Topic: Undoing this: resuscitating the panther tag

Posted under Tag Alias and Implication Suggestions

The bulk update request #4169 is pending approval.

remove alias panther (0) -> pantherine (188432)
remove alias black_panther (0) -> pantherine (188432)
remove alias panthress (0) -> pantherine (188432)

Reason: Behold, the stated rationale for this alias, in its entirety:

NotMeNotYou said:

Doing this

Here's a long thread of users complaining about the alias: topic #25662

Here's a shorter thread of users complaining about the alias: topic #23225

For reference, here's a set of every post that used to be tagged "panther" before the alias: set:blackestpanthers

And here's a thread of admins arguing among themselves about whether it should be aliased at all: topic #22231

I particularly recommend SnowWolf's post from that last thread (formatting fuckup notwithstanding).

At this point, I think it's safe to say that the dream of a biologically accurate tagging system is dead. Starting with topic #36246, we've made progress towards reverting some of the more anal species aliases. As I pointed out in the precursor to that thread:

wat8548 said:
The problem with scientific taxonomy is that we're not tagging scientific illustrations, we're tagging idealised fantasy depictions of animals drawn by other furries based on little more than a vague pop culture understanding of those species' key traits.

It is an objective fact that "panther" as a distinct species exists in the popular furry imagination, regardless of whether it does in real life. melanistic pantherine will never be an adequate substitute for what the tag used to be, and black_body pantherine is even more useless due to black spots and stripes being eligible for the former tag.

For most posts that users want to tag "panther", there isn't enough information available in the image to decide on a more specific species. It is unlikely, especially when making allowances for anthrofication of the design, that an artist will draw any visible difference between an all-black jaguar and an all-black leopard. Consider this guy, who is only the most recent example I came across:
post #3870154
What do you reckon his "real" species is? For a good illustration of the ongoing nature of this problem, the search set:blackestpanthers leopard still has only a seventh of the total posts in the set after three years, and more than a few of those are just regular leopards appearing in the same post.

Even if the alias stays, the reason for aliasing it to pantherine instead of melanistic is even stupider. Allegedly, some people refer to any big cat as a "panther". a) Citation needed and b) in popular usage that word overwhelmingly refers to black-furred big cats, to such a degree that even somebody who has grown up calling cougars "panthers" could not possibly be unaware that they are in a minority. dragon isn't a real species either, and the creatures in that tag still have less in common with each other than the various panthers do.

A black panther isn't a species though, it is a name for a genetic mutation that leopards (Panthera pardus) and jaguars (Panthera onca)[1] have.

Pantheress is a gendered term, if we unalias it, we might as well unalias lioness and other -ess tags. Ideally it'd be aliased to panther and female, but alias system doesn't support multiple tags.

If you want to search for black panthers, use ~leopard ~jaguar melanistic.

As for having it aliased to pantherine instead of melanistic, I'd argue the reason for that is because people are more likely to search for the species rather than the genetic mutation.

In summary:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_panther "A black panther is the melanistic colour variant of the leopard (Panthera pardus) and the jaguar (Panthera onca)."

wat8548 said:
melanistic pantherine will never be an adequate substitute for what the tag used to be,

Genuine question as someone new to the panther debate: Why?

wat8548 said:
For most posts that users want to tag "panther", there isn't enough information available in the image to decide on a more specific species. It is unlikely, especially when making allowances for anthrofication of the design, that an artist will draw any visible difference between an all-black jaguar and an all-black leopard.

I think this works great. Not enough information to distinguish between species, but it's definitely in the pantherine genus? Tag the pantherine genus and no species.

My current take is that the real problem is the melanistic tag isn't catching all the black panthers. Seems the solution would be to alias black_panther -> melanistic, as you've mentioned, and then to search for black panthers you'd search for pantherine melanistic. For the panther tag, maybe it should be disambiguated and redirect to melanistic, cougar, and pantherine?

Updated

chaser said:
A black panther isn't a species though, it is a name for a genetic mutation that leopards (Panthera pardus) and jaguars (Panthera onca)[1] have.

That begets the question then. Why isn't Polar_Bear aliased to Bear? Why isn't Grizzly_Bear also aliased to Bear? Both of these are genetic mutations, and given your point they shouldn't be used!

cloudpie said:
Genuine question as someone new to the panther debate: Why?

