The bulk update request #5113 has been rejected.

change category blender_(software) (3) -> meta

Reason: I can tell this is going to be a controversial one, but I think this is worth arguing for. This request exists already as part of another BUR, but part of it is in need of editing and the original poster no longer appears to be around to edit it. Other softwares are intentionally omitted from this BUR due to other issues that may prevent the BUR going through (e.g. source_filmmaker not having separate tags for the renders and the copyright itself) but I'll tackle these in future BURs if this one does go through.

I'd really recommend reading through all the posts featured at the bottom of this post and forming your own opinion, but I'll summarise the key points here because I know people don't like to read.

TLDR:

• The main argument against the blender_(software) tag existing is that it violates twys and that the tag is intended for posts that feature Blender UI or other copyrights.
• The new e621:rules (3 months ago) have added a clarification that general tags must follow TWYS, but Tags in other categories are valid if the information they are conveying is objectively true, such as the artist's name or the image's aspect ratio. - this new leniency may lend more credibility to a Blender tag existing in meta.
• blender_(software) and blender_(copyright) are now separate tags.
• While it's harder to tell if something is made in Blender or not, metatags for traditional works like pencil_(artwork), painting_(artwork), watercolor_(artwork) are often hard to tell too - often resulting in just believing what the artist says at the source.
• There is clearly a demand for this tag, as evidenced by its heavy usage.

Further reading:

• [Feature] Tagging by Software (user 328043, 2018-07-10)
• blender_(software) tag is broken :c (DubsTheFox, 2022-03-25)
• [REJECTED] Tag alias: blender_(software) -> 3d_(artwork) (DubsTheFox, 2022-04-10)
• 3D Animation Tools As Meta Tags (lurkmore, 2023-02-09)
• New Code of Conduct update discussion (2023-03-17) (NotMeNotYou, 2023-03-17)

EDIT: The bulk update request #5113 (forum #369171) has been rejected by @Rainbow_Dash.

EDIT: See topic #44029 for updates on this - faucet

faucet said:

• While it's harder to tell if something is made in Blender or not, metatags for traditional works like pencil_(artwork), painting_(artwork), watercolor_(artwork) are often hard to tell too - often resulting in just believing what the artist says at the source.

It's not the same. Artwork made in pencil vs watercolor vs paints impart a distinctive visual quality to the image. That's part of the reason why these different methods exist, because they create a different look and add to the overall piece. Blender as a 3D modeling/animation program isn't there to create something that looks different from its contemporaries, to the contrary it was made to make things just like its alternatives, as those alternatives were too expensive for non-industry professionals. 3d_(artwork) already covers 3D artwork as distinct from pencil, paints, etc. Blender itself doesn't add to the overall piece like those other media tags.

A tag for made-in-Blender would be closer to something like krita_(software), gimp_(software), etc, being tagged on posts made with those programs, even though the image itself can look identical. It's often impossible to tell what 2D paint program an image was made in, just as it can be impossible to tell what 3D modelling/animation program a post was made with, if the creator doesn't specify. As a copyright tag indicating material owned by the Blender Foundation makes sense, since it's proper ownership attribution (like sega or nintendo). But as a made-in-this-program tag, it's utility is dubious since we can't tag it if the creator doesn't say, and users generally won't be able to rely on it in searches since they're most likely not going to know.

As it is, people have been tagging blender_eevee and blender_cycles for images/animations made with Blender's Eevee and Cycles renderers respectively, which at least has more of an impact on the "look" of the image than just "Blender" (though still rather subtle). And if these two tags are staying, that makes blender_(software) more superfluous as a made-in-this tag to me since it's indicating less about the image.

faucet said:

• There is clearly a demand for this tag, as evidenced by its heavy usage.

A tag being (mis)used a lot isn't a good reason to allow it to stay as-is. A cat is fine too also had heavy usage on posts it wasn't supposed to be on, indicating a high demand for the tag to be used that way, and it still almost got nuked until someone took the time to clean up the thousands of mistags and police it (by a now-former admin who could also hand out records to people who wantonly mistag it).

I disagree that only mediums that have very distinct looks should get tags, since meta tags are unrelated to twys. +1 for software medium tags, they're interesting meta information similar to year tags.

faucet said:

• While it's harder to tell if something is made in Blender or not, metatags for traditional works like pencil_(artwork), painting_(artwork), watercolor_(artwork) are often hard to tell too - often resulting in just believing what the artist says at the source.

Could you not have come up with any better examples of medium tags that genuinely aren't usually very easy to tell?

I don't think software tags are interesting, from either a TWYS or a meta perspective. I'd prefer to see it nuked.

wat8548 said:
Could you not have come up with any better examples of medium tags that genuinely aren't usually very easy to tell?

Different paints can look pretty similar, like oil_painting_(artwork) vs acrylic_painting_(artwork) and sometimes watercolor vs gouache

wat8548 said:
I don't think software tags are interesting, from either a TWYS or a meta perspective. I'd prefer to see it nuked.

I mean... fair enough I guess, I can't really argue with personal opinion lol

watsit said:
A tag for made-in-Blender would be closer to something like krita_(software), gimp_(software), etc, being tagged on posts made with those programs, even though the image itself can look identical. It's often impossible to tell what 2D paint program an image was made in, just as it can be impossible to tell what 3D modelling/animation program a post was made with, if the creator doesn't specify.

I personally wouldn't instantly oppose having software metatags for 2D art applications either, in another thread scaliespe gave the examples of microsoft_paint and flipnote_studio tags having unique styles. I don't think we should be immediately dismissive of other tags like gimp_(software) or clip_studio_paint_(software) either - there's somebody out there that would care.

Year tags are quite comparable in my opinion - they can only be verified with outside information and provides very little reason to search for them, I doubt there's anybody out there who can't get their rocks off unless they know the art they're looking at is from 2007. The year metatags are often omitted because the year of publication isn't known, so it shouldn't be a problem if the software tags are omitted a lot of the time either.

Pretty much every photography website out there lists the make and model of the camera, and the software used to process the photos (Lightroom, Photoshop, etc.) As a website that hosts art (primarily digital art, in fact) I don't see why the information of what software the post was created in would be deemed completely irrelevant to the image.

watsit said:
As it is, people have been tagging blender_eevee and blender_cycles for images/animations made with Blender's Eevee and Cycles renderers respectively, which at least has more of an impact on the "look" of the image than just "Blender" (though still rather subtle). And if these two tags are staying, that makes blender_(software) more superfluous as a made-in-this tag to me since it's indicating less about the image.

I did notice those tags existed, and my intention was to request implying them to blender_(software) if this was successful. No point trying to think too far ahead on a BUR that's going to receive a lot of opposition.

wat8548 said:
I don't think software tags are interesting, from either a TWYS or a meta perspective. I'd prefer to see it nuked.

This is really what it boils down to. On one side is "It should exist, I like it." and the other side is "It shouldn't exist, I don't like it."

I don't think people that don't like something should get to police and suggest nuking the other tags people can use, when one group gets something they like ripped away from them and the other can just do something that everybody else gets told when they don't like something on this website: Don't look at it, don't search for it, don't care about it.

Here's some neat custom CSS that will make you never see this tag again:

.copyright-tag-list:has(div[data-tag="blender_(software)"]) {
    display: none;
}

----

No staff have been willing to nuke this tag thus far, and without any contact from them regarding its status, it leaves it in the de facto state of being a valid tag. Moving it to the meta category at this point is just a formality.

faucet said:
I personally wouldn't instantly oppose having software metatags for 2D art applications either, in another thread scaliespe gave the examples of microsoft_paint and flipnote_studio tags having unique styles. I don't think we should be immediately dismissive of other tags like gimp_(software) or clip_studio_paint_(software) either - there's somebody out there that would care.

Hello, it's me, I care :) and I care about year tags too!

watsit said:
It's not the same. Artwork made in pencil vs watercolor vs paints impart a distinctive visual quality to the image. That's part of the reason why these different methods exist, because they create a different look and add to the overall piece. Blender as a 3D modeling/animation program isn't there to create something that looks different from its contemporaries, to the contrary it was made to make things just like its alternatives, as those alternatives were too expensive for non-industry professionals. 3d_(artwork) already covers 3D artwork as distinct from pencil, paints, etc. Blender itself doesn't add to the overall piece like those other media tags.

Hello! So we meet again, just as I have predicted in the last thread about this same exact issue! And so I'm here to once again disagree with you in particular, as you are probably the most outspoken opponent to the blender tag/software tags in general!
First off all I disagree that 3d_(artwork) is enough to just shove all 3D software into because it contains things like GMOD, SFM, other video game screencaps, VR video game screencaps, ZBrush sculpts, Daz3D renders, MMD renders and animations, Blender renders and animations - all of which are pretty visually distinct from each other and therefore worthy of tags differentiating them if only for that reason.

