Forgive me if I posted this in the wrong category, it's my first time using the forums on this site.

Recently there's been a few posts that have been tag-locked as "young -cub". Which seems normal at first, but the posts in question depict anthro characters. (some examples i have on-hand being post #4068798 post #4160120 and post #4128977 here)

From my understanding of the wiki pages for the tags, young is for any character that is or appears to be anywhere under the age of 18, and the cub tag is effectively the same thing but for any furry-related character. Ranging from infants to underage teenagers.
However, a record that dacad received for previously changing the tags on their artwork appears to state the following: "I'll grant you that only a few appear to be in the much younger range (cub), but the rest are teenage at most." which seems to imply that the wiki page for the cub tag is wrong and that underage teen furry characters should not be tagged as "cub".

So, what gives? Was there an undocumented change to how the cub tag works? Is it just a misunderstanding? Should they or should they not be tagged as "young"? If yes, then why not as "cub"? I'm really confused, here.

I also actually previously discussed it on post #4068798 but recently realized it'd probably be better to discuss it on the forums instead.

Rainbow Dash said:
Looks teenager, but not childlike. We'll update the wiki here soon, but that's how we've been meaning to use the split.

- from a DM where I asked the same question

If I had to guess, it might be something to do with the discussion in topic #38991.

wat8548 said:
- from a DM where I asked the same question

If I had to guess, it might be something to do with the discussion in topic #38991.

I see, though shouldn't something like that not be enforced until wiki pages are updated?

I also personally kinda feel like "cub" makes less sense to have the meaning changed to an uber-specific "furry infant/child", and that the current meaning of "any furry character 17 and under" and having tags to distinguish the varying stages of life before adulthood, makes significantly more sense. That way people who like any type of cub don't have to do "~cub ~exampletag1 ~exampletag2 ~exampletag3" just to be able to actually see everything that involves specifically cub, and not stuff that involves just young non-furry humanoid characters.
And for blacklisting purposes, people who are okay with teenage characters but not child characters, there's already means to blacklist that. the baby, toddler, child, and teenager tags exist for that type of thing, no? So if "cub" is going to be a furry-specific equivalent to the child tag, then why no furry-specific equivalent to the teenager tag? and from what I can tell about the situation, the changing of "cub" also makes it apply to baby and toddler, so... it's just specifically excluding teenager? Why? It's so inconsistent and confusing.

From the little I've seen of the discussion, the issues with the way the cub tag currently works seems to boil down to people trying to apply real-world definitions onto fandom terminology. And considering how significantly different the fandom's usage of the term is compared to the real-world version of the word, it obviously doesn't work out very well to do that.

Young includes teenagers, and in fact teenagers have already been included on the wiki page for it. Cub meanwhile already has its wiki pointing out "4-10" and "only furry". Teens not included.

furrin_gok said:
Young includes teenagers, and in fact teenagers have already been included on the wiki page for it. Cub meanwhile already has its wiki pointing out "4-10" and "only furry". Teens not included.

The wiki page for cub also directly states that it can apply to teenagers, "While most cubs are quite young (4-10, in human years), the phrase cub can refer to all physically immature and legally underage characters, ranging from infants, to underage teenagers."

furrin_gok said:
Young includes teenagers, and in fact teenagers have already been included on the wiki page for it. Cub meanwhile already has its wiki pointing out "4-10" and "only furry". Teens not included.

I don't know where you're getting the "Teens not included" part because the wiki page does indeed state that it includes underage teens. Cub is effectively just a furry-only young tag.

My confusion stems from posts with furry characters being tag-locked as "young -cub" despite this.

guestblacklistevader said:
I don't know where you're getting the "Teens not included" part because the wiki page does indeed state that it includes underage teens. Cub is effectively just a furry-only young tag.

