So I came across a number of images currently or at one point tagged cub due to, I assume, small breasts/penis, cuntboy status, or in some cases just a mild-to-moderate size difference. This may be a misunderstanding on my part, but I was under the impression that cub is mostly used for prepubescent characters.
After a brief forum search, the only clarification I found was a two year old thread in which a former admin implied that there are taggable distinctions under the young umbrella. However, the wording of the cub page insinuates that any underaged character may be tagged cub.
Is there an official admin stance on this?

(Semi-edit: I've also found this, which still doesn't bring up the cub wiki wording.)

Now for the YS in twys. It is my belief that the following posts may have been tagged cub due to the wording of the wiki entry, combined with personal opinions and preferences. I am currently not touching these tags due to conflicting admin responses in a similar situation.

Bonus round: The young tag is a bit more subjective, but here's a few I think could be arguable. Again included because the wiki implies that teenager as a tag should extend all the way to 19, and TWYS biases.
The young tag also seems to rarely go away in the same manner as cub once added, likely due to it being plausible for teenager to apply to characters who appear to be young adults.

In conclusion, I believe that the wording of the cub wiki should change to avoid taggers taking its current wording at face value and unnecessarily placing young adult posts on cub blacklists. Similarly there could be some clarification on the entry for teenager that it should not apply to late teen/young adults, with a matching edit on young. The current teenager definition is technically correct, but doesn't match the function of separating underage characters for anyone who specifically does or doesn't want to find such posts.

This is like bedroom_eyes, which implicates seductive and half-closed_eyes. To properly tag subtags like bedroom_eyes or cub, taggers must know their implications and what all those tags mean.

In this case, teenager implicating young is most instructive. First, though, one must understand that young is the tag to blacklist for hiding all underaged characters, which helps users conform their browsing experience to "the law" (not really) or their morality or preference. Consider that underage is aliased to young and that "underage" means "(of a person) too young to engage legally in a particular activity, especially drinking alcohol or having sex" (Oxford), which says it all. Thus, teenager should not be tagged for characters who are not young/underage. Saying that feels like a tautology.

Personally, I wouldn't tag teenager on borderline adults that "could" be underage, but the cub wiki advocates overzealous tagging in its final paragraph.

excerpt from cub wiki

While most cubs are quite young (4-10, in human years), the phrase cub can refer to all physically immature and legally underage characters, ranging from infants, to young teenagers.

This tag also applies to all ratings. It is imperative that all underaged characters are tagged appropriately, as many people do not wish to see explicit cub artwork. Please err on the side of caution and tag cub even if you suspect they might be 'of age,' but are not sure.

Right away, eschewing an actual rewrite, change...
"phrase" => "term" (triggered)
"young teenagers" => "teenagers" (counterintuitive distinction)

Clearly (unclearly?), cub should be tagged for any underage anthro or feral characters, which includes teenagers. So this...

MagnusEffect said:
This may be a misunderstanding on my part, but I was under the impression that cub is mostly used for prepubescent characters.

...is wrong, assuming "prepubescent characters" refers to children and toddlers but not teenagers on E621.

By the way, cub has functioned under relatively the same wording since 2010. It's safe to say many admins have read it, and two have even tweaked it, since then. The "young" in "young teenager" that I would remove was added recently, though :/.

A lot of your cub and young examples I would not tag young. I would not even consider it for most them. I have to take second, third, and fourth looks to see why someone else might have justified that.

...

Okay, my message has been lost somewhere.

abadbird said:
Personally, I wouldn't tag teenager on borderline adults that "could" be underage, but the cub wiki advocates overzealous tagging in its final paragraph.

This is what I'm getting at, along with

abadbird said:

Right away, eschewing an actual rewrite, change...
"phrase" => "term" (triggered)
"young teenagers" => "teenagers" (counterintuitive distinction)

Clearly (unclearly?), cub should be tagged for any underage anthro or feral characters, which includes teenagers. So this...

...is wrong, assuming "prepubescent characters" refers to children and toddlers but not teenagers on E621.

You're immediately falling into the same problem of using the current wiki at its face value to lump several age categories together, making it difficult to separate them in searches.

abadbird said:
By the way, cub has functioned under relatively the same wording since 2010.

Functioned is a strong word, as the common usage of the tag does not match the wording on the wiki.
There are ¡¡¡also these!!!] two ¡¡¡forum threads!!!] with admin responses implying that cub should not in fact be a blanket term covering all the way from birth into the late teens.

abadbird said:
It's safe to say many admins have read it, and two have even tweaked it, since then. The "young" in "young teenager" that I would remove was added recently, though :/

It seems this was in fact the only change that came from the above threads was this placing of "young" in front of teenager, which was made by one of the admins involved with those threads. Clearly this hasn't changed much, as you're arguing that the earlier wording should be restored due to the rest of the page still stating that anyone vaguely-underage should be tagged cub, leading to taggers who see developed adults as appearing underage being tagged as cub, and I imagine ending up in a lot of blacklists they otherwise wouldn't be in.

