I've been seeing a lot of... we could refer to them charitably as "debates" over the Tag What You See rule on e621. The moderators tend to be in rather strict defense of the system, and I can see why. Hard-and-fast rules are easier to enforce and fighting over "gray areas" cannot exist when there are none to be spoken of.

Here is an issue, though. When I, in particular, want to search for art of a character, I usually go to e6 first. The problem, though, is that the Tag What You See rule will cause me to omit certain art from my search unless I should happen to already know what the art contains.

Say I go searching for explicit art concerning a canonically male character, and I want, specifically, to see gay art containing them. The issue is, in several pictures they are depicted with female proportions and tagged "female".

The search I would likely input in this case would be something to the effect of "character male/male rating:e". The issue becomes immediately apparent if I turn to my only option, and additionally one I wouldn't know of without preemptive knowledge of what I'm searching for: "character male/female rating:e". In addition, after this search to find the missing pieces I would have to search through, possibly, dozens of pages of false positives (specifically this male character with a female partner.)

It's currently a little past midnight and I'm not exactly full of bright ideas. But I feel the system can be improved somehow. I'm not here to start personal arguments, nor to get yelled at by mods. All I have are suggestions.

For one, I see potential in a system not unlike the "Do Not Post" list. That is to say, all posts are considered Tag What You See unless the tagging individual is the artist concerned.

But, as I can, like many, see this causing inevitable uproar when abused in the future, I think the true solution may lie in the ambiguous_gender tag or some variation thereof... perhaps something like gender_tags_against_canon.

Or something to that effect. In this case I could search for:

"character ~male/male ~gender_tags_against_canon" to whittle down my search while still being able to find all the pieces I'm looking for.

It's not the most well-thought-out of ideas, and it probably has some glaring holes, but I feel perhaps with time they could be brushed up and we could improve the site's tagging system a little. Your thoughts?

Quick addendum: I think it's necessary to point out that a good deal of the fussing over gender tagging rules comes from people of straight interest who don't want to see gay, and vice versa, which is completely fair. This proposed tag would have no effect on their searches, making them no more inaccurate than they are now. I think this is a huge plus, a solution that satisfies all sides involved.

No.

Option one of only having to allow word of God when it's been uploaded by the artist would solve almost nothing on either end, because chances are the art won't be posted by the artist in the first placs. That would just cause more issues with artists whining as Numeroth steals all their uploads by being faster.

Unless a solution is applicable globally it's not feasible for our booru system where every member has the same tagging rights.

Option two isn't feasible either, we'd have to have a list of character is canonically which gender, and then keep that list updated. Considering the vandalism we're already seeing over this stuff we'd have to have this in a list that's only editable by trusted people, let's say contributor or higher. Which means the who are already doing have even more work on their plate.
And then we go into the even more interesting place of characters that canonically have multiple genders, or characters that change gender over time for whatever reason, or characters that have explicitly been drawn as rule 63'd by magic or whatever.

Those solutions don't really do anything, especially if the issue is that most trap characters aren't even ambiguous enough to qualify for that tag. The issue is that these trap characters are simply too female in general.
In the meantime, you could use character -male/male rating:e or character chrossgender rating:e to drastically cut down on images to sift through if you're specifically interested in art of a specific character.

It's not bad IMO -- makes a clear case about precisely what the problem is, addresses it in a way that's fairly intuitive and unkludgey, avoids breaking what's already working. Might go some way to ameliorating awkward corners of TWYS like cuntboy and girly.

+1. Probably requires further discussion:

• name of tag (gender_against_canon immediately makes me think of crossgender, and I think that needs to be clearly differentiated)
• anticipated area of effect (proportion of posts that might need to have this tag applied)
• whether any other *_against_canon tags can be anticipated

If you want to find art that "might be" male/male canonically but is marked as male/female, try searching male/female -breasts -pussy -camel_toe

NMNY, it seems to me that all of your arguments apply equally to the existing tag crossgender, since the dataset required in order to apply the tag correctly is, AFAICS, the same.

I understand that making a new tag is different from maintaining something that is already there, but it seems that it would be reasonable to read your post as tacit disapproval of the crossgender tag.

If it were me, I'd use the tag combination [character] sex ~male/male ~flatchested. That ought to have a very nearly 100% success rate for finding what you are looking for.

On topic, to be honest, I think TWYS does have flaws, but TWYK or variants are not solutions.