My confusion stems from posts with furry characters being tag-locked as "young -cub" despite this.

my guess is it is just to avoid tag wars and complaining from artists

AFAICT, the trend seems to be to just use young_X or Y_young and then all the other age tags like *_X and Y_* get replaced with both * and young_X or Y_young. Something to note in this topic. Cub not including teenagers is interesting because for ferals, you don't normally even use the term 'teen'. XD

wat8548 said:
- from a DM where I asked the same question

If I had to guess, it might be something to do with the discussion in topic #38991.

So cub is being changed to only include baby, toddler, and child, excluding teenager? That seems weird; I thought the original purpose for keeping the cub tag alongside young was because some people were fine with young non-human(oid) characters and just wanted to avoid human(oid) ones, but it won't be usable for that if cub doesn't apply to all young anthro/feral/taur characters. It also means there will only be a tag for baby/toddler/child (excluding teenager) for anthro/feral/taur characters, but no tag for baby/toddler/child (excluding teenager) for human/humanoid characters, creating a hole for distinguishing certain age groups for certain forms. Are there plans to address this?

watsit said:
So cub is being changed to only include baby, toddler, and child, excluding teenager? That seems weird; I thought the original purpose for keeping the cub tag alongside young was because some people were fine with young non-human(oid) characters and just wanted to avoid human(oid) ones, but it won't be usable for that if cub doesn't apply to all young anthro/feral/taur characters. It also means there will only be a tag for baby/toddler/child (excluding teenager) for anthro/feral/taur characters, but no tag for baby/toddler/child (excluding teenager) for human/humanoid characters, creating a hole for distinguishing certain age groups for certain forms. Are there plans to address this?

I thought that whole thread was supposed to alias away cub to just young?

benjiboyo said:
I thought that whole thread was supposed to alias away cub to just young?

I'm not sure. Most of the cub_* and *_cub tags could be aliased away to their young equivalent, but cub itself could stay as a supplemental tag for a subset of young characters, for people that want to distinguish it (like how semi-anthro is supplemental for a subset of anthro/feral, and girly is supplemental for a subset of male).

watsit said:
So cub is being changed to only include baby, toddler, and child, excluding teenager? That seems weird; I thought the original purpose for keeping the cub tag alongside young was because some people were fine with young non-human(oid) characters and just wanted to avoid human(oid) ones, but it won't be usable for that if cub doesn't apply to all young anthro/feral/taur characters. It also means there will only be a tag for baby/toddler/child (excluding teenager) for anthro/feral/taur characters, but no tag for baby/toddler/child (excluding teenager) for human/humanoid characters, creating a hole for distinguishing certain age groups for certain forms. Are there plans to address this?

I guess it's a work in progress. We'll have to deal with that later. :shrugs: At least it won't hit us blind.

benjiboyo said:
I thought that whole thread was supposed to alias away cub to just young?

https://e621.net/forum_topics/38991?page=1#forum_post_368599 This comment, right? Pretty sure that's the end result after grinding it down for years and years. I just did a search on this topic and it goes back 12 years when the young aliases were created.

watsit said:
I'm not sure. Most of the cub_* and *_cub tags could be aliased away to their young equivalent, but cub itself could stay as a supplemental tag for a subset of young characters, for people that want to distinguish it (like how semi-anthro is supplemental for a subset of anthro/feral, and girly is supplemental for a subset of male).

Yeah, it makes sense to have members of this implication chain not have their own tags like X_penetrated, but instead X + young_penetrated, with adult penetration being assumed if not specified. Effectively treating them as 'body types', like girly and semi-anthro.

themasterpotato said:
my guess is it is just to avoid tag wars and complaining from artists

I feel like this is the lamest answer because it kinda goes against the point of the tags, y'know?

guestblacklistevader said:
I feel like this is the lamest answer because it kinda goes against the point of the tags, y'know?

But it's also the most common reason. The young and cub (especially cub) are 2 of the most if not THE most controversial tags on this site. This confilct has been happening since time immemorial and will last till the heat death of the universe.

benjiboyo said:
But it's also the most common reason. The young and cub (especially cub) are 2 of the most if not THE most controversial tags on this site. This confilct has been happening since time immemorial and will last till the heat death of the universe.