Furthermore I still think that software like Maya, Houdini, C4D and Blender might not be so visually distinct from each other that you could recognize them at a glance, they still have some differences since these pieces of software have different strengths and weaknesses, different user bases and skill caps.
Which means that artworks created with those pieces of software will follow (on average) slightly different trends and overall 'style'.
For example:
-Maya artworks tend to be more character focused and generally feature higher quality animation work as that's what the software excels at and therefore it's what skilled animators tend to gravitate towards.
-Houdini artworks tend to be more focused on complex simulations and effects - cloth, smoke, liquid, even muscles - that's what the software excels at.
-C4D is more generally rounded like Blender - it can do everything well, but since it's paid software it has a smaller but (on average) more skilled user base that Blender, which should mean that C4D artworks will (on average) be higher quality/fidelity than Blender.
So again - while if you take just two random artworks from Blender and Maya you might not be able to tell which is which, on average all the artworks from each software will follow a different trend. And therefore I think this also qualifies them to have unique tags.

watsit said:
A tag being (mis)used a lot isn't a good reason to allow it to stay as-is. A cat is fine too also had heavy usage on posts it wasn't supposed to be on, indicating a high demand for the tag to be used that way, and it still almost got nuked until someone took the time to clean up the thousands of mistags and police it (by a now-former admin who could also hand out records to people who wantonly mistag it).

AFAIK a cat is fine too situation is not comparable because people were tagging things that weren't even related to the meme - so it wasn't just a case of tag being used in a different way than was initially intended - it was just used completely and objectively wrong on posts that weren't even remotely related to it. With Blender it's different because people are tagging an actual thing - the fact that the post was created in Blender - even though that wasn't the initial intention for the tag, it's also not something that's completely unrelated as in the a cat is fine too case. And this thread literally discusses to legitimize this use which has been common since 2018.

watsit said:
As it is, people have been tagging blender_eevee and blender_cycles for images/animations made with Blender's Eevee and Cycles renderers respectively, which at least has more of an impact on the "look" of the image than just "Blender" (though still rather subtle). And if these two tags are staying, that makes blender_(software) more superfluous as a made-in-this tag to me since it's indicating less about the image.

Now when it comes to these tags I'm a bit on the fence - while you're correct that some rendering engines have a huge impact on the look, there's also a ton of them which are very similar and produce virtually identical results. Cycles and Eevee are two very different types of engines so they are different, but say Cycles and Octane and Arnold are the exact same type of engine and can even all be used in Blender so can produce nearly identical results. Of course these engines can also have some strengths and weaknesses and so on average maybe they will have some actual differences, but I don't know if it's worth going that much in depth - it might be a bit too technical to have all these rendering engine names listed too - Eevee, Cycles, Octane, Arnold, RenderMan, Vray, MoonRay, MentalRay and probably dozens more with many that can be used in multiple different softwares so this might turn into a huge mess instead of being actually helpful.

wat8548 said:
I don't think software tags are interesting, from either a TWYS or a meta perspective. I'd prefer to see it nuked.

I don't think the arguments like 'I don't like it', 'I don't find it interesting' or 'I don't want to see it' are valid arguments for nuking the tag because the tag existing doesn't hurt anybody, it doesn't impact the way you browse the website, it doesn't impact your experience and it doesn't take away any of the site's functionality away. So people that like it - can use it, but nobody is forced to do so. On the other hand if it was nuked it would impact everybody that liked it, that found it interesting and that was using it - it would negatively impact the ability to search for this type of thing.
In other words if the tag stays then there's no negative impact on anybody but it's beneficial to some so it has positive impact.
But if it does get nuked there's gonna be some negative impact on some people and no additional positive impact on anybody.
Nuking it has only negative impact, even if it's only on a part of the community. Leaving it has no negative impact at all.

angrydraconequus said:
First off all I disagree that 3d_(artwork) is enough to just shove all 3D software into

Maybe not, but if there are more distinct styles of 3D artwork worth tagging, the tag should be based on the visual factors under consideration, rather than the name of the software that happens to look that way at a given point in time. Particularly when a given piece of software can look different based on various setting in the program and the person using it (someone who does quality work with SFM can make art/animations that are indistinguishable from most Blender works, and people can make stuff in Blender that you couldn't tell was made in Blender).

angrydraconequus said:
AFAIK a cat is fine too situation is not comparable because people were tagging things that weren't even related to the meme - so it wasn't just a case of tag being used in a different way than was initially intended - it was just used completely and objectively wrong on posts that weren't even remotely related to it.

Like the blender_(software) tag. It explicitly states, per the last update to the tag by the head admin:

This should only be tagged if the user interface (UI), logo, or related assets are visible (e.g.: Suzanne, Big Buck Bunny, etc), not if it was merely made in Blender.

So tagging blender_(software) on posts that were just made in Blender without any related assets was just as objectively wrong as using a cat is fine too without being related to the meme.

angrydraconequus said:
Now when it comes to these tags I'm a bit on the fence - while you're correct that some rendering engines have a huge impact on the look, there's also a ton of them which are very similar and produce virtually identical results. Cycles and Eevee are two very different types of engines so they are different

Which also goes against the idea of using blender_(software) for a post simply being made in it. A post made with Cycles vs Eevee, as you admit, can look very different, despite both being "Blender". Other renderers may be made that create a different look from those too, so the argument that you get a general "style" from specific software doesn't work. blender_(software) doesn't specify what rendering was used, so it's even less useful in saying anything about the visual results.

angrydraconequus said:
Nuking it has only negative impact, even if it's only on a part of the community. Leaving it has no negative impact at all.

Ideally it wouldn't be nuked. Preferably it would be used for what it was made for:

the user interface (UI), logo, or related assets

Changing the tag to be made-in-Blender (with no information about the visual aspects of the post) is as much of a negative for that purpose as nuking it. Removing the tag from posts simply made-in-Blender doesn't take away information about what a post looks like though, since being made in Blender doesn't say anything about what it looks like to begin with, making it more beneficial to enforce what the tag is made for.

watsit said:
Ideally it wouldn't be nuked. Preferably it would be used for what it was made for: the user interface (UI), logo, or related assets
Changing the tag to be made-in-Blender (with no information about the visual aspects of the post) is as much of a negative for that purpose as nuking it. Removing the tag from posts simply made-in-Blender doesn't take away information about what a post looks like though, since being made in Blender doesn't say anything about what it looks like to begin with, making it more beneficial to enforce what the tag is made for.

Which would be identical to nuking the tag. The amount of posts that actually feature blender logo, interface or related assets is literally somewhere in the single or maybe double digit range at most while we have over 11 thousand posts that are known to be made in Blender thanks to the current use of the tag. That knowledge would go away if the tag was removed in favor of it's original intended use. Instead of you know - creating separate tags for these two things which would be much more sensible? Because I still don't understand why you're acting like we can't have both at the same time - like it has to be one OR the other.

watsit said:
Which also goes against the idea of using blender_(software) for a post simply being made in it. A post made with Cycles vs Eevee, as you admit, can look very different, despite both being "Blender". Other renderers may be made that create a different look from those too, so the argument that you get a general "style" from specific software doesn't work. blender_(software) doesn't specify what rendering was used, so it's even less useful in saying anything about the visual results.

Yes, but the renderer is responsible for rendering the piece which does some lighting calculations and all that but it's the software that allows the scene to be created in the first place. And different softwares make different scenes possible - as I've said, some are better for animation, some are better for simulations and some are more all around. So even if Maya, Houdini and Blender all used the same render engine, the types of things that people create with those softwares would still differ (on average). So distinct tags for these software still make sense - because they focus on different things and have different user bases and different goals and therefore have influence on the final artwork. You might find that some things which can be done in Houdini are impossible to do in Blender and Maya, some things that can be done in Maya might be impossible in Blender and Houdini etc.
Another way to look at it is to say that these softwares are like different cultures - and even though many cultures used similar tools to create artworks, the themes of their art are usually different and unique.

watsit said:
So tagging blender_(software) on posts that were just made in Blender without any related assets was just as objectively wrong as using a cat is fine too without being related to the meme.

Not really, because the blender_(software) tag does say something unique that no combination of other tags can provide - it tells you that the artwork was created in that software, which is an actual, real piece of knowledge - and while You might find that piece of knowledge useless, not everybody will - some care about it and think it's interesting.
Meanwhile the a cat is fine too tag was being used in a way that wasn't providing any useful information that other tags (or their combination) weren't already providing.
So while the improper use of a cat is fine too was just as much against the rules as the improper use of blender_(software) is, the improper a cat is fine too was completely useless and provided no information while the improper use of blender_(software) does provide useful information and is not useless.

watsit said:
Particularly when a given piece of software can look different based on various setting in the program and the person using it (someone who does quality work with SFM can make art/animations that are indistinguishable from most Blender works, and people can make stuff in Blender that you couldn't tell was made in Blender).

Which is why it's even more useful! An artist making a beautiful thing in SFM which is indistinguishable from Blender is so much more impressive than an artist making that same piece in Blender.
The same way as an artist making a Mona Lisa in MS Paint is so much more impressive than painting it in Photoshop just because of the software limitations, and in this case the information in which software was the image created is important as it provides crucial context. Who are you to say, that 3D software doesn't deserve such context?

angrydraconequus said:
Which would be identical to nuking the tag.

Getting rid of mistags and restoring a tag's purpose isn't nuking it, it's fixing it.

angrydraconequus said:
Yes, but the renderer is responsible for rendering the piece which does some lighting calculations and all that but it's the software that allows the scene to be created in the first place.