If it were me, I think the best policy would be TWPWBLF - tag what people would be looking for. To use an example in another thread - is someone searching nude looking for a bunch of pictures of ferals? Nope. So it doesn't get the nude tag.

The site often operates this way, but there are exceptions in the name of "objectivity" (despite plenty of other things breaking objectivity for the sake of usability).

Clawdragons said:

If it were me, I think the best policy would be TWPWBLF - tag what people would be looking for.
To use an example in another thread - is someone searching nude looking for a bunch of pictures of ferals? Nope. So it doesn't get the nude tag.

To me, what that is is tagging with respect to an established default state; in this case strongly established (unclothed feral is in no way remarkable)

crossgender is imo comparable, while obviously the default state is usually less strongly established.

IMO "TWPWBLF" is roughly half of what TWYS tries to do -- the other half being "make tagging simple enough that people are inclined to actually do it"

This may account for some of the exceptions, but I'd be interested in a list of exceptions.

NotMeNotYou said:
Those solutions don't really do anything...

I can see where your concern arises (from areas of ambiguity) but I think those concerns could be addressed in the definition of this hypothetical tag itself. An example:

Gender_tag_against_canon: Only used on characters tagged a gender they have never previously appeared as in art by the original creator.

In this case, a character who's been canonically depicted as male, female, toaster, etc. won't really ever get this tag, as there really is no clear case of "canon" for them to be tagged against.

But in the case of a female character, who's always been depicted as female by the artist, being tagged "male" by the site's rules, and similar cases, it would make the solutions to find what we're looking for far easier and more intuitive.

Two_Bit_Magician said:
I can see where your concern arises (from areas of ambiguity) but I think those concerns could be addressed in the definition of this hypothetical tag itself. An example:

Gender_tag_against_canon: Only used on characters tagged a gender they have never previously appeared as in art by the original creator.

In this case, a character who's been canonically depicted as male, female, toaster, etc. won't really ever get this tag, as there really is no clear case of "canon" for them to be tagged against.

But in the case of a female character, who's always been depicted as female by the artist, being tagged "male" by the site's rules, and similar cases, it would make the solutions to find what we're looking for far easier and more intuitive.

We already have a tag for that: crossgender.

Furrin_Gok said:
We already have a tag for that: crossgender.

Hm... I suppose you are right.

Does anyone even use that tag though?

Two_Bit_Magician said:
Hm... I suppose you are right.

Does anyone even use that tag though?

Of course, not everybody is going to use any given tag, but plenty of people do tag crossgender on things.

Two_Bit_Magician said:
Hm... I suppose you are right.

Does anyone even use that tag though?

Two_Bit_Magician said:
Hm... I suppose you are right.

Does anyone even use that tag though?

I see that tag pretty consistently, so yes.

Ah, very well. I concede the point, then. I still feel there are changes necessary to the gender tagging on this site, but I'll reserve those qualms for a future forum topic.

savageorange said:
NMNY, it seems to me that all of your arguments apply equally to the existing tag crossgender, since the dataset required in order to apply the tag correctly is, AFAICS, the same.

I understand that making a new tag is different from maintaining something that is already there, but it seems that it would be reasonable to read your post as tacit disapproval of the crossgender tag.

To me, it seems to be explicit approval for the crossgender tag, but it leaves unanswered the criteria under which that tag should be used. In addition to arguments that have been previously observed, the new arguments about characters that canonically switch gender at will and the extremely TWYK situation of a Rule 63 leaves crossgender in a dubious position, in my mind.

TWYS is inherently flawed, as one could go into either the cuntboy or Flat_chested tags and change a majority of them to the other and still be following TWYS, but the mods like to pretend it's the perfect solution instead of simply admitting that they were wrong, most likely in an attempt to avoid actually having to do work aside from banning people who call them out. Most of the time all it takes to confirm gender is a quick look at the source of the image. The mods wouldn't even have to be the ones who do this, there are people who actually care about the users who would be happy to undertake this burden in order to ensure that posts are tagged accurately.

But I mean, we all know That's not gonna happen. There are egos on the line, and the slightest impact would shatter them.

pwn3rxp said:
TWYS is inherently flawed, as one could go into either the cuntboy or Flat_chested tags and change a majority of them to the other and still be following TWYS, but the mods like to pretend it's the perfect solution instead of simply admitting that they were wrong, most likely in an attempt to avoid actually having to do work aside from banning people who call them out. Most of the time all it takes to confirm gender is a quick look at the source of the image. The mods wouldn't even have to be the ones who do this, there are people who actually care about the users who would be happy to undertake this burden in order to ensure that posts are tagged accurately.

