After seeing this forum thread, I began to wonder whether or not creating a tag (read: one tag) for when only one gender is visible, would be a good idea. This is not suggesting tags like male_only or female_only, but when used in conjunction of a gender tag would result in posts where only one gender is visible, IE male *tag_name* should show posts with only males.

The first problem brought up in Discord would be that all solo posts would innately have only one gender present, so included in it's wiki would be "this tag should only be used on posts not tagged solo". My problem, however, is in naming the tag: the only name I've come up with so far is clunky, single_gender_present. If anyone has any better names, or has concerns for the tag, feel free to bring them up. Otherwise, this tag would resolve the complaints involving people only wanting to see only X gender posts, without having the problem of such X_only tags by not being as hyper-specific as them.

...why do we have a problem with x_only tags?

The first question that came to mind: how would ambiguous_gender fit in with it? It's not it's own gender, it's for when it can't be determined and so could be any. For instance, a male character with an ambiguous (could be male) character, would that count for male+single_gender_present? There may not be only one gender present, but there isn't necessarily multiple genders present either. Given that ambiguous_gender isn't the most uncommon tag out there, I suspect a fair number of posts would fall into this.

strikerman said:
...why do we have a problem with x_only tags?

They're hyper-specific and would cause tag bloat. So far, we have 7 genders (ambiguous, male & female, and 4 intersex), and each individual tag would only be used so often; it is more effective to use, for example, male -female -ambiguous_gender -intersex, because it would result in the same thing without adding extra tags or tags that are too specific to be used enough.

In contrast, my suggestion would still be somewhat specific, but wouldn't cause tag bloat and is tagged for whenever only a single gender is present; it's only one tag and can be used for any of the 7 genders.

siral_exan said:
They're hyper-specific and would cause tag bloat. So far, we have 7 genders (ambiguous, male & female, and 4 intersex), and each individual tag would only be used so often; it is more effective to use, for example, male -female -ambiguous_gender -intersex, because it would result in the same thing without adding extra tags or tags that are too specific to be used enough.

Nowadays we already have tags like dominant_gynomorph, muscular_andromorph, overweight_maleherm, and so on and so forth. I honestly do not think 7 tags, across the entirety of this website and its dragon's hoard of tags, would be that much bloat.

Don't we already have solo tag for one person(used with other tag)? Oh right, you mean, like, all_male, all_female, all_ambiguous(as useless as that sounds, hehe), all_herm, all_intersex? Some tag like 'single-sex' is not... clear in it's meaning.

siral_exan said:
They're hyper-specific and would cause tag bloat. So far, we have 7 genders (ambiguous, male & female, and 4 intersex), and each individual tag would only be used so often; it is more effective to use, for example, male -female -ambiguous_gender -intersex, because it would result in the same thing without adding extra tags or tags that are too specific to be used enough.

In contrast, my suggestion would still be somewhat specific, but wouldn't cause tag bloat and is tagged for whenever only a single gender is present; it's only one tag and can be used for any of the 7 genders.

Ah, ninja'd. Yeah, was thinking about that, too.

I wonder if we could have it setup so that if you request male_only, it aliases that to the real tags (male -female -herm -intersex -ambiguous_gender for example). A userscript or something could do this, clientside.

watsit said:
The first question that came to mind: how would ambiguous_gender fit in with it?

I consider ambiguous gender to be a gender, in that people may draw or otherwise search for characters that don't appear male, female, or et cetera. But that's my opinion.

For instance, a male character with an ambiguous (could be male) character, would that count for male+single_gender_present?

It's definitely complicated to include ambiguous gender for any instance, but I'm considering ambiguous to be a gender for now. If someone wants to use ambiguous_gender *tag_name* to find only posts tagged ambiguous gendered characters, it should be possible...

I was trying a KISS approach where no new tags are made, but it Just Works. :)

strikerman said:
Nowadays we already have tags like dominant_gynomorph, muscular_andromorph, overweight_maleherm, and so on and so forth. I honestly do not think 7 tags, across the entirety of this website and its dragon's hoard of tags, would be that much bloat.

All the tags you cited aren't exclusive, they're generally useful and can be tagged in a multitude of scenarios; male_only is exclusive, it cannot also include female_only and whatnot. A post can absolutely have a dominant gynomorph, a dominant male, and whatnot so long as they're present in the image, which means they apply to a larger amount of posts and are more useful to keep around. If dominant gynomorph could only ever be tagged in images where only a gynomorph is dominant, and no other gender, it would be less useful and, therefore, contribute less to the site; male_only and etc. doesn't contribute enough to be of value. Or, to my understanding, I wasn't there when male_only was aliased away...

siral_exan said:
Or, to my understanding, I wasn't there when male_only was aliased away...

maybe you'll be there when male_only is unaliased away 👀

kemonophonic said:
Whose job is it going to be to add this new tag to almost 2.4 million posts?

