As things came to a slow discussion on the e6's discord server, it was decided to create a forum post for something of this respective size.

So, what is the issue ? As per 'young' definition on its wiki entry and age-to-term table:

While 'young' is being defined in e6 as "a character that appear to be underage", it has a contradiction with the 'teenanger' tag, as it has a defined age bracket (13 to 19) that's not restricted to underaged characters, and is implied to 'young' (is part of 'young' tag's umbrella).

In another note, taking the real-world perspective, the e6's 'young' description is incorrect (while the age-to-term definitions stands correct), since the term 'young' is widely used to define any human whose age is around or below ~24 years old, or appear to not have aged or be of age/maturity.
A more objective 'young' definition is made by UN: persons between the ages of 15 and 24 years, which in turn, 'children' are considered those persons under the age of 14.

So, a description update should be issued to the 'young' tag to make it reflect the real-world usage of the term (or at least UN's definition), having it be more intuitive towards what we depict what 'young' is, however, a point was raised during the discussion in e6's discord server:

• So far (especially with its description), 'young' is used to idenfity underage content, therefore, blacklists that have the young tag might also block content that's not underage if the description is redefined to reflect real-world usage of the term;

There were some suggestions regarding this description contradiction as well, which includes:

• Split 'teenager' tag into 'young_teenager' (below 18) and 'young_adult' (above 18), or into similar terms;
• Alias 'young' to 'underage' (or to something similar), as users may use 'young' to block underage content;
• Swap posts including 'teenager' with 'young_teenager', to then add a disambiguation to 'teenager' for newer posts;

So, as it may have been noted already, the issue is hefty, as the current description persisted for enough time to be related to underage content (specially when it comes to blacklists), and it can be troublesome to do the necessary adjustments due to the amount of posts.

And with all that, suggestions towards this issue are welcome in any regards, thanks for the attention.

btw, just fun little fact.
In finland, grocery stores, liquor stores, bars, etc. are instructed to check ID of everyone who appears to be under the age of 30, simply because there are many people close to their 30's who appear as they are under 18.

All that's technically necessary here is to just change 19 to 18. Also would definitely like overall overhaul with age specific tags, because everything between 18-100 seems to fall under couple tags when 1-18 has 5 tags already.

hairnoi said:
Alias 'young' to 'underage' (or to something similar), as users may use 'young' to block underage content;

A problem with that is 'underage' is context-dependent. A completely SFW drawing where a young character is playing in a field, they're not underage for that, which would make it a misleading tag. Similarly, a 20 year old drinking alcohol or doing recreational drugs is underage, while that same character having sex would not be. Of course, since this site has a large contingent of sexual artwork, it's a fair presumption that a non-SFW piece with a "young" character probably has them doing the sex or being shown off, but that doesn't mean all young art involves them doing stuff they're underage for.

There's also the problem that exact age is pretty much impossible to convey through a character's looks. Even in real life, it's easy to mistake a person for being older or younger than they are, to say nothing of stylized art of fantasy animal-people. So when you have a tagging system that works on visual information, it's invariably going to have very fuzzy boundaries (the given numbers are to give an impression of what it means, but unless you're dealing with TWYK lore tags, there isn't really a hard line between them). I mean, if you changed teenager to be 13-18 instead of the current 13-19, would any posts get changed as a result? And an additional tag for characters specifically between 19-24 seems like it would be difficult to fill correctly, and not be too beneficial (an expanded range like 20-30 could be useful though, perhaps).

That was one fun fact, Mairo. I think we can all agree that guessing someone's age based on appearance or character anatomy can prove difficult.

Mairo said:
All that's technically necessary here is to just change 19 to 18. Also would definitely like overall overhaul with age specific tags, because everything between 18-100 seems to fall under couple tags when 1-18 has 5 tags already.

Watsit said:
So when you have a tagging system that works on visual information, it's invariably going to have very fuzzy boundaries (the given numbers are to give an impression of what it means, but unless you're dealing with TWYK lore tags, there isn't really a hard line between them). I mean, if you changed teenager to be 13-18 instead of the current 13-19, would any posts get changed as a result? And an additional tag for characters specifically between 19-24 seems like it would be difficult to fill correctly, and not be too beneficial (an expanded range like 20-30 could be useful though, perhaps).

Yes, TWYS does have hazy boundaries, hence it was suggested to adapt the 'young' tag's description to something more intuitive to what we perceive young/youth as, the issue would be the usage of the tag in blacklists.
And changing the 'teenager' age bracket might resolve the contradiction, but the idea of having the young tag reflect underage characters exclusively will remain counter intuitive, specially on cases where characters can look to be above 18, but still be tagged as young, hence the suggestion of aliasing 'young' to 'underage', but as pointed by Watsit, the term might not reflect well on artwork that may be rated safe and have underaged characters.

One idea that I have is to summarize the age tags into 'toddler' (<=3), 'child' (>3, <12), 'teen' (>=12, <18), and 'young-adult' (>=18, <24). 'Young' being the parent tag with the others being under its umbrella (toddler, child, cub, loli, shota, young-adult implies young)

Mairo said:
All that's technically necessary here is to just change 19 to 18.

