Requested feature overview description.
Tags that could optionally be applied to enitre pools (rather than individual posts), and be used to find entire pools (rather than individual posts that happen to be inpool:true), by using those tags in the search bar that already exists in the pool index (but only currently searches pool names).

Why would it be useful?
I'm the type of person who tends to be primarily interested in stories / comics, not standalone images. Say I'm really in the mood to read a comic featuring gay characters - currently I can search "inpool:true male/male" for example, but in searching that I'll spoil the outcome of any comic for myself simply because only the good bits are going to pop up, and those parts are the only ones I'll be able to see/sift through when trying to find something good. But at least that one's possible. Say I want to read a comic with bi characters - unless they have "male/female" AND male/male or female/female on the same single page, I have no way of looking for that at all. It would be so much simpler to get a comprehsensive list of pools to which a tag applies than to have to sift through several mismatched pages from random pools.
Pool tags could, perhaps, be closer to "tag what you know" in a way that post tags can't - purely becasue they'd take into account all pages of a pool at once - so it'd be what you know but only from what you've seen within the comic. I understand that it could get a bit messy but maybe if some specific tags were made up with definitive criteria? "PT:Queer_themes" pool tag, for example, with the criteria that at least one page in a pool must be tagged with male/male or female/female. Pool tag ratings could be like, a pool with only SFW gets Safe rating. A pool with even one Questionable gets Questionable. A pool with even just one Explicit gets Explicit. I don't know. I just think it'd make things easier for story-seekers if it was easier to search for pools about specific things without the messyness of trying to search through masses of individual posts (many from the same few pools) when just searching for what pools might include those things.

What part(s) of the site page(s) are affected?
Pool description pages and the searching of pools from the index

That sounds nice but it would be a ton (unrealistic) amount of work. Tagging individual posts is enough work already. Maybe in the future we'll be able to perform searches for pools that contain a particular set of tags. For example input fluff-kevlar fellatio and output pool #7438, pool #12067. That would require writing some code rather than making new tags and a new tag system.

No matter what option is chosen, there's a lot of work involved. I do like the idea though!

The EASIEST method would be apply all applicable story tags to the first page, and tag it something like "first_page_of_comic" but that replies on people doing it right, which is unreliable at best.

The query side.. maybe this has been discussed before, but for a basic implementation of pool search, couldn't you take the union of all tags applied to any of the posts in a given pool, and filter on that?

Given that pools don't move very fast, you could even cache the result. If you cache it, you might be able to try more sophisticated approaches, like including only tags which are present on at least 50% of the pool's posts.

Speaking as an admin, that's the kind of thing I would want to try to see if it was good enough, before considering adding more database structure('tags applied specifically to pools' would require additions to database structure)

savageorange said:
The query side.. maybe this has been discussed before, but for a basic implementation of pool search, couldn't you take the union of all tags applied to any of the posts in a given pool, and filter on that?

Given that pools don't move very fast, you could even cache the result. If you cache it, you might be able to try more sophisticated approaches, like including only tags which are present on at least 50% of the pool's posts.

Speaking as an admin, that's the kind of thing I would want to try to see if it was good enough, before considering adding more database structure('tags applied specifically to pools' would require additions to database structure)

Nice idea, but 50% wouldnt' really do it -- I mean, if you take a 10 page comic.. some comics will be 1 pages of story and 9 pages of smut. Others are going to be 5 story and 5 smut, while others are 7 story and 3 smut. So, in many of those cases, male/male wouldn't appear on enough posts to 'count'... and you'd end up with a set of tags like "male wolf rabbit Snowwolf_(artist)" and nothing else. no mention of blow jobs, anal sex, rape, setting, or anything.

I mean, off hand, I can think of one comic where there are penises everywhere, but no sex. and certainly no incest or cub stuff-- but the WHOLE COMIC thus far is "hey, maybe I should have sex with my little sister." ... there's not been any sex yet, but there's no male/female, there's no incest, there IS cub, but that's only because of casual_nudity... this kind of comic would get more misses than hits, if they tried to do a 50% tag ratio thingy.

Plus tagging a comic is tiring. You've got multiple images each page and multiple pages. It takes a long time, especially if you're going to 'do it right'... so a lot of comic pages tend to end up rather sparsly tagged.

I wonder if we might be better doing something like... have a set of tags that we use to describe the content of a pool... no worrying about blonde_hair or gray_fur or raised_arm, but just... comic:male/male, comic:rape, comic:blowjob -- 100-200 tags, predetermined.

I dunno.

For me, idealy, you'd have a way to put tags onto a pool itself rather than the story pages and you could specifically search pools for tags...

but that's work.

It's all work, because someone has to program it and then everything we already have has to be tagged. but tagging 12K pools is not as bad as tagging 12K images.

but no matter what, it's work, or it's 'cheaply done'.

and honestly, an entirely new system--a way to search pools for their pool-only tags that only show up on the pool-page... it'd be easier to get 100% retagging ratio on that, because a pool's either been tagged or it hasn't, and it's easy to see, rahter than other tagging projects.

But it's *work* and *time* and a lot of programming, and man-hours.

SnowWolf said:
a lot, see above

Yeah that's more like what I was thinking. Tagging the pools with just a few predertmined pool-specific options, not everything like "grey_fur" etc. Some general themes, common fanfiction-type tags that apply to certain types of stories etc. I'd personally make a list of suggestions if I thought this would actually be something considered, but I do realize it's likely no more than a pipe dream.

I don't really know or understand how hard it would be to make a system for doing that available, but once something was in place I don't think it'd be too bad for casual readers to add a few of the tags to pools - especially if UNLIKE posts, there were not minimum tag requirements on pools. If it was 100% acceptable for pools to be untagged, but pools themselves COULD be tagged, that would be ideal. Then nobody HAS to tag anything, but it ups the searchability for things people specifically want if people bother TO tag pools.

Again though, I have no idea how difficult implimenting such a system in the first place would be.