Yet another reason I think it shouldn't be an actual tag, but done with the search frontend. I'm not sure if that actually makes things simpler, since I don't handle the server development/management. :/ I assume that client-side is easy enough fix?

kemonophonic said:
Whose job is it going to be to add this new tag to almost 2.4 million posts?

I do disagree with this line of thinking, otherwise no tag that impacts even a moderately large amount of posts would ever get implemented anymore. We survived trio just fine.

Well, my argument was that it could be implied from existing metadata. If it looks like something a bot could retag, enmass, then it might not be useful.

siral_exan said:
I consider ambiguous gender to be a gender, in that people may draw or otherwise search for characters that don't appear male, female, or et cetera. But that's my opinion.

There is a difference between not seeing a character well enough to determine a gender (as the tag is largely used here) and androgyny (where gender expression is visible but vague). Especially when dealing with animals or more animal-like anthros, which have features that can hide gender markers, if a species has them at all. With TWYS, this distinction may be difficult to separate (which may be why androgynous is aliased to ambiguous_gender), but that's what I see as a problem with the tag. It's telling that when someone wants to look for posts with only male, for example, they're always(?) given two options: male -female -intersex or male -female -intersex -ambiguous_gender depending how they want to handle ambiguous characters. Since different people are equally likely to want the different options, why should a new tag only be for one's benefit, selected arbitrarily?

There's a difference between something like post #2777840 (male/ambiguous, where the ambiguous character is rather non-masculine if not feminine, with only a lore tag as a give-away), post #2507807 (male/ambiguous, where the ambiguous character looks quite masculine and one could see it as male-only, even though it technically could not be), and post #2809020 (male focus, and there is absolutely no way to determine what the feral otters and fish are since you can only see their heads and neck; there's no readily-apparent females, at least). I think a tag focused on whether only one gender is present would have trouble being useful if it regularly trips over edge cases like these. But this also raises the question of lore tags; if a male/ambiguous pairing is known to be male/male through lore tags, which that count for single_gender_present? People know it has only male characters, but without knowing that both characters are visibly some gender, the tag may or may not work.

strikerman said:
We survived trio just fine.

Funny you say that. I actually completely forgot about that thread, and have felt like trio was a forgotten left-over from times past. I've actually been contemplating making a request to alias it to group since it's so poorly utilized (the upload page only has solo/duo/group/zero, many people use group for three instead of trio, tags like threesome/audience/duo_focus imply group when it could be three or more...).

I think male/female/gynomorph/..._only shouldn't be a problem, there are enough posts to apply this to.

watsit said:
I've actually been contemplating making a request to alias it to group since it's so poorly utilized

I don't see the point in aliasing things just because it's barely used. Some things are rather rare but have their right to exist. And cutting everything down to its minimum is something, I personally don't like. I mean, it shouldn't get out of hand, like, four words for one tag. But a combination of two or three words doesn't seem unreasonable for me. Also, we can change that by adding the tags to the posts.

dubsthefox said:
I don't see the point in aliasing things just because it's barely used.

It's not just that they're barely used, it's also used inconsistently and causes a problem.

To clarify, though, I don't think the proposed single_gender_present tag here creates the same kind of problem to the same degree. I mostly just see it as somewhat arbitrary which group of searches it caters to (counting or not counting for known_gender+ambiguous), which it seems rather unfair to help one group and not the other that's equally likely and useful. Maybe if there were two tags, one allowing for ambiguous characters and one not, but that gets into naming issues I'm terrible at solving.

My main objection to this proposal can be summed up by the fact that the search male -female -intersex disembodied_hand returns 99 pages of results, all of which are of a very similar nature. Should every one of these be tagged male_only or what have you?

I don't think there's any correct way to implement gender-exclusive tagging on a site which recognises the existence of ambiguous genders.

wat8548 said:
I don't think there's any correct way to implement gender-exclusive tagging on a site which recognises the existence of ambiguous genders.

Wouldn't male -female -intersex disembodied_hand posts also have the ambiguous gender tag?

strikerman said:
Wouldn't male -female -intersex disembodied_hand posts also have the ambiguous gender tag?

They should, but people don't always remember. male -female -intersex disembodied_hand ambiguous_gender has nearly 80% fewer results, and at least from a cursory glance at the first page I don't think that can be correct.