i mean the entire point is to narrow down the porn to what we wanna see right? we only got like 5 tags in the search bar to do so afaik

so makes sense to have anal and w/e since thats what you're gonna be searching

but apparently a lot of people are anal about tags, so tag literally EVERYTHING you see, doesn't matter what or why so long as it's relevant in some way

does the character have blue eyes? tag that. i literally cannot imagine anyone who would specifically search for blue eyes among other very vapid meaningless tags, unless thats a fetish i guess? not a lot you can fit with a 5-ish tag limit

is there a renamon in the picture frame in the background that takes up 1/128th of the picture? tag them. doesnt matter that its literally irrelevant to the point of the search, its not even close to the focus of the image, that tiny little picture of renamon in the background is literally equal to her sticking her bare illustrated ass directly in my face

hell sometimes things dont even get tagged just because the image itself doesnt outright tell you. like idk 2 brothers are having gay ass sex but its not tagged because they never said "brother"

its debatable what tags are necessary and im sure you guys could come up with examples, but i'd say for sure things like 'hi-res' is objectively worthless, i mean how many pics aren't high-res and how many people specifically search for that?

all in all its kinda lazy, micromanaged by a lot of people, and not fully thought out, i mean a lot of people constantly get into arguments in comments about tags, there isnt really any clear guidelines for them beyond just "tag what you see", but at least theres more to it than paheal's

deagaw said:
does the character have blue eyes? tag that. i literally cannot imagine anyone who would specifically search for blue eyes among other very vapid meaningless tags, unless thats a fetish i guess? not a lot you can fit with a 5-ish tag limit

Now imagine that you have a picture where you want to find source for and it's only crop of characters head. There's really low amount of information to go by and blue eyes at that point is vital to find that source.

Tags have far more uses other than what's users specific porn fetish is.

Oh, it's you again.

Sorry our tagging system still doesn't cater exactly to your porn searching desires?

I don't really understand how a picture having more tags effects your 5 tag limit in searches.

I questioned this as well when I was new to the website. I mean there are tags for insignificant objects that no one ever types in like ceiling fans and such, so I understand the need to question this. However, the reason for it is that e621 a file archiving website, so users come here looking for specific pieces of work that they might only remember certain things about. Even if the tag seems pointless upon regular browsing, it might prove useful to someone who is looking for it.

Sometimes these insignificant tags can help to locate an image you have very little information on. Someone has a specific article of clothing on? Look for that tag. Don't know what the character name, artist name, or even where that character is from? There are general tags that can help you find an image.

I've had plenty of times that I've been able to quickly locate an image using the "useless" tags because some are easily identifiable just based on sight alone. Not even getting into how handy they are when you understand what's actually going on in the image.

you have no idea how many times "useless" tags like 3_fingers and purple_eyes have saved me from hours of waddling through shitty porn i hate when i had to locate originals of traces, edits and crops.

just because you dont personally find any use for the tags doesnt mean that they are useless. if you dont have any use for them, then dont use the tags for searching. its that simple.

It's almost like this is an art archive that happens to primarily house porn. Would you prefer having overly-simplistic tags? That would make it nigh impossible to find specific things that you like.

Anal+m/m gives a lot different result than anal+m/m+blue_eyes.

You sound like a guy who complains for getting extra icecream because you can't eat it all.

deagaw said:
does the character have blue eyes? tag that. i literally cannot imagine anyone who would specifically search for blue eyes among other very vapid meaningless tags, unless thats a fetish i guess?

I would say it is a fetish...some people really like characters with blue eyes...or green eyes...or red eyes...who knows. I will say that there is a bit of a problem on this site with overtagging, but this is a really really bad example of it.

Less important tags like blue_eyes are included to improve the searchability of a picture. If you just want to find new pictures of anal for example then ignore these other tags. But if you ever have to find a specific picture based on your vague memory or a cropped headshot, you'll be glad for these less important tags.

deagaw said:
i mean the entire point is to narrow down the porn to what we wanna see right? we only got like 5 tags in the search bar to do so afaik

That or find certain pictures. Or to find not porn! :D We do have not-porn here too :D

so makes sense to have anal and w/e since thats what you're gonna be searching

but apparently a lot of people are anal about tags,

hahaha XD

so tag literally EVERYTHING you see, doesn't matter what or why so long as it's relevant in some way

does the character have blue eyes? tag that. i literally cannot imagine anyone who would specifically search for blue eyes among other very vapid meaningless tags, unless thats a fetish i guess? not a lot you can fit with a 5-ish tag limit

We try REALLY hard to make sure that tags are useful. We're not always perfect, but we work to balance tags together so that, for example, if you want picture of pegging, you can search for pegging and not anal_penetration male/female female_penetrating or male/female strapon ... without going so crazy as to tag, say purple_knobby_vibrating_dildo

Eye colors.... CAN be a fetish. I am pretty happy browsing whatever. Some people like being specific. Some people like the ideas of certain colors together. I know I occasionally wander through the blue_fur tag.

Plus, it's easy to tag. :)

is there a renamon in the picture frame in the background that takes up 1/128th of the picture? tag them. doesnt matter that its literally irrelevant to the point of the search, its not even close to the focus of the image, that tiny little picture of renamon in the background is literally equal to her sticking her bare illustrated ass directly in my face

We agree that this is problematic, but it's hard to write a rule about this. sometimes it's a little stuffed animal on a bed, but sometimes it's an important part of the scene. It's hard to verbalize a rule to determine if or when it is.

hell sometimes things dont even get tagged just because the image itself doesnt outright tell you. like idk 2 brothers are having gay ass sex but its not tagged because they never said "brother"

But do they LOOK like brothers? IDK, incest is a wibbly tag and I"m not sure what our rules are exactly for that.

its debatable what tags are necessary and im sure you guys could come up with examples, but i'd say for sure things like 'hi-res' is objectively worthless, i mean how many pics aren't high-res and how many people specifically search for that?

