The bulk update request #2240 is active.
change category tail (1182359) -> general
Reason: Look… we’re all furries, right? That’s sorta the whole point of this website, isn’t it? So, how can it be that we aren’t able to search for one of the most important furry features? That’s one of the few things that most animals (and by extension, anthros) have that humans lack. Yet, we can’t search for it on a furry-centric website. That’s like being unable to search for fur. Frankly, it’s absurd. The decision to invalidate tail while leaving literally every other animal-specific feature valid was a huge mistake.
Who would use this tag? I, for one, and I’m sure many others would like to as well. As it turns out, the tail is one of my favorite features on anthro characters. I’m often running into the fact that I simply can’t search for tails and having to use stupid workarounds to approximate what I’m looking for instead. Especially as an artist, I often use this site for finding references for specific species or characters that I want to draw, whether to see the different ways other artists have drawn a particular character’s/species’ tail, or to gain inspiration for a character design. However, having to sift through a bunch of posts where the tail isn’t visible makes this much harder. This is even more the case with some characters that sometimes don’t have tails anyway, like tohru_(dragon_maid). In-universe lore states that she is a shapeshifter who can have a tail or not at will. However, this makes a mess of trying to specifically find posts where her tail can be seen. Whether or not the tailless tag applies in the tailless examples is questionable since she’s a humanoid, which often don’t have tails anyway. But even if it does apply, everyone seems to forget that that tag exists, so it’s severely underused (especially on humanoids, if it does indeed apply to them). And even so, it can’t apply to images where the tail could be there, but simply isn’t visible, such as in many half-length_portraits and front_views and the like. Indeed, the major flaw with that tag is that it can’t be applied to cases where there might be a tail that simply isn’t visible; only to cases where you can specifically see that there is no tail where there normally would be one. Searching -tailless is virtually useless for finding tails because of that. And even so, a post might contain both a tailless character and a tailed character, meaning that -tailless may actually filter out things that I do want as well.
Another point: revalidating this tag would be keeping in line with other tags on the site. As I stated above, literally every other animal-specific feature is still valid. Allow me to list some of the most prominent examples:
Shall I go on? No, I think you get the point. There’s no reason to invalidate tail while leaving all these others valid.
The current workaround is to use a crapload of ~ modifiers in a search to find posts that have been tagged with tails of any specific kind. For example, ~big_tail ~short_tail ~long_tail ~thick_tail ~raised_tail ~tail_grab ~tail_between_legs ~red_tail ~green_tail ~blue_tail ~white_tail ~black_tail ~countershade_tail etc. etc. etc… and this doesn’t work as well simply because there’s no way you could include every single *tail* tag. you’ll miss out on many posts because of this, which may actually make a big difference when combining this search with a less common species or character tag. Also, this is just an absurd workaround for a very basic tag that should have been searchable in the first place.
The other “solution” (not really a solution) is to search *tail*. But this simply does not work because there are several non-tail tags that happen to contain those four letters in that order. The worst offender by far is detailed_background, which outnumbers every tail-related tag by a huge margin. Other major offenders include ponytail, pigtails, detailed, detailed_bulge, and little_tail_bronx. This would also include pages upon pages of artist, character, species, and copyright tags that don’t have anything specifically to do with tails. Oh, not to mention the tailless tag itself will be included in the results - essentially the exact opposite of what you’re looking for. The pollution of this search with other irrelevant results effectively makes it useless.
Even still, tail is just one of those tags that’s very frequently applied by more casual users of the site who probably wouldn’t believe that such a standard furry part as a tail wouldn’t be a valid tag. Often, these users don’t think to add more specific types of tail tags, and often the tail tag just gets removed in its current invalid state without any replacement. While the combination of the many *tail* tags returns plenty of results, invalidating this tag means we’re missing out on many more.
Really, look. The site stops calculating results after 750 pages, so there are even more pages than that full of tail being removed, with several new results every day. And the vast majority of the time, they’re not being replaced with a more specific tail-related tag, leaving most of these posts completely unfindable even using the above methods. The sooner this tag can be revalidated, the better.
Now, I understand that the main justification for invalidating this tag in the first place is presumably because most characters on the site will have them. However, this is not really a valid argument for several reasons, all of which I’ve mentioned already, but I’ll reiterate for clarity:
- Most of them will also have paws, claws, and snouts, and yet these are still valid tags. Should we invalidate these, too?
- The tail often simply isn’t visible in the image. What if you want to filter out all the posts where the characters’ tails aren’t visible? Sorry, pal, you’re SOL.
- Humanoid often just don’t have tails. Maybe you want to specifically find the ones that do. Tailed_humanoid exists, but it comes very far from covering all the posts on the site featuring humanoids with tails.
- How about anthros of things that can’t have tails in the normal sense, like aeromorphs and flora fauna? Plants don’t have tails, but drawn as anthros, they often do. And while aircraft do have tails, they’re not the same kind of tail we’re talking about. A regular, non-animate aircraft would not get tagged with tail. As anthros, however, they may or may not be depicted with an animal-like tail depending on the artist’s whim. In these cases, not only does tailless not apply, but there’s no standard expectation for these species to either have tails or lack them. So, being able to simply search tail in addition to these particular species would be incredibly useful. Personally, I don’t really care to see either of these depicted without tails. As I said above, tails are one of my favorite anthro characteristics. Species such as these are vastly less interesting to me if they lack tails, or even if the tails aren’t visible.
Now, once this BUR is approved (I have faith that our lovely admins will see the light), the tail tag can be repopulated with at least a few hundred thousand results by implications from all the other tail tags that we already have. Fortunately, since these are broken up among many smaller tags, this can be done with several separate BURs across several days to avoid overburdening the site with too many implications all at once.
Arise, O Great Tail Tag!
EDIT: The bulk update request #2240 (forum #330609) has been approved by @gattonero2001.
Updated by auto moderator