So you would also tag windows_(software) or linux_(software) for art made using Windows or Linux? And kde_(software) or gnome_(software) for art made using the KDE or Gnome desktop environments? It's all part of the software stack that allowed the scene to be created, even though it doesn't matter to what the result looks like.

angrydraconequus said:
Not really, because the blender_(software) tag does say something unique that no combination of other tags can provide - it tells you that the artwork was created in that software, which is an actual, real piece of knowledge

The tags aren't there to impart general factoids about the creation of the image. Just as we don't tag whether an image was made with a tablet or a mouse, or whether it was a 20 inch canvas or 10 inch, or made as a commission or for personal enjoyment, or whether it cost $10 or $100, or whether it was made in 1 day or 1 month, or whether it was made without interruption or in parts over the course of time, etc. These are all actual real pieces of knowledge about the creation of an image, but it's not relevant to what we see in the final result. The description is a perfectly fine place for information like that.

watsit said:
So you would also tag windows_(software) or linux_(software) for art made using Windows or Linux? And kde_(software) or gnome_(software) for art made using the KDE or Gnome desktop environments? It's all part of the software stack that allowed the scene to be created, even though it doesn't matter to what the result looks like.

You're being facetious, windows and linux are operating systems, meanwhile blender is a software for 3d modeling.

They ain't serving the same purpose and windows and linux alone cannot generate a 3d model, but blender can.

This is the equivalent to saying we need to tag "table_(irl)" or "canvas_(irl)" on most traditional drawings because 99% of artists who do traditional art use a table or a canvas to draw. This is used for support, they arent tools, paintbrushes are tools and so is blender in that respect, however the set group of tools are what determine whether a post must be tagged with painting_(artwork) or drawing_(artwork) and the logic does apply to software as much.

I expected by now you would mention the fact that it's prone to tag wars and mistaggings since all those 3d tools can do 2d as much as 3d and it would be a catastrophe on its own; because that is the major reason why I don't like those tags, but it's also true they will never be nuked because that failed the last time somebody made a bur for it with 4 rows of folks voting either for or against it. I'm hoping the administrators will enforce their right use when everything is said and done.

watsit said:
Getting rid of mistags and restoring a tag's purpose isn't nuking it, it's fixing it.

The end result is the same - you're getting rid of 11 038 data points to restore (and let's be generous here) 50 data points - this is a net loss of 10 988 data points which I would call nuking. Again, there is a solution that preserves both, but you're refusing to acknowledge it.

watsit said:
So you would also tag windows_(software) or linux_(software) for art made using Windows or Linux? And kde_(software) or gnome_(software) for art made using the KDE or Gnome desktop environments? It's all part of the software stack that allowed the scene to be created, even though it doesn't matter to what the result looks like.

Again, strawman - greatly exaggerating the point being argued and then refuting that because it's easier to refute the outrageous exaggerated version instead of addressing the real argument.
But I believe you answered it yourself - the operating system or the desktop environment has absolutely no impact on the result, while the 3D software used to make the 3D artwork itself absolutely does because it's literally the thing the artwork is created with.

watsit said:
The tags aren't there to impart general factoids about the creation of the image. Just as we don't tag whether an image was made with a tablet or a mouse, or whether it was a 20 inch canvas or 10 inch, or made as a commission or for personal enjoyment, or whether it cost $10 or $100, or whether it was made in 1 day or 1 month, or whether it was made without interruption or in parts over the course of time, etc. These are all actual real pieces of knowledge about the creation of an image, but it's not relevant to what we see in the final result. The description is a perfectly fine place for information like that.

No, that's exactly what the meta tags are for and a request to make blender_(software) a meta tag, which would validate it's current use is exactly the thing being proposed in this forum topic.
And your arguments against it sound to me a lot like "We shouldn't make blender_(software) a meta tag because it isn't a meta tag yet".

These discussions always lead to nowhere. Just make the change and see how it works out, and if it doesn't - the nuke option doesn't go away, it's always available. The change literally hurts nobody - it has ZERO negative impact, so just implement it and see how it goes. The nuke option on the other hand has lasting consequences so maybe save it as a last resort hmm?

Tag what you see, and stuff. The blender tag is not about the polygon count, how light is rendered, texture quality, the workflow, experienced/inexperienced users, and especially not about the user base of the program (that is the worst argument I have seen so far tbh).

Also, you literally can't tell the difference. The only arguments I could let count are the so called "fire flies" bright pixels that occur, when the artist doesn't know how lighting works. Or flickering shadows for a similar reason. But this can be tagged with tags that actually describe the visuals.

Dropkick this tag into the orbit.

dubsthefox said:
The blender tag is not about the polygon count, how light is rendered, texture quality, the workflow, experienced/inexperienced users, and especially not about the user base of the program (that is the worst argument I have seen so far tbh).

My discussion with Watsit and it's subsequent derailment into particularities of whether the software has an impact on the artwork or not (it does) is not itself an argument against what's being proposed in this topic.

dubsthefox said:
Tag what you see, and stuff.

This thread is literally proposing to make blender_(software) a meta tag which would by definition make it exempt from TWYS (since meta tags are facts about the image itself, not it's content) - it's the entire point of the discussion. Saying that you don't want blender_(software) to be a meta tag because it's not TWYS is like saying you don't want blender_(software) to be a meta tag because it's not a meta tag - it's redundant and it's exactly the point of the discussion.

I don't think having this tag as a meta tag has any utility at all, using it for content made in Blender is entirely invalid.

I don't really know what we should do with this tag because having it as a copytag would have some actual use, but the current population of the tag is so megafucked that it's pretty much entirely irreparable.
I'm not even sure if nuking the tag and trying to rebuild it from the ground-up as would work, since future irrelevant posts will still inevitably be tagged with this. maybe invalidate the current one and move its wiki def to like blender_ui or something? I dunno...

darryus said:
I don't think having this tag as a meta tag has any utility at all, using it for content made in Blender is entirely invalid.

I don't really know what we should do with this tag because having it as a copytag would have some actual use, but the current population of the tag is so megafucked that it's pretty much entirely irreparable.
I'm not even sure if nuking the tag and trying to rebuild it from the ground-up as would work, since future irrelevant posts will still inevitably be tagged with this. maybe invalidate the current one and move its wiki def to like blender_ui or something? I dunno...

blender_(copyright)

angrydraconequus said:
This thread is literally proposing to make blender_(software) a meta tag which would by definition make it exempt from TWYS (since meta tags are facts about the image itself, not it's content) - it's the entire point of the discussion. Saying that you don't want blender_(software) to be a meta tag because it's not TWYS is like saying you don't want blender_(software) to be a meta tag because it's not a meta tag - it's redundant and it's exactly the point of the discussion.

This should really be copied into the original post.

wolfmanfur said:
You're being facetious, windows and linux are operating systems, meanwhile blender is a software for 3d modeling.

They ain't serving the same purpose and windows and linux alone cannot generate a 3d model, but blender can.

We're talking software stack here, as was mentioned:

the blender_(software) tag does say something unique that no combination of other tags can provide - it tells you that the artwork was created in that software, which is an actual, real piece of knowledge

"Blender" doesn't indicate anything about how the post looks or what's in it, it's simply saying what it was made with, just like those other examples I gave. Nothing facetious about it.

angrydraconequus said:
Again, there is a solution that preserves both, but you're refusing to acknowledge it.

The fundamental issue is we don't otherwise tag the software something was made with. "Preserving both" isn't a solution, as it's carrying on the underlying problem. It being mentioned in the description is fine, but the tags aren't supposed to be the place for it.

angrydraconequus said:
Again, strawman - greatly exaggerating the point being argued and then refuting that because it's easier to refute the outrageous exaggerated version instead of addressing the real argument.
But I believe you answered it yourself - the operating system or the desktop environment has absolutely no impact on the result, while the 3D software used to make the 3D artwork itself absolutely does because it's literally the thing the artwork is created with.

But it doesn't, as we've said before. Different artists and animators can create very different looking results from the same 3D software, or make indistinguishable results from different 3D software. And particularly for software under active development, what it's capable of will change with time as new options are added.

angrydraconequus said:
No, that's exactly what the meta tags are for

No, the Meta category isn't for general factoids about the image's creation.

angrydraconequus said:
These discussions always lead to nowhere. Just make the change and see how it works out, and if it doesn't - the nuke option doesn't go away, it's always available.

Like I said, there's the fundamental issue that the tags aren't supposed to be used for this. "Just make the change" has far more reaching effects than just Blender, as it would be a change to what should be tagged for nearly every post on the site. Cleanup would be a lot messier if it's later undone since it would be a significant number of tags and posts affected.

Are you against year tags and traditional medium tags (that aren't always visually obvious such as different types of paint) too, Watsit?

watsit said:
The fundamental issue is we don't otherwise tag the software something was made with.

I believe everyone here who's pushing to make a blender meta tag intends to do the same for other art programs as well like MS Paint, Clip Studio, SAI, etc. It's basically to match the traditional medium tags, which already exist.

cloudpie said:
Are you against year tags and traditional medium tags (that aren't always visually obvious such as different types of paint) too, Watsit?

Traditional mediums are more visually distinct from each other compared to 3D software, like I said. The year tends to be written on the image, so it makes sense to tag (I would be against tagging years as an assumption; e.g. an artist posts an image in 2022, then someone tags it as 2022 without knowing when it was made).

cloudpie said:
I believe everyone here who's pushing to make a blender meta tag intends to do the same for other art programs as well like MS Paint, Clip Studio, SAI, etc. It's basically to match the traditional medium tags, which already exist.