Hi res used to be more useful 10 years ago, when screens were smaller and so was your bandwidth cap and internet speed. But man. Changing it would be a HUGE pain in the ass. Like... right now, hi res is everything between X and Y in size. anything BELOW that one thing, and anything ABOVE that is another thing (and even smaller is another thing, while there's another, even bigger one too!) ... to adjust it so, say, that hi res is x+500 and y+500, you'd need to... well... I think you'd probably end up doing a redonkulous amount of manual retagging.

we'd be better off renaming 'hi res' to something like "medium" or "larger than the screen" or something. I dunno.

but it can be helpful. knowing that the picture was ridiculously huge, or that it was very small helps a lot, when you're hunting for, say, old 90's furry art.

all in all its kinda lazy, micromanaged by a lot of people, and not fully thought out,

I mean... wow.

Okay. So...

I'm not sure where to begin.

This site's been around for over a decade.

Do you know any kids? think about how much they've changed over a decade. Think about how much YOU'VE changed over that last decade. 10 years is a lot of time and no matter how much we TRY to plan ahead and future proof things, it doesn't always work. 10 people can discuss an idea, declare it PERFECT and bomb proof and 10 years later, it's exploded because it turns out that enough people understand Tag X as something totally different than intended. You can't plan for this stuff.

You can TRY.

God knows we tried. we tried a lot. If I could use time travel for frivolous and inconsequential things, I would LOVE to go back to when the site was a FRACTION of the size it is now, and have some serious come to jesus meetings with the forums and come up with some better solutions to the problems we had. what would I GIVE to have had the insight I do today about choices made in the past.

I can say that about a lot of life actually.

But, y'know.

I mean.

I have 86,000 tag edits and I'm not even in the top 20 most prolific taggers. I kinda object to being called lazy. Just like... there are a few dozen people who just... come here and tag. and upload. and those people are not the same people who were doing this a decade ago. People get bored. They leave, they come back, they disappear forever. sometimes they spend an intense few weeks working hard, sometimes they come and stay for a few years.

None of us are getting paid for that, y'know? we're just people volunteering our time here. of course there are a lot of people who work on it. Gosh, there are are, I think, something like a thousand pictures a day uploaded. I'm not even sure how a single person or group of people could keep up with that. we need those people.

are we micromanaged? Not really. I mean. we're crowdsourced, mostly. sometimes people disagree on what a tag should be. but that's not really micromanaging.

and not fully thought out,

... I mean... if you have some productive suggestions, we welcome conversation about tags and ways to improve the system.

i mean a lot of people constantly get into arguments in comments about tags, there isnt really any clear guidelines for them beyond just "tag what you see", but at least theres more to it than paheal's

There are quite a few guidelines, actually. just some people don't get that. tag what you see if a pretty specific idea. Most of the tag arguments aren't about if it should have a certain clothing tag or eye color on it. Those are obvious. The arguments come about the character's sex/gender. The arguments come about which hole is being penetrated. The arguments come about ambiguities in the artwork. mostly, anyway. Or tags that SHOULD be on the picture that aren't. ("why isn't penis tagged?") ... or people who simply say "penis isn't tagged" but don't fix it themselves.

again, if you have any suggestions, other than "there are too many tags"... please feel free to speak up.

There is a lot of "learn as you go" but... we have pretty powerful tools to help peopel find the information that they need.

The only ones I've seen that are possibly objectionable are "overweight_[gender]". Those are combination tags, those words would normally intersect anyway. I can see how they'd apply in pictures of two or more characters and having multiple genders as identifying which one is referred to, but it just seems a bit silly overall.

There may even be likewise other gender variation cases, but I haven't taken note of them.

Oh, and of course the 'meta' ones, the "tag_hell" and the like. The few and the proud for images to wear as a badge of honour!

Two nights ago I remembered an artist I had discovered on here a few years ago. I hadn't fav'd or saved any of their art at the time, but I remembered their art was high quality, even more so for its time. I was reminded of this artist because I saw something featured on Hentai-Foundry's front page drawn in a similar style with similar quality, but the artists are not the same. To be honest, I hadn't particularly like their stuff back then, but I thought I might now. Obviously, I couldn't remember the artist's tag name.

I distinctly remembered a picture of theirs where a male human was wearing a pikachu hoodie sweater and he had an erection. I remembered the post being human only, but that the pikachu sweater must have gotten it approved nonetheless. I tried various tag combinations, keying in on the pikachu sweater. pokemon_costume, while perhaps not technically correct, seemed like it would have been the best fit. That didn't work and neither did cosplay. I also tried tag combinations with sweater, hoodie, and human_only (and male -female -intersex and erection, but those aren't enough on their own).

I could not find it after 30-45 minutes of fucking around with tag searches. Finally, I found it searching something like human pikachu source:hentai, since I also remembered the artist's affiliation with Hentai-Foundry. Indeed, following the post's source back then may have caused my discovery of HF.

As it turned out, the post was a shota human porn shoot. shrug

post #258066

I have since added 50 "worthless" tags to that post.

The artist is ulrikbadass. They did not have much art/porn when I first discovered them, but they have indeed made much more since then. They did not go DNP here but have since closed their HF account, removed/censored porn on their pixiv, and went Patreon paywall (sigh). E621 only has 10 of their works, but Sankaku Channel and rule34.xxx appear to have over 100. I'll check that out eventually.

TL;DR? Detailed story about how poor tagging kept me from reconnecting with an older artist recently. The post was missing some "worthless" detail tags that I had remembered about the art.