But I mean, we all know That's not gonna happen. There are egos on the line, and the slightest impact would shatter them.

Ain't you cute.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone say that TWYS was perfect. But it does have the highest success ratio for helping users find what they're looking for. I've seen a LOT of conversations over the years trying to find better solutions to the TWYS/cuntboy debate, especially as cuntboy and dick girl are pretty unhappy degrading words to use . The problem is, that while TWYS isn't a perfect solution, there's not a better one that maintains the same level of accuracy for results.

The staff is ALWAYS willing to listen to new ideas, and is ALWAYS willing to discuss options, but most of the options proposed--and there have been MANY over the years either:

1) Lower the accuracy of search results
2) Requires retagging basically every single picture on the website. By hand.
3) Requires the website to work in ways that it doesn't currently work. And while it's possible that new features will be added at some point, these new features will inevitably requires everything to be retagged, by hand.

Retagging every picture owuld be a pain in the ass by the way. I cna't get the stats to work at the moment, but we're at post number 1,556,393 ... so.. let's say that 33% of all pictures ever posted were deleted (which is highly unlikely.) that's about 1 million pictures to tag.

Let's say that you can tag a picture in 5 seconds. That's... load the picture, look at the picture, **ACCURATELY** evaluate the picture, change the tags on the picture, save the tags and move on. In 5 seconds. (protip: I've got 86,000 tag edits. It takes a LOT longer to accurately evaluate a picture.)

5 seconds, 1 million pictures. That's 1389 hours. That's about 57.8 days of tagging.

24 hours days.

With no sleeping, eating, drinking, peeing, fapping or anything.

Even if you had 10 people working with you, 24/7, that's still nearly 6 days of constant effort. at 5 seconds per picture, which is ... not realistic. You're closer to 30 seconds a picture, if not a minute. (or around 347 days of tagging.)

The reality of the matter is that there has not been a better solution proposed that would not take thousands, if not tens of thousands of man hours.

And you.... are just repeating the same old song we've seen a dozen times: Use the source's gender.

all that results in is inaccurate results:

post #1145013 post #348083 post #227310

none of those are females. Yet by your rules, I would find those when I search female.

pwn3rxp said:
but the mods like to pretend it's the perfect solution instead of simply admitting that they were wrong, most likely in an attempt to avoid actually having to do work aside from banning people who call them out.

Except, we have never said it was a "perfect solution". It was never perfect but it's what works the best for people searching what they are looking for.

Most of the time all it takes to confirm gender is a quick look at the source of the image. The mods wouldn't even have to be the ones who do this, there are people who actually care about the users who would be happy to undertake this burden in order to ensure that posts are tagged accurately.

Here's a hypothetical situation for you: Let's say an artist draws what is clearly a female (puss, boobs, no dick n' balls, fully female) but the artist says that the character identifies as a male. And let's also say all artists do this with their characters and their art gets posted here. If we were to change the rules according to how you want it, when peeps search up male, all they are gonna get is posts of females that identify as male. You see where the problem is? Peeps aren't gonna get accurate search results, which is the bread and butter of a booru. If an artist says that a character identifies as (insert identity here), that's fine and dandy, but on this site alone, we tag what we see. And the majority of artists I've been in contact with have been fine with this. They know it's not a big deal, and they understand how we operate. It's not like we are trying to change the character lore or some shiz. It's not that deep.

Also, I want to point out that you are not in the majority on this. Stop acting like you're leading a revolution when in reality, you are the equivalent of a guy screaming in the middle of the street about pennies being a good topping on pizza.

And stop acting like we don't care about the users. We moderate this site every day, handling people's complaints from the tickets, moderating hundreds of posts that are uploaded every day, to even doing behind-the-scenes work when we got personal emails or PMs. All while not receiving one single penny because we are only volunteers.

There are egos on the line, and the slightest impact would shatter them.

What ego? It's the rules. Don't like them? Don't use the site. It's that simple.

It's ironic you say we have egos when you, yourself, is trying to sound like a savior of some sort.

I myself have done some looking around and found that the "crossgender" tag satisfies my qualms quite nicely. I'll simply be adding it to the relevant images and hoping others follow suit so they're easier to find. Mods can lock this thread now if they want.