Software isn't analogous to mediums. Tagging what software digital art was made with would be more like tagging what brands traditional art was made with, where a single brand can encompass multiple mediums (Photoshop, Krita, etc, are all capable of making something that looks like watercolors or paints or pencils), and different brands can create very similar results (images make in SAI can be indistinguishable from images made in GIMP). And people could create custom tools based on a brand (custom brushes and brush settings, custom filter and blending operations, etc), further blurring any distinction between them. Digital art (2D and 3D) is much more versatile and can't be delineated like traditional mediums, so it doesn't make sense to tag software like we tag mediums.

what are people even talking about meta tags not needing to follow TWYS? looking at the stuff under the meta tag category, as far as I can see, the only thing that's true for is maybe the year tags; everything else describes the file itself, the language, the format, or the rendering method. all things that you can see.

pretty much the only stuff that TWYS doesn't strictly apply to is lore tags, character tags, and some species tags.

sipothac said:
what are people even talking about meta tags not needing to follow TWYS?

There's a ton of tags in there that aren't TWYS. All the source ones, for a few. I'd agree that most tags in meta are TWYS (discounting year), but far from all.

scth said:
There's a ton of tags in there that aren't TWYS. All the source ones, for a few. I'd agree that most tags in meta are TWYS (discounting year), but far from all.

I mean, the *_at_source, *_in_description, and *_comments tags are still _kinda_ TWYS, but they're just pointing to stuff that isn't the image itself.

darryus said:
I mean, the *_at_source, *_in_description, and *_comments tags are still _kinda_ TWYS, but they're just pointing to stuff that isn't the image itself.

And art program meta tags would be pointing to the artist's statement about what program they use.

cloudpie said:
And art program meta tags would be pointing to the artist's statement about what program they use.

that's really not a 1-to-1 comparison, though.
the description, comments, and source links are all part of the post. all of the related tags are easily confirmed or falsified. they also provide some amount of utility to the user.
an artist's statment is not part of a post and might not even exist. it's also like, uhhh... hearsay, as in the artist could (although, I'm not sure why they would) be lying. and, probably most important, I don't think tags like these have any tangible use, they're not browsable, they're not blacklistable, they're not searchable, and they don't provide any information about the post to the user.

darryus said:
I don't think tags like these have any tangible use, they're not browsable, they're not blacklistable, they're not searchable, and they don't provide any information about the post to the user.

Um, they are browsable, blacklistable and searchable though. And they do provide information to the user. A year tag for example provides information about when the piece was created. You can also search for posts tagged with a particular year or you could even blacklist a year if you really wanted to. 2012 is an example of a search that you can browse through. Similarly blender_(software) tag is also clearly searchable and browsable and blacklistable and making it into a meta tag would not change that. Also it does provide information to the user - that the art was created in Blender. And while some users like you or Watsit don't find that information interesting, other users do - think of all the posts with comments asking what software was the artist using - and if you don't recall (or don't want to recall) that happening I can tell you from experience that it does happen A LOT. So an information about software being in the tags would be helpful to those curious people that like to know such things.

angrydraconequus said:
And while some users like you or Watsit don't find that information interesting, other users do - think of all the posts with comments asking what software was the artist using - and if you don't recall (or don't want to recall) that happening I can tell you from experience that it does happen A LOT. So an information about software being in the tags would be helpful to those curious people that like to know such things.

Surely a more intuitive place to answer a question about a specific post would be in the description, as suggested? "What software was this post made in" and "what other posts were made in the same software" are two barely related genres of question. We don't allow Tumblr-style "tag rambles" where artists just dump full sentences into the tag field because they think the description is beneath them or something, so we've always enforced a strict separation between information that belongs in the tags and information that belongs in the description.

hopping in here as a 3d artist/animator and fan: i'd love to be able to quickly see what software the artist is using. it cuts down on the "what did you make this in?" question. not that i mind answering but it's more convenient to just have the info right there. it would also make it easier to filter down to certain types of animation to see what other blender artists are doing for inspiration.

if i could vote it would be +1 for making it into a meta tag. it's useful information.

i'd also +1 a vote for adding a source_filmmaker meta tag (as opposed to its current copyright form), because i value being able to filter for or against that software (depending on what kind of style i'm looking for)

edit: oh wait I can vote, nevermind. :P

also if we're keeping blender_eevee and blender_cycles, the OCD in me is annoyed that they wouldn't both imply blender implies 3d_(artwork) or something. idk, it's cleaner in my head.

edit:
one reason people ask is to know what format the assets are in. there are program-specific brushes for 2d art programs, but there's also usually trivial conversion software or the seller will offer another format because it's relatively easy to convert.

for 3d modeling, especially for characters, if it's not in the format for your program, you are SOL. fbx might give you a basic deformation rig to go with a generic model format, but you'll lose many of the program-specific features (constraints and control panels and drivers and light levels and procedural shaders and edge sharpness (maya shit the bed last time i tried to use something exported from it). there are so many different variables and no direct converters. porting a model is a massive amount of work. so that information is very useful to know. i've seen a bunch of fantastic character rigs i'd love to use, but they're Maya-specific :(

please don't compare brushes to complex models like character rigs, they are vastly different.

sentharn said:
it would also make it easier to filter down to certain types of animation to see what other blender artists are doing for inspiration.

Yes I love that you mentioned looking there for inspiration!! 2D artist here and this is exactly what I want to use the clip studio and ms paint tags for!

angrydraconequus said:
Um, they are browsable, blacklistable and searchable though. And they do provide information to the user. A year tag for example provides information about when the piece was created. You can also search for posts tagged with a particular year or you could even blacklist a year if you really wanted to. 2012 is an example of a search that you can browse through. Similarly blender_(software) tag is also clearly searchable and browsable and blacklistable and making it into a meta tag would not change that.

I obviously didn't mean the it was impossible to search/blacklist/browse the tag, I was saying that there's no reason anyone would ever want to. this is like one person saying "sand isn't edible" and another saying "you can swallow sand, so it is edible", but that's not what words mean.

there's 4 main factors that determine if a tag valid.
Searching: can this tag be used for finding a spesific post? (ex: red_fur)
Browsing: can this tag be used to find more content in a general niche? (ex: female)
Blacklisting: can this tag be used to avoid seeing content a user finds objectionable? (ex: whitekitten)
Additional information: can this tag provide useful, actionable information about a post to a user. (ex: sound_warning)

usually tags will fall into multiple of these categories (with browsing and blacklisting usually being two sides of the same coin), but they generally need to apply to at least one of these to be considered valid.
_{these aren't hard rules that are written down anywhere, these are just my general observations of tagging theory over the past 8 years of being on the site.}

angrydraconequus said:
Also it does provide information to the user - that the art was created in Blender. And while some users like you or Watsit don't find that information interesting, other users do - think of all the posts with comments asking what software was the artist using - and if you don't recall (or don't want to recall) that happening I can tell you from experience that it does happen A LOT. So an information about software being in the tags would be helpful to those curious people that like to know such things.

that is what a description is for, my dude.

There are clearly multiple people in this thread who would like to be able to search for posts by software, which a description does not work for. That includes me; I find it interesting to see what people have done with various tools.

I also don't fully understand the pushback. Clearly, very few people are using the tag for it's intended purpose; an alias to give it a more specific name would be useless. A new tag could be created that specifically mentions UI, but that leaves the old tag. At that point, the only options are nuking a tag that clearly has demand, or changing wiki and category to reflect its use.

darryus said:
I obviously didn't mean the it was impossible to search/blacklist/browse the tag, I was saying that there's no reason anyone would ever want to. this is like one person saying "sand isn't edible" and another saying "you can swallow sand, so it is edible", but that's not what words mean.

there's 4 main factors that determine if a tag valid.
Searching: can this tag be used for finding a spesific post? (ex: red_fur)
Browsing: can this tag be used to find more content in a general niche? (ex: female)
Blacklisting: can this tag be used to avoid seeing content a user finds objectionable? (ex: whitekitten)
Additional information: can this tag provide useful, actionable information about a post to a user. (ex: sound_warning)

usually tags will fall into multiple of these categories (with browsing and blacklisting usually being two sides of the same coin), but they generally need to apply to at least one of these to be considered valid.
_{these aren't hard rules that are written down anywhere, these are just my general observations of tagging theory over the past 8 years of being on the site.}

that is what a description is for, my dude.

This already applies to most meta tags. Is anybody blacklisting 2022? No. Does 18:39 help anybody find more content in a specific niche? No. Does huge filesize provide any useful, actionable information? No. These factors you’ve listed may be perfectly appropriate for general category tags, but this hardly has any bearing on meta tags.

And yet, on the contrary, I would argue that the software category tags would be among the few meta tags that actually *do* fulfill these requirements.

