Topic: blacklist should be subtracted from search

Posted under Site Bug Reports & Feature Requests

instead of just having the images be there but the post just saying "blacklisted" it should just remove the images from you being able to see them in the first place, just like how you can add "-" before the tag you don't wanna see

bunniesatan said:
instead of just having the images be there but the post just saying "blacklisted" it should just remove the images from you being able to see them in the first place, just like how you can add "-" before the tag you don't wanna see

So like it was before they updated the site

+1 for that

I prefer having them there under a "blacklisted" thumbnail, as that tells me where it got removed if it's a half-blacklisted thing (which I do for things that I feel the need to prepare for), so -1.

Edit: Looking into it, what are you even talking about? It's the same old thing it's always been, the thumbnails are just absent. The change you're saying happened doesn't seem to have.

bunniesatan said:
instead of just having the images be there but the post just saying "blacklisted" it should just remove the images from you being able to see them in the first place, just like how you can add "-" before the tag you don't wanna see

Yes

bunniesatan said:
… having the images be there but the post just saying "blacklisted" …

show us a screenshot
i've only seen that behaviour on user avatars, not post search results

This idea has been proposed numerous times before. It's going to get rejected just the same as it was every other time, and for the same reason. Making the blacklist behave this way would put the job on e621's end, rather than the images simply being hidden user-side after the fact, which would mean that doing the blacklist this way would slow browsing to a crawl for every user, even ones who do not have a blacklist. And nobody wants that.

e621 allows up to 40 tags to be searched at once. Has anyone created an e621 browser addon that fills your search query up to this limit with negating tags based on your blacklist, with which tags it uses being based on the tag count stats? If something like that existed, much fewer posts would need to get hidden by the blacklist.

If many users searching 40 tags every time would be too much server strain, then even just appending, say, your top 6 negative search terms to the query would be helpful.

Updated

caroway said:
e621 allows up to 40 tags to be searched at once. Has anyone created an e621 browser addon that fills your search query up to this limit with negating tags, with which tags it uses being based on the tag count stats? If something like that existed, much fewer posts would need to get hidden by the blacklist.

If many users searching 40 tags every time would be too much server strain, then even just appending, say, your top 6 negative search terms to the query would be helpful.

This is possible. Quite easy, in fact - the user's blacklist is easily accessible to scripts, and adding extra tags to the query is trivial.
I just don't see the need for this. Please, explain to me why it's so vital that the blacklist is handled server-side.

The issue described in the OP with the blacklisted posts showing up as placeholder images - that's not supposed to happen. Blacklisted posts should be completely hidden. I have no idea how or why it's showing up like that.
It's not even javascript being disabled; if that was the case, the blacklist just wouldn't work at all. But it's definitely a bug that should be fixed.

bitwolfy said:
I just don't see the need for this. Please, explain to me why it's so vital that the blacklist is handled server-side.

For me, it does get rather annoying when I search for certain things but each page only shows 30 to 50 results out of 75, because blacklisted items are included in each page and simply made invisible. I don't even have a particularly large blacklist, which affects specific searches, so I can only imagine what it may be like for people with larger blacklists affecting more general searches.

watsit said:
For me, it does get rather annoying when I search for certain things but each page only shows 30 to 50 results out of 75, because blacklisted items are included in each page and simply made invisible. I don't even have a particularly large blacklist, which affects specific searches, so I can only imagine what it may be like for people with larger blacklists affecting more general searches.

I have an extensive blacklist, and it includes "-female", which is... a lot of posts. Here are the ways I mitigate that effect:

  • Account -> Settings -> Posts per page -> I currently set to 160, it goes all the way up to 250.
  • On post results pages, click on the caret immediately above "Blacklisted(###)" to show your blacklist entries and how many posts are affected by each one. Append the inverse of high-numbered ones to your search query. (As you can imagine, my default search term, always, is "female".)

When it comes to automatically adding blacklisted tags, the reality is that the popularity of different kinds of content and tags varies each day. Some days are very MLP (I blacklist both "equine" and MLP, separately), others are very draconic (I blacklist scalie), while sometimes it's clearly folks' gym day (I blacklist "muscular"). I've even sometimes seen "hyper" account for a stunning number of posts on page results. In the end, I say "shrug", append the "worst offenders" of the day, and move on with my life.

Updated

@ikdind
1st: I don't believe you (or at least a great majority) want to filter out all posts with females (or their respective bl tags). I for example don't want to see m/m stuff but comics and group posts can include those or solo male which can be included in comics, too. The most annoying is if the "tag what you see" get's in your way because for example one post of a series doesn't show the character clearly as a female which can be quit possible in maaaany scenarios and get's tagged male therefore.
2nd: It get's especially annoying if you go to a post and than have to klick sometimes 5 times the next button to get to your next image in your search because the blacklisted posts are hidden.

@bipface and @bitWolfy
The blacklists at least show up with the next and prev buttons if you are already in post.

