Okay so it has recently come to my attention that searching 'bat' no longer comes up with pictures of bats, and in order to find what im looking for i have to search for 'chiropteran'. Its inconvenient and rather silly, because i find it hard to believe that people would be searching for the bat object rather than the animal, so why would this be changed?

Keasbey said:
Okay so it has recently come to my attention that searching 'bat' no longer comes up with pictures of bats, and in order to find what im looking for i have to search for 'chiropteran'. Its inconvenient and rather silly, because i find it hard to believe that people would be searching for the bat object rather than the animal, so why would this be changed?

Bats is aliased to the species, so you can search for bats and get all the bat related posts

DiceLovesBeingBlown said:
Bats is aliased to the species, so you can search for bats and get all the bat related posts

But now bats is inconsistent with other species, because you can search for dragon or dragons and get the same results, but you cant for bats?

Keasbey said:
But now bats is inconsistent with other species, because you can search for dragon or dragons and get the same results, but you cant for bats?

The singular bat was often mistagged on various sports bats such as the baseball bat. I've seen it quite often. The disambiguation was because of this.

DiceLovesBeingBlown said:
The singular bat was often mistagged on various sports bats such as the baseball bat. I've seen it quite often. The disambiguation was because of this.

I dont think the solution is to create a big inconsistency like this, and inconvenience the people who maybe dont understand the way tagging and searching on e6 works. I, like many of my friends who use the site, dont search for bats, or dragons, or deers, or whatever. We search for it as a singular thing because thats the way the tags are displayed on posts. They arent tagged plurally, they just have the allias that allows them to be searched like that.

Its unintuitive, and genuinely confusing to people to not allow them to search for bats as a singular thing, like you can with every other species.

bat_(species) also works. We should probably have a bat_(object) tag for the other kind of bat.

BlueDingo said:
bat_(species) also works.

So does chiropteran but nobody calls them that outside of scientific circles or whatever. Its an unnecessary change, imo, and only serves to make searching for things more complicated and inconsistent.

I completely understand that bat means both an object and an animal, but this is a furry site, not a sports site, so its probably a greater priority to allow people to search for the animal than it is to search for a sport implement.

Keasbey said:
So does chiropteran but nobody calls them that outside of scientific circles or whatever. Its an unnecessary change, imo, and only serves to make searching for things more complicated and inconsistent.

I completely understand that bat means both an object and an animal, but this is a furry site, not a sports site, so its probably a greater priority to allow people to search for the animal than it is to search for a sport implement.

Oh I totally agree; the penis, vagina, and stomach tags should be removed as well! I mean cmon this is a furry site, why would anybody every bother to use those scientific tags when simple straightforward things like belly and dick exist? Just imagine… having accurate search results? Ew please no, just give me something with training wheels so I don’t have to formulate any coherent thoughts when I try to find an image.

Scaeling said:
Oh I totally agree; the penis, vagina, and stomach tags should be removed as well! I mean cmon this is a furry site, why would anybody every bother to use those scientific tags when simple straightforward things like belly and dick exist? Just imagine… having accurate search results? Ew please no, just give me something with training wheels so I don’t have to formulate any coherent thoughts when I try to find an image.

Misrepresenting someone's argument while having an obnoxious, condescending attitude is not a particularly effective way to demonstrate your point.

Also, we DON'T have a vagina tag. It's aliased to pussy. Also stomach is tagged on just under 800 posts, while belly is tagged on over 36000.

Would it not have been better to have aliased bat to bat_(disambiguation) and then sort the objects to baseball_bat, cricket_bat, or whatever, and the animals to bat_(species)? This would be consistent with other disambiguated tags.

Out of curiosity I went through the tag histories of last six months of posts tagged with bat_(object) and there were only 10 posts that were originally erroneously tagged with bat when the user meant a baseball bat instead. In five out of those ten posts the uploader noticed the wrong tag and fixed it themselves and only in the rest of the five posts another used had to step in and fix the tag.

I don't think this constitutes as a big problem and fixing it like this is the approach of shooting a fly with a tank shell and indeed creates an exception to the rule.

I agree that considering the site's target audience it would make more sense from the usability point of view to have bat aliased to chiropteran as from the tagging side it didn't seem to really be a problem and when searching there should be that "Maybe you meant: bat_(disambiguation)" suggestion anyways if somebody is interested in sports equipment.

Clawstripe said:
Would it not have been better to have aliased bat to bat_(disambiguation) and then sort the objects to baseball_bat, cricket_bat, or whatever, and the animals to bat_(species)? This would be consistent with other disambiguated tags.

That is like saying primate_(species) or rodent_(species)-- they are entire taxonomical orders. I'm not going to use run-of-the-mill disambiguation for entire orders of animals and there is nothing wrong with using proper terminology.

I don't mind aliasing bat to chiropteran but I will not go the other way around. Last night I went through the *bat tag search and got rid of a bunch of dumb hybrids and aliased/implicated various objects that I could find, umbrella-ing them under the bat_(object) tag. This should hopefully suffice.

Ratte said:
That is like saying primate_(species) or rodent_(species)-- they are entire taxonomical orders. I'm not going to use run-of-the-mill disambiguation for entire orders of animals and there is nothing wrong with using proper terminology.

I don't mind aliasing bat to chiropteran but I will not go the other way around. Last night I went through the *bat tag search and got rid of a bunch of dumb hybrids and aliased/implicated various objects that I could find, umbrella-ing them under the bat_(object) tag. This should hopefully suffice.

This seems like the most reasonable way to go about things to me.

Ratte said:
That is like saying primate_(species) or rodent_(species)-- they are entire taxonomical orders. I'm not going to use run-of-the-mill disambiguation for entire orders of animals and there is nothing wrong with using proper terminology.

I don't mind aliasing bat to chiropteran but I will not go the other way around. Last night I went through the *bat tag search and got rid of a bunch of dumb hybrids and aliased/implicated various objects that I could find, umbrella-ing them under the bat_(object) tag. This should hopefully suffice.

Okay, that's logical. Thank you for the answer.

Sure. By the time I submitted my response I moved the alias over so it should work now. Just, you know, keep the tag clean.