Searching: can this tag be used for finding a specific post? - yes, because if you happen to know what software was used to create a specific post that you’re looking for, then the tag can be used to help find it. Many 3D artists have used different software at different points in their careers, and so, for example, you might be looking for a certain old rekin3d post from back when they used Source Filmmaker, but you might not recall what the exact year of publication was (if the year is even tagged) - the software tags can help you find it.
Browsing alright not this one
Blacklisting: can this tag be used to avoid seeing content a user finds objectionable? - definitely this one. Not only is it hypothetically useful, but people already often do blacklist Source Filmmaker specifically. Many, many times has this been mentioned by various users on the forums and other places. Many people just don’t want to see Source Filmmaker content. The reason is because the visual quality of SFM artwork as a whole is significantly lower than that of Blender. While, yes, it is possible to create high-quality artwork in SFM, and it is perfectly common for people to create eye-torturing ugliness in Blender, there is absolutely a significant and tangible difference in overall quality between the two tags. I’ve had to sift through a ton of SFM stuff as a janitor and it’s even made me seriously consider blacklisting it. It’s often not quite bad enough to delete for quality standards, but most SFM art I see really does push that boundary.
And finally… Additional information: can this tag provide useful, actionable information about a post to a user? - also, clearly, yes. Much more so than the year and aspect ratio tags, and many other meta tags already in existence. As one person has already pointed out, artists take inspiration from other artists using the same tools. If you’re a Blender artist, then searching the Blender tag will give you much better results if you’re looking for this sort of inspiration for your own work. Different software have different strengths and weaknesses, so seeing what one artist does in a certain software might not even be possible in Blender, or might just be infeasible or impractical to implement. Sure, this information may not be recognized by the average non-artist user, but 3D artists may be able to recognize these differences, and they are users here too.
Or, let’s consider a different scenario. Some character models are designed for certain software. Source Filmmaker can’t use some character models as-is that Blender can. You can convert a model to be able to be used in SFM, but from what I’ve heard it’s not exactly a simple or easy process, and maybe you don’t want to or somehow can’t do that. Now let’s say you have a 3D model of your character for Blender and you want to find an animator to commission to make an animation with your character. What do you do? Search the Blender tag and see what animators are using that software so you can commission them. Or maybe you want the project file from the commission, but it obviously has to be in the same software that you use, because Blender can’t open a SFM project file. Or any other similar scenarios. Being able to specifically find artists who are known to use certain software definitely has its potential uses.

I really don’t see what all the opposition to this tag is about. It’s completely in line with other meta tags, both in concept and in practice. It does not violate any tagging guidelines. The only real objection I’ve seen here that’s even worth mentioning is the fact that the tag was not initially meant to be used this way. But really, is it such a bad thing to just change how it’s supposed to be used? Had this been the original purpose of the tag from the beginning, none of you would be complaining about it now. It clearly has its uses, it clearly has high demand, so why not just let it be? Tagging is a crowdsourced, community effort. The profoundly widespread and consistent usage of these software tags is a pretty potent indication that the community as a whole finds these to be useful tags.

Now, let’s step back for a moment and ask ourselves: what are meta tags?

They are tags that contain meta information. Information about the post itself.

Now… why? The vast majority of these tags have basically no bearing on searching or blacklisting for the majority of users. Most people really just come here to look for porn to get off to. I’d speculate that animated is probably the only meta tag that is ever actually utilized by the average user. Maybe sound as well. These users simply do not care what the aspect ratio is or what specific kind of traditional artwork medium was used to create it.

So why bother with these tags at all?

Because, this isn’t just a porn site. This site doesn’t exist exclusively to host porn for people, even though that’s all that the majority of users are here for.

What this site is is an art archive. Metadata is extremely valuable to art archivists. That may not be the “average user,” but that is many of our regulars, staff, and power users. People who are here for more than just an endless stream of furry porn. People who spend their hours uploading the artwork that so many come here to enjoy. Those who engage in massive tagging projects to improve the searchability of the archive for the benefit of everybody. These are the people who benefit from these otherwise niche and seemingly pointless meta tags.

An archive such as this not only collects artwork, but categorizes and organizes it. Meta tags are particularly valuable for these purposes. While nobody is actually searching 2022 or 16:9 to achieve their next hit of dopamine, people do use them to form categories and statistics about the site and about furry artwork in general. You can actually see, just by comparing the usage of the year tags, roughly how much artwork was created by the furry fandom year by year. It goes up every year, unsurprisingly as the fandom itself continues to expand, but you can see exactly by how much it goes up, and compare this data to a plethora of other things. This kind of stuff is a goldmine for data nerds. And since this is pretty much the only true public, thoroughly tagged art archive for the furry fandom, we are in a unique position to record and maintain this kind of data. If somebody wants to figure out roughly what percentage of furry artwork was made with Blender in the year 2019, they are not going to go to FurAffinity or Deviantart or anywhere else to try to gather that data; they’re going to come here. You just cannot reliably pull that kind of information from those kinds of websites. They aren’t designed to support it. But here, all you have to do is look at the post counts of meta tags, and you have your information immediately. Just one of the wonders of being an archive.

So with that said, are the software tags useful for at least this purpose of archival and categorization? The answer is quite emphatically yes. These would probably be the most important meta tags for that purpose behind the year tags, and maybe the media tags. What software is used to create a given piece of artwork is profoundly relevant to statistical representations of the vast data hosted here. We could combine them with the year tags or upload dates to identify trends in software usage among the furry art community. We could identify correlations between software and ratings or favorite counts. Spoiler alert: Blender posts score far higher than SFM posts on average - but by exactly how much? We can find out! We have the data to do that! As long as we don’t demolish the software tags. We could also do some very interesting comparisons between 2D software if we can get those as well established. Microsoft Paint is already a thoroughly well-established 2D art software tag, but in the future we could compare it to Photoshop and Krita and Clip Studio Paint to see what kinds of ratings artwork made with these programs get compared to one another. There will almost certainly be tangible differences between them due to software limitations (ms paint particularly), different userbase, price point (do more successful artists on average use the more expensive software?) and so on. This information is all very useful for an archive - really, the only archive - from which useful statistical data on these subjects can be derived.

Alright, that’s my rant. Sorry for making you read all that - those of you who didn’t gloss over it completely, that is. My TL;DR version is that this is an art archive, not just a porn site. We categorize and organize artwork just for its own sake. Software tags are quite useful for that purpose, so let’s keep them.

scaliespe said:
This already applies to most meta tags. Is anybody blacklisting 2022? No. Does 18:39 help anybody find more content in a specific niche? No. Does large filesize provide any useful, actionable information? No. These factors you’ve listed may be perfectly appropriate for general category tags, but this hardly has any bearing on meta tags.

I said that they need to apply to at least one, not all four.
year tags are arguably mostly a browsing tag, but honestly, I'm not sure if they really fit with the rest of the normal tags on the site. the aspect ratio tags are searching tags mostly, but there are situations where you are browsing for a file with a spesific aspect ratio, I mean I'm not sure how often people are using e6 to find wallpapers or lockscreens, but the possibility exists. the filesize tags... uhh, yeah I'm not sure they fit anywhere.

darryus said:
that is what a description is for, my dude.

TIL you can only search for one word in a description. that sucks, especially combined with the VA tag issue, where the answer was "search in the description".

that is not a good solution. if I want to search for ziggyzack (VA) and blender without a blender tag, i can't do that.

also FWIW aspect ratio is good to search to study how people frame things (composition is hard ok)

i also don't understand the pushback here, nor the circular logic of "it shouldn't be a meta tag because it's not a meta tag". what is the actual tangible downside of implementing this tag?

sentharn said:
TIL you can only search for one word in a description. that sucks, especially combined with the VA tag issue, where the answer was "search in the description".

that is not a good solution. if I want to search for ziggyzack (VA) and blender without a blender tag, i can't do that.

...How many words do you think are in "Blender"?

wat8548 said:
...How many words do you think are in "Blender"?

Clip Studio Paint, MS Paint, Source Filmmaker, etc. are all multiple words and as such cannot be searched for in descriptions.

wat8548 said:
...How many words do you think are in "Blender"?

at least one!

but i can't search for blender + ziggyzack (ziggyzack is a voice actor on a bunch of 2d and 3d animations, but as a VA does not get an artist tag) for example. it was the first example that came to mind but being able to search for only a single keyword/phrase in the description is limiting.

EDIT: my bad, I had it backwards. I can do that, but apparently searching for multiple words is not allowed for a single search term. still sucks. see above post for examples.

darryus said:
I said that they need to apply to at least one, not all four.
year tags are arguably mostly a browsing tag, but honestly, I'm not sure if they really fit with the rest of the normal tags on the site. the aspect ratio tags are searching tags mostly, but there are situations where you are browsing for a file with a spesific aspect ratio, I mean I'm not sure how often people are using e6 to find wallpapers or lockscreens, but the possibility exists. the filesize tags... uhh, yeah I'm not sure they fit anywhere.

I didn’t necessarily mean to imply that they ought to fit all four categories. Few tags do. Those were just some specific examples I picked out to illustrate my point.

I don’t think very many, if any users ever use the year tags for browsing, assuming we’re using your definition of the word: looking for more content in a general niche. With the possible exception of the ancient art years (in which case, you can just use that tag instead of the specific years) I don’t think there is any such general niche to the year tags. The only specific use I could think of would maybe be for the Searching category, if you just happen to recall the exact year that an image was produced (and assuming the year is actually tagged), you could use that to find it. But I doubt most people know or memorize the years of publication of artwork they want to find. Very niche use at best. The same probably applies to aspect ratios, but even more so. Nobody memorizes the aspect ratio of artwork. Even being one pixel off disqualifies a post from the aspect ratio tag, so you can’t even guess at the aspect ratio based on the shape of the image. Wallpaper exists for the purpose of finding wallpapers, which is probably more useful for that purpose.