I think this works great. Not enough information to distinguish between species, but it's definitely in the pantherine genus? Tag the pantherine genus and no species.

My current take is that the real problem is the melanistic tag isn't catching all the black panthers. Seems the solution would be to alias black_panther -> melanistic, as you've mentioned, and then to search for black panthers you'd search for panthera melanistic. For the panther tag, maybe it should be disambiguated and redirect to melanistic, cougar, and pantherine?

Gonna apply that response I made here too. There are multiple tags for subspecies that are very similar to well-known species. I mentioned two of them already, but I bet there are more and this makes perfect sense if someone wants to see or blacklist something oddly specific rather than broad.

wolfmanfur said:
That begets the question then. Why isn't [Polar_Bear] aliased to [Bear]? Why isn't [Grizzly_Bear] also aliased to Bear? Both of these are genetic mutations, and given your point they shouldn't be used!

Because polar bear is a species, ursus maritimus. Grizzly bear (ursus arctos horribilis) is a subspecies of brown bear (ursus arctos). Bear is the ursidae family which contains many species. Whether to alias all subspecies to their species is another conversation but I think currently the rule is that subspecies get their own tag.

Black panther is not a subspecies, it literally just means a big cat (big cat means pantherine genus) with melanism. Melanism is like the opposite of albinism.

Updated

I've always been of the stance that the tagging system should favour desired results over 1:1 "accuracy", the whole argument for the pussy vs vagina thing comes to mind. Granted, I think hybrids that exist in a reliable and common enough state to be pulled up should be given their own tag that implies hybrid rather than simply aliased away, and that moderation really does jump the gun on a lot of this (catsharks, an actual category of sharks, got aliased to hybrid in a fit of administrative pique, for example), so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

cloudpie said:
Because polar bear is a species, ursus maritimus. Grizzly bear (ursus arctos horribilis) is a subspecies of brown bear (ursus arctos). Whether to alias all subspecies to their species is another conversation but I think currently the rule is that subspecies get their own tag.

Black panther is not a subspecies, it literally just means a big cat (big cat means pantherine genus) with melanism. Melanism is like the opposite of albinism.

There is a tag for Black_Bear which is a bear with black fur. This is a subspecies, sure, but at least within the furry fandom that is redundant information given that anthro black bears have usually the same body shape and proportions to an anthro grizzly bear or polar bear..

Also, there is an argument to be made for that. The tags are meant to be useful to search for anything. If someone wants to search for a panther with black fur and nothing else, they cannot reliably rely on black_body because it gets applies to pretty much everything. Black_countershading implicates black_body for example.
If someone wants to find pictures of black panthers (or what they consider to be black panthers within the furry fandom), they may have pictures that they don't want to see to show up. This is particularly why the set linked in the thread starter exists, I make many sets simply because when I use the tags only I don't see what I wanna see and it is irritatinbg.

Even if we argue that is not enough for Black_Panther to be its own tag. Pantherine is still largely useless as a substitute for panther. Look at the tags that can implicate it. Many furs use the word panther to describe their character even if it is supposed to be a different animal and it would be impossible to assume whether or not it is a leopard, a cougar or a jaguar. This ultimately leads to a situation where the post is not properly tagged, and as a result, it is harder to find or blacklist, coming back to my first paragraph pointing out how important tags are. For all intents and purposes, panther is its own subspecies in the furry community. For instance, the Pink_Panther is a panther.

wolfmanfur said:
There is a tag for Black_Bear which is a bear with black fur. This is a subspecies, sure, but at least within the furry fandom that is redundant information given that anthro black bears have usually the same body shape and proportions to an anthro grizzly bear or polar bear..