The young tag isn't changing, though. All this is doing is changing the cub tag to exclude "teenager", and I doubt most people who have trouble accepting cub being tagged on their art like young much better. This change effectively only allows tagging anthro/feral characters in the baby/toddler/child range, with no similar tag for human(oid) characters.

This also makes it more vague when cub applies if young does. E.g. tulin_(tloz) is undoubtedly young, but younger-than-teenager young? He comes across as more of a teenager to me, just coming of-age in the latest game and thus isn't cub anymore, but he's still getting tagged cub because he is a young anthro character.

themasterpotato said:
my guess is it is just to avoid tag wars and complaining from artists

That's exactly what it is, since according to the e621 definition of cub, would entail all creatures deemed under 18. So how some posts get -cub +young gets me every time. Of course, the artist in question recently went CDNP to remove all works deemed "cub" on e621. My guess is if too many things were to be deleted, it might cause some drama.

watsit said:
The young tag isn't changing, though. All this is doing is changing the cub tag to exclude "teenager", and I doubt most people who have trouble accepting cub being tagged on their art like young much better. This change effectively only allows tagging anthro/feral characters in the baby/toddler/child range, with no similar tag for human(oid) characters.

This also makes it more vague when cub applies if young does. E.g. tulin_(tloz) is undoubtedly young, but younger-than-teenager young? He comes across as more of a teenager to me, just coming of-age in the latest game and thus isn't cub anymore, but he's still getting tagged cub because he is a young anthro character.

I think artists have fewer issues with the young tag Vs the cub tag because the word young just comes with far less baggage even if the tags mean basically the same thing on e621. I think it would be a pretty arbitrary decision to remove teenagers from the cub tag though and don't really like the idea of making such a change just to appease artists who don't like the cub tag, at that point I'd sooner suggest replacing the cub tag with something more neutral sounding like young_furry/anthro/feral.

Wouldn't it be easier to get rid of cub altogether and introduce a young_humanoid tag to fill the space of young -cub? Young and cub tags are already almost identical since this is a furry centric website.

Proposal: alias the cub tag to squeeblyzorbly and change literally nothing else.

wat8548 said:
Proposal: alias the cub tag to squeeblyzorbly and change literally nothing else.

Even better!

wat8548 said:
Proposal: alias the cub tag to squeeblyzorbly and change literally nothing else.

replace all tagnames with just a random 4-byte hex value.

but honestly, if the contention really is just the tag name we should just split the tag into young_feral and young_anthro (and young_taur, sometimes). we already have <age>_<form> tags for other age groups.

I mean, even without the tag name being a problem, as it stands now cub is already kind of a weird combo/catch-all tag. splitting the tag up would just have more actual utility.

It's a bit conflicting

Bam is now cub?

Otters are now cubs? There's pages upon pages that say otherwise
Here / Here

Rigby is cub? There are 25 pages where he is not tagged as such and only 3? That are

Spitz too??
Mine is the ONLY one tagged cub

A lot of these were added by banned users or Rainbow Dash, who seems to have it out for me? They are inconsistent and downright predatory towards my works. The young tag also gets slapped on several of my works, with not much rhyme or reason. They just don't stop. It's like they want me to just straight up go dnp to have less of a hassle with the tagging situation. The whole situation has made me depressed as fuck. This. Furaffinity. The bot scraping. The mad vengeful? Users, who have it out for me thinking I am not true to myself because I don't go balls to the wall and just draw their specific fetishes. Like, I get it somewhat, but I also am trying to make a living? Just drawing what makes me happy for the most part, and I am constantly met with hurdles like this and so on. I get the way this website wants things to work, but also am perplexed at them. Hope I'm coming off right, I can't think too well these days.

dacad said:
A lot of these were added by banned users or Rainbow Dash, who seems to have it out for me? They are inconsistent and downright predatory towards my works. The young tag also gets slapped on several of my works, with not much rhyme or reason. They just don't stop. It's like they want me to just straight up go dnp to have less of a hassle with the tagging situation. The whole situation has made me depressed as fuck. This. Furaffinity. The bot scraping. The mad vengeful? Users, who have it out for me thinking I am not true to myself because I don't go balls to the wall and just draw their specific fetishes. Like, I get it somewhat, but I also am trying to make a living? Just drawing what makes me happy for the most part, and I am constantly met with hurdles like this and so on. I get the way this website wants things to work, but also am perplexed at them. Hope I'm coming off right, I can't think too well these days.