We're told time and time again that the tagging system is there to help people find what they're looking for, so why should distinctly different age groups be haphazardly thrown into the cub tag? We already have young as an umbrella term, why do we need two umbrellas?

abadbird said:
A lot of your cub and young examples I would not tag young. I would not even consider it for most them. I have to take second, third, and fourth looks to see why someone else might have justified that.

These are in fact a result of characters being viewed as underage for whatever reason, causing them to fall into the cub and young tags due to the call for overzealous tagging, and the fact that the teenager definition extends all the way to day-before-20, causing of-age teenagers to fall into a term reserved for underage characters.

tagwhatYOUsee is one hell of a drug.

I blacklist 'young' because I don't want to see ANY of it, including borderline and ambiguous cases. I don't bother with specific terms that might not get tagged due to canon technicality or "style". Being broad is a good thing for blacklisters. There's no practical way to separate 18-year-old characters who are drawn looking especially young from the 'young' tag without getting into outside information and making it harder to blacklist 'young' since it'd encourage "well actually she's 128934289 years old" bullshit and other technicalities to factor into tagging.

As far as 'cub' is concerned idk why it's something that can't just be covered by just slapping 'anthro' into your search or blacklist.

regsmutt said:
I blacklist 'young' because I don't want to see ANY of it, including borderline and ambiguous cases. I don't bother with specific terms that might not get tagged due to canon technicality or "style". Being broad is a good thing for blacklisters. There's no practical way to separate 18-year-old characters who are drawn looking especially young from the 'young' tag without getting into outside information and making it harder to blacklist 'young' since it'd encourage "well actually she's 128934289 years old" bullshit and other technicalities to factor into tagging.

As far as 'cub' is concerned idk why it's something that can't just be covered by just slapping 'anthro' into your search or blacklist.

because you're assuming anything with those tags are describing one character. could have a young human with an adult anthro

regsmutt said:
I blacklist 'young' because I don't want to see ANY of it

Further argument for young being the blanket tag and cub being more specific.

regsmutt said:
Being broad is a good thing for blacklisters.

Hey, I'm not arguing for the removal of young.

regsmutt said:
There's no practical way to separate 18-year-old characters who are drawn looking especially young from the 'young' tag

My point is that characters who aren't drawn looking especially young are ending up in the young tag. A lot of tagging is arguably subjective, and can vary wildly from person to person. I've found that taggers will often bias toward their own preferences, whether that manifests as a girly male being tagged female because a straight male tagger found it appealing, a straight image being tagged male/male because a gay male tagger found it appealing while failing to spot visible breasts or genitalia, the many commenters scattered around the overweight/big_breasts (and above) tags whining that the character/breasts they're observing aren't large enough to warrant the tag they're given,
or in this case, a tagger who enjoys seeing underage images choosing to apply the cub or young tags to characters displaying signs of adult development.

regsmutt said:
As far as 'cub' is concerned idk why it's something that can't just be covered by just slapping 'anthro' into your search or blacklist.

post #1364439
Unless I'm missing something cub does not distinguish between anthro and feral.

Edit: O h h h h , this one's about the distinction between anthros and human-like characters.
In which case there should still be terms distinguishing the various age groups, with clear enough interpretation for tagging to occur naturally, rather than age group tags being nested inside the cub/loli/shota tags inside the young tags.

A quick search of cub teenager displays thirteen pages. A search of just teenager anthro displays 34. (Chalk up another three pages for teenager -anthro -human -humanoid.) Under common usage, the majority of anthro teenager posts are already not shoehorned into cub, and a number of the ones that are feature particularly young teenagers or an additional younger character.

I was going to type a joke here about going through the teenager+anthro tags and adding cub to everything, but then I realised the way this thread's gone people would take it the wrong way.

After I posted, I realized I could have saved myself time simply saying...

MagnusEffect said:
This may be a misunderstanding on my part, but I was under the impression that cub is mostly used for prepubescent characters.

But why?
[end of post that never happened]

What supports that belief? Sounds like an arbitrary preconception to me.

Also, I strongly advise against looking at old tag discussions as gospel (many do this...). Often times elements of those discussions are officially or organically outdated. Some tagging conventions are now palatable or even prescribed that weren't when those discussions took place and vice versa. Likewise, as you've already argued, wikis are not gospel either. Precious little here is. The bottom line is the responses a user gets to a tag question (if they get any) in the present generally supersede prior discussions.

As I said, "cub should be tagged for any underage anthro or feral characters." It's a tag for young "furries" (anthros and ferals). cub is an age group, but not one more specific than "not yet an adult"... or, because furry/art, "not possessing a convincingly adult-shaped body". cub is literally the furry-only version of young.

IF you want to break down young characters into apparent age groups, then we have baby, toddler, child, and teenager as laid out in the young wiki. If you want to find a cub in a specific age group, you can try searching cub + that age group. Hot on the heels of that suggestion... Are the age groups undertagged? Every tag is either tagged perfectly or undertagged, so every tag is undertagged.