Black bear is a species, ursus americanus. It's not just a bear with black fur. Not all of them are even black.
Edit: Whoops, I was wrong, the black_bear tag on e6 is an informal grouping because two bear species have the common name "black bear" so both of those species tags implicate black_bear, similar to the badger tag. This is still a different situation from black panther because "black panther" is not a common name shared by multiple actual species, it's a term referring to any pantherine (or a generic vague pantherine) with all black fur, a condition also known as melanism.

wolfmanfur said:
Also, there is an argument to be made for that. The tags are meant to be useful to search for anything. If someone wants to search for a panther with black fur and nothing else, they cannot reliably rely on black_body because it gets applies to pretty much everything. Black_countershading implicates black_body for example.
If someone wants to find pictures of black panthers (or what they consider to be black panthers within the furry fandom), they may have pictures that they don't want to see to show up. This is particularly why the set linked in the thread starter exists, I make many sets simply because when I use the tags only I don't see what I wanna see and it is irritatinbg.

Even if we argue that is not enough for Black_Panther to be its own tag. Pantherine is still largely useless as a substitute for panther. Look at the tags that can implicate it. Many furs use the word panther to describe their character even if it is supposed to be a different animal and it would be impossible to assume whether or not it is a leopard, a cougar or a jaguar. This ultimately leads to a situation where the post is not properly tagged, and as a result, it is harder to find or blacklist, coming back to my first paragraph pointing out how important tags are. For all intents and purposes, panther is its own subspecies in the furry community. For instance, the Pink_Panther is a panther.

This is why we should tag all the black panthers (which we've established the fandom usually uses to refer to generic big cats, pantherine genus, with black fur) with both pantherine and melanistic so people can search pantherine melanistic and it'll return all the black panthers. No black_body required. It would be just as functional as a separate tag and also happens to be biologically accurate, a nice plus.

Updated

cloudpie said:
Black bear is a species, ursus americanus. It's not just a bear with black fur. Not all of them are even black.
Edit: Whoops, I was wrong, the black_bear tag on e6 is an informal grouping because two bear species have the common name "black bear" so both of those species tags implicate black_bear, similar to the badger tag. This is still a different situation from black panther because "black panther" is not a common name shared by multiple actual species, it's a term referring to any pantherine (or a generic vague pantherine) with all black fur, a condition also known as melanism.

This is why we should tag all the black panthers (which we've established the fandom usually uses to refer to generic big cats, pantherine genus, with black fur) with both pantherine and melanistic so people can search pantherine melanistic and it'll return all the black panthers. No black_body required. It would be just as functional as a separate tag and also happens to be biologically accurate, a nice plus.

I was speaking of the usage of those words in the furry community, not the lager scientific community.

All the anthro black bears are just regular bears with black fur. All the anthro polar bears arejust regular bears with white fur. I could go on quite honestly.

I adore how you decided to skip over my mention of the pink panther because it completely wrecks your point. By the way, melanistic pantherine as a group of tags is largely useless since there are black tigers, black lions and other black felids in there. When people look up for a panther they wanna see a panther, this is effectively a subspecies in the furry fandom whether or not you agree with it.

Updated

wolfmanfur said:
All the anthro black bears are just regular bears with black fur. All the anthro polar bears arejust regular bears with white fur. I could go on quite honestly.

...I guess so yeah. Species here are a little bit tag-what-you-know.

wolfmanfur said:
I adore how you decided to skip over my mention of the pink panther because it completely wrecks your point.

AFAIK the pink panther is also a generic big cat who is pink and is described well by the pantherine tag as we can't really determine his species further than being a big cat.

wolfmanfur said:
By the way, melanistic pantherine as a group of tags is largely useless since there are black tigers, black lions and other black felids in there. When people look up for a panther they wanna see a panther, this is effectively a subspecies in the furry fandom whether or not you agree with it.

Fair enough, I guess? I still personally disagree as if you really wanted to filter out characters identifiable as lions and tigers you could add -lion and -tiger. But this is ultimately a personal difference in opinion so I can't really argue with it. Also, sorry if I came off aggressive earlier, I didn't mean to.

Updated

wolfmanfur said:
this is effectively a subspecies in the furry fandom whether or not you agree with it.

Thinking about this, by this rule wouldn't a lot of common-in-the-fandom hybrids deserve their own tags? Like folf? But they don't have their own tags.

cloudpie said:
Thinking about this, by this rule wouldn't a lot of common-in-the-fandom hybrids deserve their own tags? Like folf? But they don't have their own tags.

