So I know most tricks for filtering results, but is there a way to cut results to a single tag e.g. if I type in "avian" then posts with only avian and no other species show up?

According to the documentation, there's a way to approximate that, but it's not completely straightforward. avian speciestags:2 should get you anything tagged "bird" (but not a specific type of bird) "gryphon" "harpy" or "avian_(starbound)", but as I mentioned it will fail to grab anything tagged, say, "crow" (since crow implies bird which implies avian, bringing the species tags up to 3). avian speciestags:1..3 should get any single species of avian in a picture, but should fall down on, say, a crow and a parrot or whatever.

But this is all a moot point because the tag count meta searches seem to be bugged (searching for speciestags:2 avian pulls up post #512910, which has, by visual inspection, 7 species tags). So I think you're out of luck. And I think I need to go off to the bug report thread (appears to be a known issue, actually).

since members can search up at the max of 8 tags (i think), these should work if everything is properly tagged, it might not tho.

avian -mammal -scaly -Pokémon -marine

If the results aren't that specific you can search up more tags to block search / temporarily put on your blacklist while searching.

https://e621.net/wiki/show?title=tag_group%3Aspecies

That works in that particular case, but if you wanted anything more specific than a top level grouping (say, only tigers), it breaks down.

Honestly I would just put this into your blacklist:

-avian

pokémon

dragon

marine

scalie

And search for -mammal avian and maybe wings (since they would almost always have these showing; they are fun to draw).

The -avian in your blacklist will blacklist anything without an avian, and blacklisting the others would make sure they don't show up in your search. The reason I suggest doing -mammal instead of putting it in your blacklist is simple: Since it's the largest species tag, it would take the biggest chunk out of your search results.

As for speciestags search, I would actually suggest speciestags:>0, since it would (hopefully) remove anything from the search that has no species at all, but give a lot of room for, say, 3 different kinds of birds. Never mind, this wouldn't help you.

Just_Another_Dragon said:
since members can search up at the max of 8 tags (i think), these should work if everything is properly tagged, it might not tho.

It's only 6, but you can expand it quite a bit by blacklisting smaller terms and negating bigger ones.

parasprite said:
As for speciestags search, I would actually suggest speciestags:>0, since it would (hopefully) remove anything from the search that has no species at all, but give a lot of room for, say, 3 different kinds of birds.

If the search includes avian, that wouldn't do anything at all (avian is a species tag, thus every post in the results has at least one species tag). The reason to use limits on a species tag would be to set a lower limit to ensure more than one species being present, or to use an upper limit to lessen the odds of results with more than one species, without relying on blacklist tricks (which become an enormous pain in the ass if you want to find, say, one particular species (especially a mammalian species) rather than a very broad category such as avian).

Snowy said:
If the search includes avian, that wouldn't do anything at all (avian is a species tag, thus every post in the results has at least one species tag). The reason to use limits on a species tag would be to set a lower limit to ensure more than one species being present, or to use an upper limit to lessen the odds of results with more than one species, without relying on blacklist tricks (which become an enormous pain in the ass if you want to find, say, one particular species (especially a mammalian species) rather than a very broad category such as avian).

Oh, you're right. I'm silly. I usually only search by equine or nothing so that obvious fact must have slipped my mind.