You need to make peace with the fact that tagging and finding what you want here is like eating something you just dropped on the floor: the food's mostly intact but might have some spice added.

ABadBird said:
Are the age groups undertagged?

Yes. But it's usually because people want to use TWYK or the image itself is in a gray area. If Li Li Stormstout's model is taken straight from WoW/HotS, she'll look like a child, but common art depicting her makes her look closer to a teenager. Ergo, people avoid tagging child or teen and just tag young.

This is most prevalent for video game characters, since they are more popular and thus artwork of them is more varied. There isn't a way to combat people avoiding age groups other than by tagging it yourself, which makes doing just that a daunting task. This is a prime example of the snowball effect: nobody wants to tackle that snow-boulder because it's too big for any one person to deal with...

abadbird said:
This is all wrong. You misread the edit history. The change happened here, July 3, 2017, much after those threads' last posts, and was made by a non-admin.

Shit, I did misread the notches on the edit page, my bad.

abadbird said:
Chiefly, though, you've mistakenly assumed that (1) I haven't thought this through and (2) a well-considered opinion wouldn't agree with the cub wiki. This is one of the times where I agree with the wiki in principle and I believe the wiki communicates those principles well enough.

Okay, here's where we can hopefully get somewhere. I'll make another one of these assumptions here; that this principle which you hold is directly tied to the age restriction within age-of-consent and pornography laws.

I think I've realised where this is becoming a conflict between us!
The one unanimous view in this thread is that the cub tag is either vastly underutilised or misused. So why is the disclaimer that it apply to maybe-underage characters found on cub, instead of young, with the latter already being the blanket and more accurately used term covering every underage character? As it is the cub tag seems difficult to enforce, while young is the tag that's more fully working as intended.

abadbird said:
Many times IRL I've used the phrase "[X] is a strong word" the same way you have, but maybe never here. Saying something "functioned" like I did is roughly synonymous for, although a slightly more positive appraisal than, "gets the job done", and a sensitive communicator will understand that doesn't necessarily mean "functioned without issue".

It doesn't appear to matter to users whether or not something in young is also in cub, so under its current usage the only part of its wiki worded function it reliably fulfills is as a vector for implicating the young tag if someone ever tries to tag cub without young.

My gripe on the teenager tag is a bit different, since it's a definition that heavily overlaps into young territory, it implies young. But because of its hard definition as extending all the way to day-before-20, there are going to be a lot of cases where people using external information (for example, the in-image text + description from the ref sheet in my OP combined with the wiki) will tag an of-age (I'm assuming we're going by Arizona law here, as stated by the TOS) character as such, and by auto-implicating young effectively extending the definition of underage to anyone under 20, which you agreed should not happen.

abadbird said:
Thus, teenager should not be tagged for characters who are not young/underage. Saying that feels like a tautology.

This is probably what matters most:

So why is the disclaimer that it apply to maybe-underage characters found on cub, instead of young, with the latter already being the blanket and more accurately used term covering every underage character?

Because the wikis are fragmented. It's not intentional. Shit happens, except it doesn't happen everywhere, equally, and all at once, if at all. See: "but I can hardly look at [wikis] without getting pricked by inconsistencies, oversights, and missing details." Better yet, once a problem is identified [OBVIOUS FORESHADOWING], the discussion dies and no one fixes anything ;). The tentacles, breasts, and disembodied_penis wikis do better, but still... damn, I better not read them closely.

abadbird said:

but there's clearly a line below which users who would properly tag cub do not add it alongside young. This is a stark contrast to a wiki page stating that anything with the possibility of being perceived as underage should be tagged cub.

I don't think we can ever know with certainty why that is. We can only guess. Is there an inclination to tag some furries young only instead of cub? Possibly, plausibly, probably. IMO, young is just a more conceptually accommodating tag than cub, as if taggers are less confident in stamping some characters as true furry cubs but will concede they're definitely young.

A lot of people don't view many Pokemon, Digimon, and so on as anthros, even when they possess the same features as classic anthros--some even regard them as not_furry. Those people definitely won't tag cub when they could, but they will tag young because it's generic. Perhaps to some cub means "not a viable sexual partner due to age" yet teenagers exhibiting apparent sexual experience are fair game. And some people delude themselves into thinking that sex object teenagers are actually adults, tags be damned, much the same as others will overzealously tag young for characters that very probably aren't.

This is more difficult to catch, as it mostly shows on young posts that were previously tagged cub, but retain the young tag. To my knowledge there's no way to search posts by combinations of former and current tags, so it's going to be hard to find examples, and few of those tag changes are going to include the reason field.
I've caught a single one here though.

At a count of nearly 18000 under/mis-tagged posts, this would be one hell of a tagging project, particularly for anyone without the ability to lock tags. We're still talking a post volume above one-third of the existing cub tag, and not going to slow down without some kind of widespread notification that it's incorrect.