Today I put a two tag sequence of tags into the search bar, the string of tags I entered was simple, I wanted to find images of mares being gangbanged So I entered the word Mare, and the word gangbang, but alas I was both shocked and infuriated to find that of the two tags I had entered the one that was actually a technical term for describing a female horse, the one that had previously been extremely efficient at producing results including female horses, no longer worked despite the completely crude and non-technical word "gangbang" still being used the same way resulting in many images of male horses surrounding what was very clearly not a female horse, so in a sense I guess you could say in my experience it would appear the person who made this change in the functionality of the tag in attempts to take a step forward had taken two steps back since the terms both Mare and stallion were the correct technical terms for male and female horses and yet despite them being clearly identifiable their tags no longer work and now the system easily confuses one for the other since they're both reduced to simply "horse".This is just one of several new problems I found with this change in the way the search engine is being run, I would like to say the site still holds a candle to its previous iteration but it just doesn't, the tag base is so significantly narrowed by these "refinements" that it's impossible to find anything you're looking for especially when you do know exactly what you're looking for and exactly the right tags it took to find them since those situation-specific tags such as Mare are automatically filtered out of your search for you and reduced to a less specific tag, this often makes it frustrating to even attempt to use the search bar! I fail to see how under any conditions someone could make such a change to the website without seeing how irreparable the harm of simplifying the tags The Way They Were could be, mainly because they don't have a habit of routinely talking to the community that uses the website and I'm sure that's mostly because of the sheer amount of people who visit the site and it's the user's that tags the art for the people who run the site. while I would like to say that the new tagging system still works but it doesn't and if it's at all possible functionality for a lot of the old tags should be re-implemented or perhaps a new set of situationally aware tags should be implemented in their place when the search engine doesn't know that the female in the picture should be the horse and the male in the picture should be a dog and what the quantity of each of these are it's less efficient. the new system used yields no benefits over the older one as far as can be seen from my interaction with the site. this new trend of reducing tags to less specific tags even tags as simple and useful as multiple_females can be very bothersome the aforementioned tag is reduced to Simply "female" despite the tag having a very useful application in determining a specific situation within the image you're looking at, a situational attribute such as having more than one of a Target gender is in fact a thing you can see within the image and should be tagged as to make it easy to look for but with the way the websites tagging system is behaving it's been made impossible for a lot of us navigate the site accurately using filters to remove images we're not looking for from our search results, and is not at all convenient or easy to use for the user dedicating their time to making the tags it's been drastically simplified and made harder by the decrease in tags we're able to use, and while I will admit I had not used "multiple_female" tag in quite some time "Mare" was a tag I used quite frequently, I don't know who made the change but the drastic difference in efficiency of this site simply from my own experience is quite laughably evident, but I don't intend to put the people responsible down I simply wish to accurately stress just how important it is that some functionality of the previously usable tags should be returned, especially since the sooner it's returned the faster people can be encouraged to tag, considering a lot of images are tagged by users rather than the admins if we're the ones going through all the trouble to tag the images why should we continue doing so if every time a tag like mare gets as wildly used as it was that progress is undone by a change in how the tags work? this discourages not only people from tagging correctly but also using tags at all and thus discourages them from coming back to the site, but I have an idea for making more specific tags come in to use without making them redundant! there is a lot of traffic on the site, if upon arrival to the page for the image or animation you clicked on there was a request for help applying new standardized tags consisting of this format quantity_gender_species and they be applied wherever possible for the convenience of people who are looking for specific results I think it would be a straightforward viable option for showing people how to tag correctly, for example say there's a male human farmer surrounded by what appears to be three female horses in this instance 2 tags would be applied one_male_human three_female_horse an Interactive checklist could even be implemented so that the tags could quickly be created and submitted every time someone clicks on create a tag they click how much what gender and type in the species or pick from a list. At the end of the day this new tagging method could literally fix all the problems I've addressed, but since my experience with this site has been nothing but a good one since my discovery of it, I can adamantly and proudly say e621 is by far the best furry focused art site on the internet AND I HAVE LOOKED OTHER PLACES! I'm that scared for the well-being of this site at the moment because recently it's not been very user-friendly. I really hope the problems I've highlighted will really be taken into consideration and we, as both the users and the operators of this website, can work together to find a solution. Tags should include details of the situation depicted such as what the quantity species and gender the characters in the picture are and how those traits interact with each character in the situation depicted so as to create a sort of situational awareness or improved filter guideline for the search engine to follow so that we're not just limited to describing a single character or all of them simultaneously within the image with no clue as to how their traits should interact with the image itself especially since most pictures have more than one character. In short it should work like this "the more tags you use and the more you tag image based on things you can see within the image the better the ability to use tags to shape the search engines understanding of the situations depicted in the images you're searching for so in the process it filters out the things you don't want preventing confusion and frustration" I love e621 and I love the people who run it please don't give up or hold out on us these really complicated strings of tags aren't redundant they're just specific and specific can be very efficient

Bruh mare has been aliased since 2012, what do you mean by "recently" and "old"?

Could you divide this into some paragraphs? This is rather difficult to read, it'd be easier to understand and address your discussion if you separated your points by breaking them up.

You're several years late on this. We dealt away with species specific gender tags (like mare and vixen) a long time ago. They (and other tags like them) were aliased to just the species they refer to, since keeping them would've eventually bloated the hell out of the tagging system with all the various species and gender specific things that would've precipitated out from them. I suppose that might be less of a problem now with our current server resources and the new site code, but it was a very legitimate concern back then because we had neither of those things.

It might be a good time to revisit the topic of species-specific gender tags, or at least some method of specifying what gender you want a species in a post to be. I found a bit with a former staff member saying the administration had wanted to eventually get around to implementing tag grouping (in the style of [fox female]), but I don't know if that's still on the table.

Also, split your post into paragraphs. That was hard to read.

As others have said, mare has been aliased for a long time.

As this is the second time you’re referring to something changing ‘recently’ that hasn’t actually been messed with for many years, are you sure you weren’t on some other website??

Additionally, a mare can be a female horse... or a zebra. Sometimes a donkey. But a female donkey can also be called a Jenny... A female Wren is also called a Jenny.

A male donkey is a jack. So is a make ferret, badger, weasel, wolverine or rabbit.

Think that sows are only Pigs? Nope. Badgers, anteaters, armadillo, bears, Chinchilla, coati, Panda, raccoons and many many others are also called sows.

Humans are really not that creative with their animal words. Don't get me started on bucks and does.

Now.... The argument for female_horse as a tag...?

That one's over my paygrade.... But I'll tell you this: it is a terrifyingly huge task.

We have over 2 million posts.

That is s loooooot of retagging. Like.... Months upon months of effort. Years even.

And then there is the fact that for every species tag, we should have implications set up: female_horse implies both horse and female. We could never change our gender/sex related tags again. There would be literally thousands of tags to change. Each implication takes time to set up and time to run.

And that's not even the tip of it. We have aliases set up around species so that common errors and whatnot are aliased away. Bad_species aliases to good_species.... But now we need female_bad_species aliased away too.

And... If we're are going to do female_species, we should probably also do female_feral and so forth as well.

This is...... A ginormouse undertaking that I thibk is literally too big for our active tagging user base to tag. Maybe if we had a few hundred people happy to help... But we don't.