I think hybrid species deserve their own tag. And these tags should imply hybrid+<species> tags.

cloudpie said:
AFAIK the pink panther is also a generic big cat who is pink and is described well by the pantherine tag as we can't really determine his species further than being a big cat.

There is a defining trait though. Like irl lionesses, panthers are often devoid of bodily markings like the pink panther.

Also, sorry if I came off aggressive earlier, I didn't mean to.

No problem.

cloudpie said:
Thinking about this, by this rule wouldn't a lot of common-in-the-fandom hybrids deserve their own tags? Like folf? But they don't have their own tags.

I have no opinion on this topic, but they could. The only problem would be to not let it go out of hands because there are more than trillions of possible combinations.

wolfmanfur said:
One result...

Monotone_fur is super undertagged. Gotta be the change we want to see in the world and work on tagging it :P

Edit: Oh, it's because the pink panther has a lighter colored belly. I guess do -markings then? Looks like markings is also super undertagged, but that can be fixed.
Second edit: Oh boy spotted_fur doesn't imply markings. Might need a marking related BUR at some point. I guess for now -spots -stripes -rosettes would mostly get the job done

Updated

chaser said:
A black panther isn't a species though, it is a name for a genetic mutation that leopards (Panthera pardus) and jaguars (Panthera onca)[1] have.

Allow me to quote from the previous admin thread here:

ratte said:
I do not care.

We are not the fucking Encyclopaedia Brittanica and should stop pretending to be. This is an archive of art produced by a contemporary popular subculture, with many common conventions and myths which all need to be properly organised along with the rest. Gryphons aren't a species either, but they get their own tag. By refusing to engage with the fandom as it actually exists, we are failing in our one job.

EDIT: Also, I love how you undermined your own point by linking to a literal Wikipedia article titled "Black panther". Can't say that about the average catfoxdinosparkledog, can we?

chaser said:
Pantheress is a gendered term, if we unalias it, we might as well unalias lioness and other -ess tags. Ideally it'd be aliased to panther and female, but alias system doesn't support multiple tags.

Obviously, it would then be re-aliased to panther, but the existing alias has to be removed first. Same for black_panther. Though I don't know why I'm talking to you as if you didn't already know that.

chaser said:
If you want to search for black panthers, use ~leopard ~jaguar melanistic.

11 pages of results, whoop-de-do. The set which comprises only posts from before the tag was nuked in December 2018 (so missing over half the current total number of posts) has 14, and the overlap between the two searches is 4 pages. This means that panthers are, at a generous estimate, being tagged according to your standards at best half as frequently as they were before, and I don't imagine for a moment it's because the fandom suddenly lost interest in panthers.

You can also see the deficiencies just by looking at what results do exist. True black panthers, without even a subtle leopard or jaguar colouration, are extremely rare to see in the combo tag, and those that do exist are mostly characters abusing TWYK, such as bagheera_(jungle_book). And even then, bagheera_(jungle_book) -leopard has a lot more results than bagheera_(jungle_book) leopard. Posts like post #1738999 and post #1689063 and post #1687826 and post #1721379 are much rarer in the combo search than they are in just the first few rows of the set.

You're fighting a losing battle over an issue (biological accuracy) that isn't even relevant to the site's mission in the first place. Nine times out of ten, literally the only distinguishing factor between different anthros (sometimes even different ferals) is fur colour. If we can't see anything else, we can't tag anything else.

chaser said:
As for having it aliased to pantherine instead of melanistic, I'd argue the reason for that is because people are more likely to search for the species rather than the genetic mutation.

It's still useless. Nobody refers to all big cats as "panthers" and nobody would expect to see, say, a normal-coloured lion as a search result for that word.

cloudpie said:
Thinking about this, by this rule wouldn't a lot of common-in-the-fandom hybrids deserve their own tags? Like folf? But they don't have their own tags.

The important distinction here is that it is often difficult at the best of times to tell the difference between a fox and a wolf, let alone tell when they were supposed to be mixed together. Most hybrids that aren't straight-up chimeras fail the TWYS test, and those that remain have no common standard for which body parts should be present. By contrast, all panthers are roughly the same size and shape, and have one notable distinguishing feature that everybody agrees on and still tries to tag as "panther" to this day.