I’d consider adding a fifth category to your scheme: something like Classification. Tags that can be used to order, categorize, or otherwise organize posts on the site. I think this would cover these meta tags that otherwise struggle to fit into that scheme. This would also grant some extra validity to other tags, like the extremely broad species tags such as mammal. I don’t think mammal is all that useful for much else, as it just covers such a vast variety of species, but it would definitely be useful for classification. You can categorize solo artwork as either mammal or non-mammal. You can categorize traditional_media_(artwork) by year. You can categorize animations by aspect ratio, length, file size, whether or not it’s letterboxed, and software used. Some really specific anatomy tags like finger counts also come to mind here. I’m not sure what else those are actually any good for. But you could categorize humanoids by 4-fingered and 5-fingered, for example; or you could compare how many tyrannosaurus anthros actually keep their distinctive 2-fingered hands versus the humanoid five fingers. I find all of this to be interesting stuff that just doesn’t fit in the other categories.

I actually do use the year tags in my searches sometimes lol. Sometimes I like looking at art from the 90s and 2000s. I'm very glad we have the year tags.

darryus said:
I obviously didn't mean the it was impossible to search/blacklist/browse the tag, I was saying that there's no reason anyone would ever want to.

Just because you personally can't think of a reason for someone to use these tags doesn't mean that such a reason doesn't exist - in fact the only thing this proves is your poor imagination OR maliciousness in making that argument in the first place (since you likely know this argument is bullshit but decided to run with it anyway).
I think scaliespe provided plenty of valid reasons why someone might want to use software tags. Plenty of users already use SFM tag, especially to blacklist content. I have used blender_(software) tag in my searches several times before - looking for animations made in Blender is a valid use case and honestly it doesn't even matter if you don't know the reason why someone might want to do that - It's enough to know there are people that do want that.

darryus said:
that is what a description is for, my dude.

watsit said:
The description is a perfectly fine place for information like that.

You both keep mentioning the description as if it's some holy grail containing all the information in the world. But the problem with the description is that it's not standardized in any way and there's also no expectation for anyone to include any information there, particularly about software.
A tag existing puts an expectation on people that they should use it when appropriate, meanwhile the description is just the Wild West and you can't expect people to actually use it in a consistent manner, especially on a site where the uploaders are often NOT the artists themselves.
I know for a fact that Evalion did several animations which featured characters rigged with full muscle simulation done in Houdini - which for those that might not know is an incredibly impressive feat and that sort of thing was historically only done in big Hollywood productions. Houdini is also an incredibly complex and hard to master 3D software that's probably as far ahead of Blender as Blender is ahead of SFM.
Anyway muscle sims of that caliber are pretty much only possible in Houdini, Maya with a proprietary plugin and some proprietary in-house software used by some studios (obviously not accessible to anyone outside them).
My point being that this is something completely unique only possible in specific software and 3 of these animations are here on e621, yet nowhere is Houdini mentioned - not in the tags and not in the description. In fact Houdini tag doesn't exist, but there are a couple of posts that do mention Houdini in the description. However some of them are only mentions like "I want to start learning Houdini". So searching the description for Houdini isn't all that useful for finding posts made with Houdini - yes you can find some, but you also get false positives and you're obviously missing a lot of posts because as I mentioned - the description is a Wild West - anything goes, so there's no standard to what to include and how to include it.

cloudpie said:
Clip Studio Paint, MS Paint, Source Filmmaker, etc. are all multiple words and as such cannot be searched for in descriptions.

Not to mention the multitude of ways these could be written, abbreviated or even misspelled in the description - Clip Studio Paint, CSP, Clipstudio, MS Paint, MSPaint, Paint, SFM, SourceFilmmaker, Source Filmmaker etc. and also the fact that many software names are also just words or names that are commonly used. Gimp, Houdini, Maya, Blender, Resolve, Premiere, Illustrator etc. All of this could lead to a lot of false positives and a lot of missed results because someone spelled the name in a different way or abbreviated it. There are no implications or aliases in the descriptions, there are no standards. It just doesn't work that way.

angrydraconequus said:
You both keep mentioning the description as if it's some holy grail containing all the information in the world. But the problem with the description is that it's not standardized in any way and there's also no expectation for anyone to include any information there, particularly about software.

We're not saying it's the holy grail of information, but it is a perfectly fine place for additional information that doesn't fit for tagging. Such as how long it took to make, who it was made for, whether it was commercial (commission, YCH, etc) or personal (gift, for themselves, etc), and all the software used in its creation (what the models were made in, what the textures were made in, what the scene was rigged in, what it was animated in, what software was used for touch-ups on the final render, etc; e.g. models made in ZBrush, textures made in Photoshop (using photos taken with a Canon camera), rigged and animated in Blender, touched up using After Effects, then converted to webm using ffmpeg -- tagging all that would be insane, especially as some software can be used for different purposes and a single tag doesn't indicate what purpose it was used for in a given post, but it's perfectly fine to note it all in the description). There may not be any expectation for anyone to include information in the description, just as there's no expectation for anyone to tag software used.

watsit said:
There may not be any expectation for anyone to include information in the description, just as there's no expectation for anyone to tag software used.

No - if a tag exists, there is an expectation to use it whenever applicable and posts should ideally have as many tags as possible. So if the software was a tag there would be a incentive to tag it. There's zero incentive to put it in the description though.
Saying that we can nuke software tags because we have the description is insane - it would lead to losing 99% of software info that's currently present and what would remain in the descriptions would be a mess.
And judging from all the threads over the years in which you argued this it seems you that for some reason you have made it your personal agenda to nuke the blender tag (specifically) out of existence.

watsit said:
e.g. models made in ZBrush, textures made in Photoshop (using photos taken with a Canon camera), rigged and animated in Blender, touched up using After Effects, then converted to webm using ffmpeg -- tagging all that would be insane [...]

Again you're going into the what if/worst case scenario that wouldn't be representative of the average post. Could some posts technically qualify to be tagged with so many different software packages? Probably, but that doesn't mean that all of them would be.

This is akin to saying that we should remove all the sub-categories of traditional_media_(artwork) because an artist technically could use every single one of these techniques in a single artwork (or animation) meaning they would have to tag all 18 of them! That would truly be the end of the world!
Maybe we should also remove the year tags because someone could compile artworks from many decades into one art/animation and then we would have to tag all the years like on post #1443037? How can the poor tagging system recover after that?

angrydraconequus said:
No - if a tag exists, there is an expectation to use it whenever applicable and posts should ideally have as many tags as possible. So if the software was a tag there would be a incentive to tag it. There's zero incentive to put it in the description though.

Except we can't tag it if the artist doesn't say, meaning for it to be tagged here, it would almost certainly be mentioned in the original description that should be brought here. And information shouldn't be removed from the description just because it's tagged too.

angrydraconequus said:
Again you're going into the what if/worst case scenario that wouldn't be representative of the average post. Could some posts technically qualify to be tagged with so many different software packages? Probably, but that doesn't mean that all of them would be.

This is akin to saying that we should remove all the sub-categories of traditional_media_(artwork) because an artist technically could use every single one of these techniques in a single artwork (or animation) meaning they would have to tag all 18 of them!

The sub-categories of traditional media have some visual impact on the image, unlike the software used. And I would still bring up the second point that you cut out from my quote:

[...] especially as some software can be used for different purposes and a single tag doesn't indicate what purpose it was used for in a given post

So to take Blender as an example, blender_(software) could mean a model was made in Blender, or a pre-made model was rigged and rendered in Blender, or a pre-made + pre-rigged model was animated in Blender, causing a single tag to mean different things.

watsit said:
Except we can't tag it if the artist doesn't say, meaning for it to be tagged here, it would almost certainly be mentioned in the original description that should be brought here. And information shouldn't be removed from the description just because it's tagged too.

Some artists upload their own work.
Some artists who don't upload their own work have announced on their social media or on an FAQ what software they use, but don't put that info in the description of every post.

watsit said:
So to take Blender as an example, blender_(software) could mean a model was made in Blender, or a pre-made model was rigged and rendered in Blender, or a pre-made + pre-rigged model was animated in Blender, causing a single tag to mean different things.

The tag means Blender was used in the creation of the image, just like the watercolors tag means watercolor was used somewhere in the creation of the image, even if it's mixed media and watercolor was only used for a small part.

watsit said:
Except we can't tag it if the artist doesn't say, meaning for it to be tagged here, it would almost certainly be mentioned in the original description that should be brought here. And information shouldn't be removed from the description just because it's tagged too.

I don't follow. ruaidri doesn't put in every animation and render that he uses blender_(software), but it's not a secret that he uses blender because he discusses it often. Tagging would add useful information to the post. Is there a threshold of certainty we need to meet to tag something if the artist doesn't directly say it? I don't go around posting in every pic that I made it in blender. Instead I put it where it belongs--in a tag--which is where people expect to find and filter for information on a post.

watsit said:
The sub-categories of traditional media have some visual impact on the image, unlike the software used.

Hard disagree. Extreme example: picoCAD is a 3d modeling system. Here's what its output looks like: https://johanpeitz.itch.io/picocad

Ruaidri's fur system (which I wrote the backbone of before Blender had curve hair objects) is uniquely dependent on the way the Blender renderer renders hair. Check these visual examples. https://github.com/sentharn/encode-normals

Now that he has ported the system all to internal blender mechanisms (which means I don't have to support the addon anymore, thank goodness), and distributed those mechanisms publicly (so he's not the only one that uses it), blender is the only software that can get that specific look.

watsit said:
So to take Blender as an example, blender_(software) could mean a model was made in Blender, or a pre-made model was rigged and rendered in Blender, or a pre-made + pre-rigged model was animated in Blender, causing a single tag to mean different things.