@bitWolfy and @caroway
It's not possible to include the blacklist into the search because the blacklist acts like brakets for example is here a line which could be in the bl but you couldn't filter out: solo ~male ~gynomorph -duo -female

like Jacob said, there were many that requested that and got rejected. Also undertsandable it's not an easy request.
For example my request
Which also could lighten this problem a bit is another one of my requests (Search bar able to use () ) which is already on the wishlist if I understood it right. So I'm a bit disturbed by that, too, but let's be patient because to be honest it's not that great of a problem because there are some ways to compromise.

agiant said:
@ikdind
1st: I don't believe you (or at least a great majority) want to filter out all posts with females (or their respective bl tags). I for example don't want to see m/m stuff but comics and group posts can include those or solo male which can be included in comics, too. The most annoying is if the "tag what you see" get's in your way because for example one post of a series doesn't
show the character clearly as a female which can be quit possible in maaaany scenarios and get's tagged male therefore.

You misunderstood. I do not blacklist "female", I blacklist "-female", literally all images that do not contain at least 1 female character. Your avatar, I see. BunnieSatan's avatar, I see. But not the avatars for Watsit, bitWolfy, Caroway, Jacob, bipface, chrome2445, Furrin Gok, or D4rk. Or many others. I did not see the infamous cheese grater as an avatar, the only reason I know what it looked like is because I once went out of my way to find out, disabling my blacklist when I did so. I am quite content to not see that kind of content on a regular basis.

But hey, if someone were to blacklist "female", that's their choice. Not everyone swings the same way, yo. Some people prefer males and/or intersex.

And I have many, many blacklist terms. Artists. Uploaders. Characters. Copyrights. Fetishes. I don't hold the record for blacklist items, by any means, but my search results are highly tailored to my interests, predominantly by way of the blacklist. And I find it perfectly reasonable that today is an equid and scalie day, so instead of just "female", I'm searching "female -equid -scalie". And if 31 of 160 is still too many filtered results, then I can add "-intersex -hyper" to bring it down to 16/160.

agiant said:
2nd: It get's especially annoying if you go to a post and than have to klick sometimes 5 times the next button to get to your next image in your search because the blacklisted posts are hidden.

Well, that's not an issue for me, as I open browser tabs from the post results page. I don't trawl through the full-size of every image in the search results, I get a sense of what I want to see from the thumbnails. It's vastly more efficient than clicking through individual results. I get that's less of an option for folks visiting from mobile devices, but I generally don't find the 6-inch displays on mobile to be conducive to my enjoyment, especially compared to the 40" 4K display I have in front of me as I type this.

But given the above example from the current top results right now... Those 16/160 blacklisted images might all be in a row, if I were to use the next and prev buttons from the posts themseves, but it seems unlikely. Or if it happens, then I'm likely to have closer to 144 non-filtered images in sequence.

furrin_gok said:
I prefer having them there under a "blacklisted" thumbnail, as that tells me where it got removed if it's a half-blacklisted thing (which I do for things that I feel the need to prepare for), so -1.

Edit: Looking into it, what are you even talking about? It's the same old thing it's always been, the thumbnails are just absent. The change you're saying happened doesn't seem to have.

I agree with this, honestly. I like the freedom to have some tags appear blacklisted always but still let me click them if I'm in a mood, and some posts just never appear at all.

@ikdind
I don't know why I had/have so much problems with it. My posts per page are 100 (satisfied with it) and I have quite often over 30 blacklisted ones. I filter them like you described it, too, but I check those afterwards again and find many times posts which shouldn't be filtered.
Anyways you find your ways to minimize the problem the way you like it (for example I rate with sets and filter already seen posts with sets, too) and the rest is patience till improvement comes which also comes with time.
I just wanted to point out, that some solutions are not so easy to implement.

bunniesatan said:
instead of just having the images be there but the post just saying "blacklisted" it should just remove the images from you being able to see them in the first place, just like how you can add "-" before the tag you don't wanna see

I prefer blacklisting instead of the subtracted search, because you can always see the terms you searched at the top of the screen and I would really rather not see the terms I blacklisted. Don't want to be clicking through posts with "-gore" or "-vore" sitting at the top of the screen, y'know?

i like the blacklist dropdown and the ability to show images on you blacklist on the fly, i really do, but if they just added a toggle in setting to turn that off in exchange for more images not in your blacklist showing up at one time then that would make my pool surfing a whole lot easier

Bumping this to agree with OP. It’s important to note the current implementation means that content you have blacklisted is still downloaded and cached to your devices storage, just out of view to you.

This sites backend can absolutely handle a few more exclusion tags in each search and should be implemented (and at worst could be an opt-in feature in your blacklist settings quite easily)

bitwolfy said:
This is possible. Quite easy, in fact - the user's blacklist is easily accessible to scripts, and adding extra tags to the query is trivial.
I just don't see the need for this. Please, explain to me why it's so vital that the blacklist is handled server side.

The site making you download/cache content without your knowledge that is a lot more grey in pretty much every jurisdiction outside of the USA and Japan. And even then, some states too.

Please I beg you to consider this for user safety.

Updated

When not logged in, the default blacklist removes the young -rating:s tags on the serverside, and won't deliver them through the API without using a key either, it would make sense if this feature could be toggled optionally for logged in users too.

The arguments for not overwhelming searches with peoples hundreds of blacklisted tags make sense, but this is something that may have actual legal implications for people. And the feature is already there.

faucet said:
When not logged in, the default blacklist removes the young -rating:s tags on the serverside

Well that is better news.
But yeah as you said, still causes issues for logged-in people. And also people looking to block literally any other content that may also be an issue on the same level.

Thank you for voicing your support too.

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