You can get a very rough estimate as to the scale of the problem by looking at the results for panther spectags:3, which also includes every generic "big cat" character that people deliberately tagged as pantherine in the absence of further information. And yet the front page is still about 40% black panthers, there are 43 more pages where that came from, and this effectively excludes all non-solo posts. The set proves that the panther and pantherine tags would not be mixed if the alias didn't exist.

Updated

Again, what is wrong with pantherine melanistic? I'm seeing almost entirely the animals you guys want tagged black_panther in here, even more so if you add -tiger -lion.

If the problem is just that melanistic is undertagged, then... fix it? Tag some cats? I did some earlier today.
(And to prevent future undertagging, perhaps we could alias black-panther -> melanistic as I've mentioned earlier)

cloudpie said:
Again, what is wrong with pantherine melanistic? I'm seeing almost entirely the animals you guys want tagged black_panther in here, even more so if you add -tiger -lion.

If the problem is just that melanistic is undertagged, then... fix it? Tag some cats? I did some earlier today.
(And to prevent future undertagging, perhaps we could alias black-panther -> melanistic as I've mentioned earlier)

Alright, so let's have a fun experiment. I officially prohibit you from using the tag deer for an entire year. You may use any other tag you want, but not deer. Let's see how long you last until you give up and break that restriction before it gets lifted exactly 1 year later.
Maybe then you'll understand the problem.

wolfmanfur said:
Alright, so let's have a fun experiment. I officially prohibit you from using the tag deer for an entire year. You may use any other tag you want, but not deer. Let's see how long you last until you give up and break that restriction before it gets lifted exactly 1 year later.
Maybe then you'll understand the problem.

Ok but does pantherine melanistic -tiger -lion return the same results as you're looking for in a black_panther tag or not? (I'm genuinely asking, not sealioning, I'm legit not sure if there's something wrong with those results)

cloudpie said:
Ok but does pantherine melanistic -tiger -lion return the same results as you're looking for in a black_panther tag or not? (I'm genuinely asking, not sealioning, I'm legit not sure if there's something wrong with those results)

How would I know? I didn't have an account in 2018 when the merge happened.

Oh and there are a few characters that aren't panthers listed.
https://e621.net/posts/3859560?q=pantherine+melanistic+-tiger+-lion

This one's a jaguar.

cloudpie said:
(And to prevent future undertagging, perhaps we could alias black-panther -> melanistic as I've mentioned earlier)

If you want that to happen, you will still have to upvote this request first.

So much anger and bitterness these days. It makes it hard to take some sides as seriously as they otherwise ought to be.

wolfmanfur said:
For instance, the Pink_Panther is a panther.

Yes, and "Pink Panther" is his name. It's not the same thing as black panther. Treating it as such would be like insisting "Bagheera" should be the species tag for melanistic leopards.

wolfmanfur said:
Oh and there are a few characters that aren't panthers listed.
https://e621.net/posts/3859560?q=pantherine+melanistic+-tiger+-lion

This one's a jaguar.

...That's what the term black panther actually refers to in real life, jaguars and leopards, and in real life their rosettes are indeed faintly visible. If black_panther was reinstated, I can't imagine it would exclude them lol. I think you'd have to add either monochrome_fur or -rosettes to your search to exclude that.

cloudpie said:
...That's what the term black panther actually refers to in real life, jaguars and leopards, and in real life their rosettes are indeed faintly visible. If black_panther was reinstated, I can't imagine it would exclude them lol. I think you'd have to add either monochrome_fur or -rosettes to your search to exclude that.

Bagheera and the pink anther have solidly colored fur. The examples posted by wat have solidly colored fur, no spots at all and to top it off they areall black panthers.

We know what is and isn't a panther, it isn't just a "big cat" tag we give to a bunch of random felines. It's especially unhelpful when a pop culture character is specifcally referred to as a panther because it is impossible to search normally and adding negative tags to weed out trash means that if I want to see pictures of a panther getting fucked by a tiger,it becomes impossible.

clawstripe said:
So much anger and bitterness these days. It makes it hard to take some sides as seriously as they otherwise ought to be.

Yes, and "Pink Panther" is his name. It's not the same thing as black panther. Treating it as such would be like insisting "Bagheera" should be the species tag for melanistic leopards.