You mean 17, as by 18 a character ceases to be underage.
But this is all kind of arbitrary when what's actually being determined is whether a character appears to be underage or not, like with the infamous 900-year-old-loli scenarios. Having year-defined age groups is probably harmful to the tagging system in the first place, as opposed to just defining more generalised age groups by body type.

hairnoi said:
Yes, TWYS does have hazy boundaries, hence it was suggested to adapt the 'young' tag's description to something more intuitive to what we perceive young/youth as, the issue would be the usage of the tag in blacklists.

The bottom line here is beyond a simple name-swap, young needs to stay where it is. There are many, many young posts which do not have any other age-related tags and is the only thing keeping blacklists working, in addition to being the tag bridging animal-based and human-based underage cases together. You're going to need an awful lot of work to change any of that, and I should also point out the admins tend to avoid interacting with any thread relating to underage tag discussion.

MagnusEffect said:
in addition to being the tag bridging animal-based and human-based underage cases together.

Why on earth are they split to begin with? It seems to cause no end to missing or misapplied tags, but I'm not exactly sure what is gained by having them be split.

donteven said:
Why on earth are they split to begin with? It seems to cause no end to missing or misapplied tags, but I'm not exactly sure what is gained by having them be split.

Cub

MagnusEffect said:
Cub

I mean yes, but why is that differentiated from any-underage-child to begin with?

donteven said:
I mean yes, but why is that differentiated from any-underage-child to begin with?

I assume so that you can view underage anthros without completely excluding humanoids, and vice versa.

MagnusEffect said:
The bottom line here is beyond a simple name-swap, young needs to stay where it is. There are many, many young posts which do not have any other age-related tags and is the only thing keeping blacklists working, in addition to being the tag bridging animal-based and human-based underage cases together. You're going to need an awful lot of work to change any of that, and I should also point out the admins tend to avoid interacting with any thread relating to underage tag discussion.

Welp, if that last bit is true then whatever this discussion I guess.
Well, the idea isn't just a name change, but a better and/or more defined wiki entry for it instead. Hence my suggestion was to change its description to be better fiting or summarize the age-related tags to include (or even exclude) young-adults. Either that or make it exclusive to underage content (with a more fitting name) as it always seemed to be.

In all honest, this conversation was brought up here due to post #764769, since there was this discussion towards whether or not it should be tagged 'young', when the character looks to not be underage but seems to fit within the 'teenager' tag age bracket (18-19).

The age group listings in the wiki are guidelines, and not "we need to see your ID" kind of strict deal. With the age of 17-19 it's often not at all clear whether it's actually 'barely an adult' or 'soon expiring jailbait', and we simply collapse the wave function to 'still jailbait'.

The UN nation's definition of the terms and age groups is also based on legal requirements and the desire to have terms clearly defined with as little overlap as possible. Children are "young" by common dictionary definitions, but the UN redefines those terms to have more precise verbiage to use when discussing laws or similar.
Practically the same deal as "theory" in science and common usage mean two entirely different things.

Watsit said:
A problem with that is 'underage' is context-dependent. A completely SFW drawing where a young character is playing in a field, they're not underage for that, which would make it a misleading tag. Similarly, a 20 year old drinking alcohol or doing recreational drugs is underage, while that same character having sex would not be. Of course, since this site has a large contingent of sexual artwork, it's a fair presumption that a non-SFW piece with a "young" character probably has them doing the sex or being shown off, but that doesn't mean all young art involves them doing stuff they're underage for.

There's also the problem that exact age is pretty much impossible to convey through a character's looks. Even in real life, it's easy to mistake a person for being older or younger than they are, to say nothing of stylized art of fantasy animal-people. So when you have a tagging system that works on visual information, it's invariably going to have very fuzzy boundaries (the given numbers are to give an impression of what it means, but unless you're dealing with TWYK lore tags, there isn't really a hard line between them). I mean, if you changed teenager to be 13-18 instead of the current 13-19, would any posts get changed as a result? And an additional tag for characters specifically between 19-24 seems like it would be difficult to fill correctly, and not be too beneficial (an expanded range like 20-30 could be useful though, perhaps).

Also, the legal age at which things can be done is country dependent.

Kamril said:
Also, the legal age at which things can be done is country dependent.

Not super relevant when all a website really has to comply with are the laws at its physical hosting location.
I'm pretty sure the laws for porn are separate from actual age of consent laws just about everywhere, as well.

Mairo said:
btw, just fun little fact.
In finland, grocery stores, liquor stores, bars, etc. are instructed to check ID of everyone who appears to be under the age of 30, simply because there are many people close to their 30's who appear as they are under 18.

All that's technically necessary here is to just change 19 to 18. Also would definitely like overall overhaul with age specific tags, because everything between 18-100 seems to fall under couple tags when 1-18 has 5 tags already.

• adult
• young_adult (20-30)
• mature_adult (includes middle-aged?) (30-49)
• old_adult (50+)
• senior_(age) (65+)

I would like to see this happen. It would be consistent with the young tag we have.

• young
• baby
• toddler - I thought this was the same thing as baby, but guess not.
• child
• teenager

I think this structure would technically be more accurate, but I'd feel indifferent if only toddler and baby were linked.

• young
• child
• baby
• toddler
• teenager

These would be good for lore tags too I suppose.