A non-trivial model produced in Blender in any way is going to be rendered in Blender, even the image used to showcase it. Thus, the blender tag is appropriate. This argument makes no sense to me.

sentharn said:
I don't follow. ruaidri doesn't put in every animation and render that he uses blender_(software), but it's not a secret that he uses blender because he discusses it often. Tagging would add useful information to the post. Is there a threshold of certainty we need to meet to tag something if the artist doesn't directly say it?

Yes, that it's accurate. Especially if it's supposed to be useful information to find posts made with Blender because people are interested in seeing what's made in Blender (since we can't actually tell by looking at it); if you can't be sure a particular piece was actually made in Blender, and end up erroneously tagging Blender on a post that was actually an experiment with other software, that will poison the results.

sentharn said:
A non-trivial model produced in Blender in any way is going to be rendered in Blender

Not necessarily. You can export models from Blender in various different model and animation formats, which can be loaded in other programs to continue work with it or render it. That's actually a large portion of Blender's use; it is used to make models for video games, which are exported and loaded in different game engines. Animating and rendering videos within Blender is just one of many uses of it. So making models in Blender then exporting them and animating/rendering it in Source FilmMaker is a possibility.

watsit said:
Yes, that it's accurate. Especially if it's supposed to be useful information to find posts made with Blender because people are interested in seeing what's made in Blender (since we can't actually tell by looking at it); if you can't be sure a particular piece was actually made in Blender, and end up erroneously tagging Blender on a post that was actually an experiment with other software, that will poison the results.

Which can be said for any kind of tagging error really. The possibility of making a mistake is not a valid argument against the existence of tags. Same mistake can be made with tags like the year or traditional media but we have to accept the possibility of making mistakes in a community-driven tagging system. The best we can do is make sure to tag as best as we can and fix mistakes over time, we shouldn't just give up on something because it's hard or inconvenient to tag.

watsit said:
Not necessarily. You can export models from Blender in various different model and animation formats, which can be loaded in other programs to continue work with it or render it.

You are reaching HARD. I know for a fact you're also opposed to tagging model creators on posts as artists (and your solution is again the description). And now you're telling me that you think we would have to tag every software in which every asset was created even though we shouldn't be tagging the artists that created those assets? No, you're clearly just arguing in bad faith and reaching for arguments that you don't even agree with to further your cause.
When tagging software it's generally logical to tag only the thing that you did majority of the work in or at least to tag the most significant software that you - the artist used during the process - this is how it works on sites like Artstation. You don't have to tag every software that was used by other artists to create the assets you're using - now that would be insane.

watsit said:
The sub-categories of traditional media have some visual impact on the image, unlike the software used. And I would still bring up the second point that you cut out from my quote:
So to take Blender as an example, blender_(software) could mean a model was made in Blender, or a pre-made model was rigged and rendered in Blender, or a pre-made + pre-rigged model was animated in Blender, causing a single tag to mean different things.

We already established I disagree that software has no visual impact, and I think I and others sufficiently explained why, so I won't repeat myself.
As for the other thing that's also true of other tags like the year or traditional_media tags - if a post is tagged with multiple years like post #1443037, can you just from the tags alone determine which image was made in which year? Or if the post is tagged with multiple traditional media and digital media tags like post #494182 can you determine which part of the image was created with which technique from the tags alone?

watsit said:
Except we can't tag it if the artist doesn't say, meaning for it to be tagged here, it would almost certainly be mentioned in the original description that should be brought here. And information shouldn't be removed from the description just because it's tagged too.

Yes, I agree - if there's a description at source it SHOULD be brought here as well, however that doesn't always happen. But even when it does it doesn't guarantee that any useful information will actually be there. There's also the fact that other sites - like Furaffinity and Newgrounds have their own tags - and that's where I personally include software information on my animations instead of in the description - how should that be brought if not by being tagged here? Should every uploader be expected to add that custom information to the description?
Also even if there's no information on one animation, but the artist included an information on 10 animations before that and 10 animations after that they were made in Blender, it's reasonable to assume that the animation with missing info was also made in Blender.

angrydraconequus said:
...

i agree with everything you've pointed out.

i feel like we're going in circles at this point rehashing points that have already been made, and people are probably not going to change their minds at this point. how/when can we get a final judgement call on this?

angrydraconequus said:
Which can be said for any kind of tagging error really. The possibility of making a mistake is not a valid argument against the existence of tags. Same mistake can be made with tags like the year or traditional media but we have to accept the possibility of making mistakes in a community-driven tagging system.

Except those mistakes can be fixed. We can see what's in the image and fix the tags appropriately, which we can't do with the software used. If someone guesses watercolor or pencil but it clearly doesn't look like it, we can fix it. If someone guesses 2023 but a different date is written, we can fix it (something I've done, FWIW; not terribly long ago, someone had tagged a post as 2023, when the image itself had the year '22' written on it, which was easily fixed). If someone just guesses Blender and is wrong, no one can know any better except the artist to fix it.

angrydraconequus said:
And now you're telling me that you think we would have to tag every software in which every asset was created even though we shouldn't be tagging the artists that created those assets?

No, I'm saying that if we tag software used as proponents want to, that should be the logical result since every step of the software chain was involved in making the final piece. I have no idea why you're bringing model creators into this since it has nothing to do with the software argument. Although it's worth noting, when modelers are tagged, the tags are kept separate based on what they did for the piece, e.g. the petruz_(copyright) tag for their model work is separate from petruz for their own art/animation work. So there is precedent for using different tags for modeling vs animation work, which a single blender_(software) tag lacks.

angrydraconequus said:
When tagging software it's generally logical to tag only the thing that you did majority of the work in or at least to tag the most significant software that you - the artist used during the process - this is how it works on sites like Artstation.

So that's even more reliant on the artist providing more information, which we can't verify it with what we see in the final image.

angrydraconequus said:
Yes, I agree - if there's a description at source it SHOULD be brought here as well, however that doesn't always happen. But even when it does it doesn't guarantee that any useful information will actually be there.

And if there's not any useful information there, we can't tag it here anyway (even if we do start tagging software used, I'm vehemently opposed to tagging software based on taggers guessing what was used). If the description isn't brought over when a post is made, we can always bring it over afterward as long as there's a valid source (something I've done plenty of times).

angrydraconequus said:
There's also the fact that other sites - like Furaffinity and Newgrounds have their own tags - and that's where I personally include software information on my animations instead of in the description - how should that be brought if not by being tagged here?

We don't copy source tags as e6 tags in either case. Anyone can tag "Blender" on their source post for any reason, even when it wasn't significant to the final piece. But what I've done when I see relevant info in the source tags (or, as I've seen some artists do, write more of the description as sentences in their tags) is to add a line at the bottom of the description like

FA tags: ...

Similar to how we can copy over #tags from Twitter or wherever in the description.

angrydraconequus said:
Should every uploader be expected to add that custom information to the description?

No, just as they aren't expected to add every valid tag to a post. As long as they tag the major things (artist, genders, controversial subjects, etc) and get to at least 5 (preferably 15) distinct tags, they're good and other users can help fill in more minor details they see missing.

angrydraconequus said:
Also even if there's no information on one animation, but the artist included an information on 10 animations before that and 10 animations after that they were made in Blender, it's reasonable to assume that the animation with missing info was also made in Blender.

Every post is tagged on its own. There's nothing to say that the one animation not being mentioned as being made in Blender was in fact not made in Blender which is why they didn't mention it. People sometimes experiment, they sometimes experiment in the middle of a series, so if they don't say, we shouldn't assume.

I'd like to point out again that a significant number of artists do upload their own work to e621, and for those that don't, it's very easy to reach out and ASK them what software they use either in general or for a specific piece, if they really haven't written it anywhere. Artists don't bite and are usually happy to answer this question if it's not already in a FAQ. So if someone guesses Blender and is wrong, it actually is trivially easy to get the correct answer directly from the artist themself.
If there's a language barrier? Tons of e6 users are multilingual, surely someone's available who speaks the artist's language.

cloudpie said:
I'd like to point out again that a significant number of artists do upload their own work to e621, and for those that don't, it's very easy to reach out and ASK them what software they use either in general or for a specific piece, if they really haven't written it anywhere. Artists don't bite and are usually happy to answer this question if it's not already in a FAQ. So if someone guesses Blender and is wrong, it actually is trivially easy to get the correct answer directly from the artist themself.

Though this won't work for artists that aren't around anymore. Either they've died, or their contact info no longer works, or they're trying to separate themselves from their past work and wouldn't appreciate people tracking down their new identity to tie back to their old work.

Also, there's the problem in being able to tell whether someone's guessing with tags or not. If a post is simply tagged with "Blender" without the verified artist checkmark, are we to assume it's a guess and should check up with the artist on it? So people would keep bugging the artist about it since different people will keep seeing it tagged without another mention (adding a note to the description wouldn't be good, since anyone can make a note saying they checked even if they haven't, so people would need to check up to see if that note is accurate just like the tag). It just gets really messy if it's not the artist themselves doing it, which would severely limit the purported usefulness of the tags. And given what stuff made in Blender can look like, we could never trust the tag's absence either.

