Hello everyone,

I just found out that the "ambiguous" part in "ambigous_on_[species]" tags - such as ambiguous_on_feral, ambiguous_on_human, ambiguous_on_humanoid - refers to and implies ambiguous_gender. It would be more logical to me if "ambiguous" would rather refer to and imply ambiguous_species because [feral]], human, humanoid, etc. are categories for species, not gender.

On the other hand, "ambiguous_gender" has already all the "ambiguous/[gender]" tags - such as male/ambiguous, female/ambiguous, intersex/ambiguous, ambiguous/ambiguous, etc. Those help to narrow down and specify searches containing characters with ambiguous gender, while there is not much I know of to search for ambiguous species.I personally would change the "ambigous_on_[species]" to refer to ambigous species rather than ambiguous gender.
Otherwise we could also come up with two coexisting standards, my initial suggestion would be anything refering to ambiguous gender should use a slash, such as "ambiguous/humanoid" and anything refering to ambiguous species should use "_on_" such as "ambiguous_on_humanoid".What is your opinion?And thank you for your attention.

Are you aware that ambiguous_form exists? Changing the tag to ambiguous/humanoid wouldn't make the term any less ambiguous IMO.

I disagree about swapping one interpretation of ambiguous to another. ambiguous_gender is by far the most common ambiguous tag, and that will be the tag most users will be familiar with and encounter frequently. The tag itself doesn't fully indicate its usage, and that should be enough reason for curious users to want to check the wiki, which should as a result clear up any confusion about the tag.

The only solution to your problem that makes sense to me is to have species tags for each interpretation of ambiguous.

• Ambiguous gender -> ambiguous_gender_on_<form>>
• Ambiguous species -> ambiguous_species_on_<form>
• Ambiguous form -> ambiguous_form_on_<form>

There are several options on what to do with ambiguous_on_<form>.

• 1 - Leave it unchanged. It is an already established tag, and the most well recognized interpretation of ambiguous.
• 2 - Leave it unchanged, but include extra interpretations of ambiguous as part of its meaning.
• 3 - Disambiguate it and encourage usage of more specific tags.
• 4 - Have it serve as the base tag for all interpretations of the tag (gender, species, form), and encourage people to use the more specific tags.

thevileone said:
Are you aware that ambiguous_form exists?

No I didn't, thank you. What exactly is the difference between ambiguous_species and ambiguous_form?

thevileone said:
Changing the tag to ambiguous/humanoid wouldn't make the term any less ambiguous IMO.

The big idea of that suggestion was that other gender pairings with a slash all relate to gender.

thevileone said:
I disagree about swapping one interpretation of ambiguous to another. ambiguous_gender is by far the most common ambiguous tag, and that will be the tag most users will be familiar with and encounter frequently. The tag itself doesn't fully indicate its usage, and that should be enough reason for curious users to want to check the wiki, which should as a result clear up any confusion about the tag.

I understand. The problem was, as I stumbled on it, I of course checked wikis, first ambiguous_on_humanoid which doesn't exist, then ambiguous_on_human which doesn't exist either, last ambiguous_on_feral which gave me a clue why pictures I added tags to suddenly had ambiguous_gender auto-tagged. I hope you understand my confusion better now. Someone with more knowledge about this should add a wiki entry to those, most ideal would have been if the creator of the tag would have done that.

thevileone said:
The only solution to your problem that makes sense to me is to have species tags for each interpretation of ambiguous.

• Ambiguous gender -> ambiguous_gender_on_<form>>
• Ambiguous species -> ambiguous_species_on_<form>
• Ambiguous form -> ambiguous_form_on_<form>

There are several options on what to do with ambiguous_on_<form>.

• 1 - Leave it unchanged. It is an already established tag, and the most well recognized interpretation of ambiguous.
• 2 - Leave it unchanged, but include extra interpretations of ambiguous as part of its meaning.
• 3 - Disambiguate it and encourage usage of more specific tags.
• 4 - Have it serve as the base tag for all interpretations of the tag (gender, species, form), and encourage people to use the more specific tags.

I feel like all your suggestions are better than mine.

moon_flower said:
things

Difference between "form" and "species"

Human, humanoid, anthro, feral, and taur are better described as body forms than species.

ambiguous_form is for situations where the form cannot be determined from the image itself.

ambiguous_species is for situations where the type of species a character is (fox, tiger, bear) cannot be determined from the image.

Syntax doesn't suggest intention.

There would still be tags such as male_on_feral, and female_on_anthro that still would be valid tags. Similarly you can also tag something as anthro/anthro and it will get changed to anthro_on_anthro.

There are some flaws in your reasoning here.

• You are assuming that slash syntax is only used for gender and it isn't. predator/prey.
• You suggest that using slashes to only refer to gender is intuitive, but it isn't. The same logic can't be applied to the "_on_" syntax in the same way. The _on_ syntax usually compares forms (taur_on_taur, anthro_on_human, etc). You want to compare a species tag to a form, when it should be more intuitive to compare a form to a form. This suggests that it would be most consistent to associate ambiguous with ambiguous_form instead of ambiguous_species or ambiguous_gender.

For that reason, we can't rely on syntax to mean a certain thing.

Other remarks

I totally agree with you that those tags need wiki pages. It shouldn't be too difficult to create them.