It's hard to stay calm when I have to reiterate the same point 5 times because some folks are brick walls.

Aside from this, "Pink Panther" is a as much of a panther as "Sonic the Hedgehog" is an hedgehog.

I have just discovered, while looking into something else entirely, that there used to be a black_panther_(lore) tag. It is currently the only lore-type tag with 0 posts.

It was first applied, and set as a lore-type tag, by Millcore on 2020-06-07. Its debut post was post #2250088 (which is still not tagged with anything more specific than pantherine).

Over the next few hours, it was applied to a large number of other posts, principally by the user Odisaodi, although Millcore came back for another post right at the end. Then, less than 12 hours after it was created, NotMeNotYou ran what we now know was the "nuke" BUR command on the lot of them. This removes a tag from all of its posts without creating a new history entry - as a result, black panther "removals" are still showing up in the changelog to this day. We can only determine the culprit because he also ran a script to replace a small minority of them with melanistic at the same time, which did leave a history trail.

There have been two more isolated attempts to revive the tag since then - the first by laranja a week later, and the last by Rainbow Dash in September 2021. The first one was removed manually by gattonero2001 (not then an admin) after it was mentioned in this forum thread four months later. The latter was self-removed after one minute, with the enigmatic edit reason, "love you milly".

See what I mean about even the admins not agreeing about this?

wat8548 said:
I have just discovered, while looking into something else entirely, that there used to be a black_panther_(lore) tag. It is currently the only lore-type tag with 0 posts.

It was first applied, and set as a lore-type tag, by Millcore on 2020-06-07. Its debut post was post #2250088 (which is still not tagged with anything more specific than pantherine).

Over the next few hours, it was applied to a large number of other posts, principally by the user Odisaodi, although Millcore came back for another post right at the end. Then, less than 12 hours after it was created, NotMeNotYou ran what we now know was the "nuke" BUR command on the lot of them. This removes a tag from all of its posts without creating a new history entry - as a result, black panther "removals" are still showing up in the changelog to this day. We can only determine the culprit because he also ran a script to replace a small minority of them with melanistic at the same time, which did leave a history trail.

There have been two more isolated attempts to revive the tag since then - the first by laranja a week later, and the last by Rainbow Dash in September 2021. The first one was removed manually by gattonero2001 (not then an admin) after it was mentioned in this forum thread four months later. The latter was self-removed after one minute, with the enigmatic edit reason, "love you milly".

See what I mean about even the admins not agreeing about this?

All this conspiring over a tag about a fictitious furry species popular in cartoons when they could have spent their day dealing with real issues like the mistagging that warranted a bur by shitposter yesterday. https://e621.net/forum_topics/37195

Really makes you wonder some folks' priorities.

sigh

Huh, I always thought panther was yet another name for the mountain lion. I do seem to be wrong there, though.

nimphia said:
Reminder that lore tags can only be made by staff, so this isn't really "circumventing".

Anything could have _(lore) added to the ending; It's the categorization of lore tags that can only be done by staff. What would you call this if not an attempt to circumvent an alias?

versperus said:
Anything could have _(lore) added to the ending; It's the categorization of lore tags that can only be done by staff. What would you call this if not an attempt to circumvent an alias?

Can't add tag test_(lore): Can not create lore tags unless admin; Name is invalid.

nimphia said:
Can't add tag test_(lore): Can not create lore tags unless admin; Name is invalid.

Oh, good; they patched that. Black_panther_(lore) appears to have been created four years ago before programming stopped people. If you look at the post in question tag history, the tag has been added and removed multiple times. The fact it already exists means people can use this tag until it's dealt with. So, removing it from the tag pool is the best recourse for the current tagging protocol.

Updated

versperus said:
Oh, good; they patched that. Black_panther_(lore) appears to have been created four years ago before programming stopped people. If you look at the post in question tag history, the tag has been added and removed multiple times. The fact it already exists means people can use this tag until it's dealt with. So, removing it from the tag pool is the best recourse for the current tagging protocol.

Millcore was the one who made the tag and was initially set in the lore category, then changing it a couple times before Slyroon set it to the invalid category.

https://e621.net/tag_type_versions?search%5Btag%5D=black_panther_%28lore%29

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