One of the larger reasons for TWYS is that we shouldn't have to ask or rely on the artist's say-so like that, we can just look and tag these things as we see them for ourselves (lore tags being the primary exception, which were made to address the real issue of a lot of artists and character owners taking down their stuff over characters being misgendered).

watsit said:
Though this won't work for artists that aren't around anymore. Either they've died, or their contact info no longer works, or they're trying to separate themselves from their past work and wouldn't appreciate people tracking down their new identity to tie back to their old work.

Also, there's the problem in being able to tell whether someone's guessing with tags or not. If a post is simply tagged with "Blender" without the verified artist checkmark, are we to assume it's a guess and should check up with the artist on it? So people would keep bugging the artist about it since different people will keep seeing it tagged without another mention (adding a note to the description wouldn't be good, since anyone can make a note saying they checked even if they haven't, so people would need to check up to see if that note is accurate just like the tag). It just gets really messy if it's not the artist themselves doing it, which would severely limit the purported usefulness of the tags. And given what stuff made in Blender can look like, we could never trust the tag's absence either.

One of the larger reasons for TWYS is that we shouldn't have to ask or rely on the artist's say-so like that, we can just look and tag these things as we see them for ourselves (lore tags being the primary exception, which were made to address the real issue of a lot of artists and character owners taking down their stuff over characters being misgendered).

i'm envisioning two use cases: the first one is an artist (like me) tagging their own works for easier filtering and searching by others. the second is other people tagging when the use of blender is "obvious" (example: ruaidri). the first case is obvious and there's no question about data accuracy. it's objectively useful for other people to find or blacklist our works, and to give information about the asset ecosystem in use. there's literally no downside when the tag is used like this. so we can set that one aside.

for the second case, i feel like you're really reaching for any reason to reject this tag.

i don't buy your position that the tag is unacceptable just because 1 untagged pic buttressed by 10 tagged pics *might* be an experiment by the artist and thus the blender tag might be wrong. interoperability between 3d apps is hilariously poor, it's not like an artist using their tablet to draw in Krita instead of CSP. when an artist does an experiment, it's a big deal, and you're probably going to hear about it from the artist themselves.

check out various popular 3d artists on twitter or FA and you'll find that many of them are eager to discuss techniques and tools. it's more of a thing than in the 2d world--hence this tag is more useful here. perhaps this is the source of this disconnect in our understandings.

if there is any doubt, there's always the option of just not tagging the pic. i don't know why you claim this is unacceptable either. some pics just don't have a lot of tags.

the pic you linked is an extreme example. scroll through the first few pages of the blender_(software) tag, both in score and by date modes, and you'll see that every work is 3d generated. so i'm not sure what your point is here.

i don't understand your logic on people "guessing" either. i feel like you've set the bar for validating the tag to a very high and almost unreachable standard. for any other tag, do we double-check the double-checkers when they leave a note?

if people get confused and we end up with a tag war--wait a minute, this situation sounds familiar. this is exactly where TWYS falls apart and is the reason we have lore tags for gender. how do we handle verification for these cases? is it when the artist says--wait, then we can just use what the artist says. that answers that. and if nobody can figure it out (unlikely) then people can just...not tag it?

This proposed change is to make TWYS not applicable to the tag by making it into a meta tag, so i'm not sure what your point is here.

watsit said:
No, I'm saying that if we tag software used as proponents want to, that should be the logical result since every step of the software chain was involved in making the final piece. I have no idea why you're bringing model creators into this since it has nothing to do with the software argument. Although it's worth noting, when modelers are tagged, the tags are kept separate based on what they did for the piece, e.g. the petruz_(copyright) tag for their model work is separate from petruz for their own art/animation work. So there is precedent for using different tags for modeling vs animation work, which a single blender_(software) tag lacks.

No, actually, I think the model creator issue is pretty relevant.

The idea is that artist tags only go to the person who actually positioned/animated the model(s) and rendered the result. Model creators seem to be credited in the copyright category for now, and we’re working on a solution to hopefully credit people like VAs in the future too; but in either case, they are not tagged as artists, even though they contributed to the artwork in a sense.

Likewise, I don’t see why we would tag every single software that had anything to do with the creation of a piece. We can follow the same logic as artist tags and state that only the software that the models were positioned/animated and finally rendered out from gets the tag. The primary software used, comparable to the primary artist in that it produced the core result. If an artist uses Photoshop to touch up the colors on a 3D render, I would not consider using a photoshop tag for that. That would be only for artwork made in Photoshop which, given the nature of the software, would not be a 3D render. Most likely it would be a drawing. So unless it’s some kind of mixed media that also includes 2D drawing in the artwork, or in other words if it’s only taggable as 3D_(artwork), I wouldn’t include Photoshop.

Likewise, I wouldn’t tag the software used to create the model, for the same reason that model creators are not tagged as artists. That’s not what was used to create the artwork, just a prerequisite for the artwork.

Generally, almost all artwork, whether 2D or 3D, is made primarily or even exclusively within a single software. If a piece is made with more than one software in such a way that constitutes a really significant contribution to the creation of the final work, that would be akin to mixed_media and would be worth tagging as such, with multiple software tags. Otherwise, mostly every post will have only one software tag, as they have only one year tag and one medium tag and so forth. This really is not an issue of tag bloat, and the potentially excessive list of tags you mentioned is not a practical outcome of allowing software to be tagged.

scaliespe said:
No, actually, I think the model creator issue is pretty relevant.

The idea is that artist tags only go to the person who actually positioned/animated the model(s) and rendered the result. Model creators seem to be credited in the copyright category for now, and we’re working on a solution to hopefully credit people like VAs in the future too; but in either case, they are not tagged as artists, even though they contributed to the artwork in a sense.

Likewise, I don’t see why we would tag every single software that had anything to do with the creation of a piece. We can follow the same logic as artist tags and state that only the software that the models were positioned/animated and finally rendered out from gets the tag. The primary software used, comparable to the primary artist in that it produced the core result. If an artist uses Photoshop to touch up the colors on a 3D render, I would not consider using a photoshop tag for that. That would be only for artwork made in Photoshop which, given the nature of the software, would not be a 3D render. Most likely it would be a drawing. So unless it’s some kind of mixed media that also includes 2D drawing in the artwork, or in other words if it’s only taggable as 3D_(artwork), I wouldn’t include Photoshop.

Likewise, I wouldn’t tag the software used to create the model, for the same reason that model creators are not tagged as artists. That’s not what was used to create the artwork, just a prerequisite for the artwork.

Generally, almost all artwork, whether 2D or 3D, is made primarily or even exclusively within a single software. If a piece is made with more than one software in such a way that constitutes a really significant contribution to the creation of the final work, that would be akin to mixed_media and would be worth tagging as such, with multiple software tags. Otherwise, mostly every post will have only one software tag, as they have only one year tag and one medium tag and so forth. This really is not an issue of tag bloat, and the potentially excessive list of tags you mentioned is not a practical outcome of allowing software to be tagged.

i agree with the above (of course, i'm still eagerly awaiting to see the solution so VAs and other major contributors get tagged to make it easier to search).

if the blender_(software) tag is used to represent pics where the actual posing/animation/rendering was done in blender, that still implies that blender assets/ecosystem was used, which still makes the tag useful for that purpose.

the edge case would be, say, someone making a model in blender, and then showing it in a game engine like unity or ue5. (or in another 3d system like maya, sfm). skimming through random pages, this edge case is either rare or non-existent, but the tag documentation should still be clear that the proper tag would be for unity/ue5 or maya/sfm. and it'd have to be a pretty artsy piece to raise it above the level of a screenshot for the first two.

Blender and SFM tags should've been invalitated years ago already, why do these still exsist?

mairo said:
Blender and SFM tags should've been invalitated years ago already, why do these still exsist?

Blender was meant for images showing the ui, like photoshop currently does (mostly). and SFM was meant for when the actual sfm logo was shown

mairo said:
Blender and SFM tags should've been invalitated years ago already, why do these still exsist?

Somebody tried, but it was met wth overwhelming opposition.
https://e621.net/forum_topics/33295

Technically they tried to re-alias it to 3d_(artwork), but it is the same idea in mind.

mairo said:
Blender and SFM tags should've been invalitated years ago already, why do these still exsist?

Because there's demand for them, it's as simple as that. For all the other reasons I recommend reading through the entire thread carefully as almost every argument possible was already made and explained in detail.

wolfmanfur said:
Somebody tried, but it was met wth overwhelming opposition.
https://e621.net/forum_topics/33295

Technically they tried to re-alias it to 3d_(artwork), but it is the same idea in mind.

I'm not sure that +12/-8 was "overwhelming opposition", but either way a big part of problem here is that it was an alias to 3d_(artwork) which would add the tag to 2d renders and animations.

The bulk update request #5113 (forum #369171) has been rejected by @Rainbow_Dash.

mairo said:
Blender and SFM tags should've been invalitated years ago already, why do these still exsist?

For me, I really REALLY don't like SFM stuff and like to have the ability to blacklist it.

bdanimare said:
For me, I really REALLY don't like SFM stuff and like to have the ability to blacklist it.

Problem is that people use this exacctly for this kind of quality control.
If it sucks, they tag it with SFM. If it rules, they tag it with blender. It doesn't actually matter what was used to create the post. I have reported these from time to time.

mairo said:
Problem is that people use this exacctly for this kind of quality control.
If it sucks, they tag it with SFM. If it rules, they tag it with blender. It doesn't actually matter what was used to create the post. I have reported these from time to time.

I think the vast majority are tagged correctly. Must be a few that are tagged them wrong.