:
What about this: If you want to blacklist all pokemon except blastoise, machoke, and incineroar, how would that work out? It'd be nice to search "pokemon" and only see those three.

I forget if we can have multiple blacklists and switch them around. Sometimes I use the blacklist as a way to cheat the tag limit on searches. Instead of toggling a bunch of tags on/off, it'd be nice to just select the "perfect vore" blacklist or the "one species only" blacklist.

regsmutt said:
I forget if we can have multiple blacklists and switch them around. Sometimes I use the blacklist as a way to cheat the tag limit on searches. Instead of toggling a bunch of tags on/off, it'd be nice to just select the "perfect vore" blacklist or the "one species only" blacklist.

Nothing stops you from saving them in a text document or dmailing them to yourself. :)

That said....

It might be pretty neat to have a collection of, like, blacklist modules. ... (though I would like to think that the most objectionable things we make pretty easy to blacklist.)

But like "the 'ew' starter pack" .. or "No violence" or "No scalies, ever"

Plus, a lot of people learn by example, so having easy 'copy paste' blacklists might help with people who Do It Wrong. XD

How about a favourite tags list? It highlights posts that have favourited tags in a different colour outline like white unless that user has specifically searched those tags.

LuceoX30 said:
How about a favourite tags list? It highlights posts that have favourited tags in a different colour outline like white unless that user has specifically searched those tags.

https://e621.net/forum/show/249805

kamimatsu said:
adding -female on the same line tells the blacklist that, out of the things the rest of the line counts, only to blacklist what does not have the female tag. in other words, the same thing except the pictures with the female tag

that's what I thought. I put

* -cub

just for science; that should hide everything except cub art, right? Doesn't work.

If you really want to blacklist everything except for a single tag it is just -cum on a line. You don't need, and for that matter, can't use an asterisk. You can even expand this by having multiple tags on the same line, all with - in front of them if you want to whitelist only a small list of tags. Go nuts friends. 3900 characters is the limit!

MyNameIsOver20charac said:
that's what I thought. I put

* -cub

just for science; that should hide everything except cub art, right? Doesn't work.

that's because you just write

-cub

by itself if you only want to show cub.

KiraNoot said:
If you really want to blacklist everything except for a single tag it is just -cum on a line. You don't need, and for that matter, can't use an asterisk.

So, to be clear, NMNY's assertion

A simple * functions as "everything" in the blacklist.

is incorrect? * has no special meaning?

SnowWolf said:
But like "the 'ew' starter pack" .. or "No violence" or "No scalies, ever"

Plus, a lot of people learn by example, so having easy 'copy paste' blacklists might help with people who Do It Wrong. XD

Like the Derpibooru 'filter sets' ? Having it as an actual site feature like that might be unlikely, but I think an addon would be able to provide a similar 'click to add/remove this set of rules from your blacklist' interface.

savageorange said:
So, to be clear, NMNY's assertion
is incorrect?

NMNY's assertion is incorrect

NMNY's assertion is incorrect

*world collapses*

savageorange said:
So, to be clear, NMNY's assertion
is incorrect? * has no special meaning?

The assertion is incorrect. * has no special meaning. Not yet anyways. There is a patchset sitting around that adds wildcards to the blacklist, but I'm terrified to touch the blacklist. Every single time I've touched it, I've broken it in some way. It's extraordinarily fragile, and testing it to completion in all of the circumstances that can occur is very difficult. I consider it a cursed feature, since it is full of implicit and poorly defined behaviors sprinkled through the code. Same goes for moving it out of cookies and into an inline script to ease problems with it becoming too long, the patch exists, but I'm sitting on it because of how hard it is to test all of the edge cases.

KiraNoot said:
pokemon -blastoise -machoke -incineroar

The thing is, whenever I go search "Pokemon," it shows me a bunch of empty pages until I find a page that meets those criteria. This is one thing that's annoying about the blacklist -- it hides all the images on one page, without just making it so that the first image you see is the first whitelisted image.

furrymancock said:
The thing is, whenever I go search "Pokemon," it shows me a bunch of empty pages until I find a page that meets those criteria. This is one thing that's annoying about the blacklist -- it hides all the images on one page, without just making it so that the first image you see is the first whitelisted image.

Once upon a time, you had to scroll past every single blacklisted image, rather than having them automatically hidden. At one time, there was a hard limit of posts per page--which was quite smaller than the 320 posts per page you can have now.

I'm not saying things can't be better, just that they were, at one point, at lot worse...

furrymancock said:
The thing is, whenever I go search "Pokemon," it shows me a bunch of empty pages until I find a page that meets those criteria. This is one thing that's annoying about the blacklist -- it hides all the images on one page, without just making it so that the first image you see is the first whitelisted image.

Honestly if you only want to see such a specific few Pokemon your best bet is to search for them specifically - I.E., search ~blastoise ~incineroar ~machoke. Yeah you've got to write a bit more but if you need just save the search as a bookmark or something.

Clawdragons said:
Honestly if you only want to see such a specific few Pokemon your best bet is to search for them specifically - I.E., search ~blastoise ~incineroar ~machoke. Yeah you've got to write a bit more but if you need just save the search as a bookmark or something.

what does '~' do? (that's an adorable emoji that I'm totally going to start using)

https://e621.net/help/show/cheatsheet

KiraNoot said:
https://e621.net/help/show/cheatsheet

Oh right, forgot about that page. thanks ^.^

Commander_Eggplant said:
https://e621.net/forum/show/249805

Ah... I see.

Clawdragons said:
Honestly if you only want to see such a specific few Pokemon your best bet is to search for them specifically - I.E., search ~blastoise ~incineroar ~machoke. Yeah you've got to write a bit more but if you need just save the search as a bookmark or something.

got it!