I still don't get why it matters to you what your posts are tagged as. It's not like we're pulling a FurAffinity and arbitrarily declaring "you must be this tall to ride". The tags are there for the benefit of the site's users. They are neither a marketing tool (promotional tags are in fact explicitly banned) nor part of some grand conspiracy to... do something nefarious, I presume you're implying? Tags describe what appears to be visually present in the image and that's it. This whole hooha reminds me of a thousand flamewars from years ago over how crossdressing male characters would consistently get their tags locked as female when there was no visual evidence present within the bounds of the post that they were anything but. If we survived that, we can survive acknowledging that small characters with big heads do in fact look a bit like children sometimes.

Hmm, Dacad name sounds familiar. Other site?

People were tagging Chibi as cub, even if it made no sense at all for specific images.

I'll laugh if cub ends up only applying to ferals from now on, though!

dacad said:
Bam is now cub?

this wasn't a lock; it was was changed by a serial ban evader, with what looks like some kinda vendetta against your art, adding young to posts seemingly at random. admins have even reversed the change(s) and it was added back again by another ban evade account.

wat8548 said:
I still don't get why it matters to you what your posts are tagged as.

Because it can harm their social standing, cause them to get labeled as pedophiles, and damage their career/income. Artists get harassed (here and on other sites) because of it, and need to take down the art if it gets tagged young to stop the harassment. An artist doesn't have to personally care themselves if it's tagged as young for it to have a negative impact on them.

I can also imagine the feeling of being targeted isn't nice, which there has been a concerted effort in recent months from outside forces to swarm certain popular artists and liberally tag their stuff as cub (so that they in particular have to put up with it while similar art from others is left untouched).

Yeah unfortunately if it's a user that can evade ban like crazy I think it's better for Dacad to DNP anything new : \
Hope new artists know to just make a separated indetity and e-mail if they want to make porn so they can't have that type of problem if their artwork can be a bit cute...

watsit said:
Because it can harm their social standing, cause them to get labeled as pedophiles, and damage their career/income. Artists get harassed (here and on other sites) because of it, and need to take down the art if it gets tagged young to stop the harassment. An artist doesn't have to personally care themselves if it's tagged as young for it to have a negative impact on them.

I mean, I said this a while ago in regards to tags being on a user's favs, but the image will look just as much like cub art whether its got the cub tag or not. people are going to judge either way. I'm not sure if it's fair to put blame on the tagging system.

darryus said:
I mean, I said this a while ago in regards to young being visible in a user's favs, but the image will look just as much like cub art whether its got the cub tag or not. people are going to judge either way. I'm not sure if it's fair to put blame on the tagging system.

The problem isn't what it looks like, since the issue is mostly with it being tagged young rather than it "looking young" (which there is disagreement on that point; different people will have different opinions on different pieces). And I wouldn't say the problem is the tagging system, but rather the social view of certain types of porn. Like was said earlier:

wat8548 said:
Proposal: alias the cub tag to squeeblyzorbly and change literally nothing else.

I honestly wouldn't doubt that would solve 90% of the issue people have, as long as they don't have to see that word "young" or "cub" next to their porn.

watsit said:
Because it can harm their social standing, cause them to get labeled as pedophiles, and damage their career/income. Artists get harassed (here and on other sites) because of it, and need to take down the art if it gets tagged young to stop the harassment. An artist doesn't have to personally care themselves if it's tagged as young for it to have a negative impact on them.

So you think e621 should be held responsible for social problems on other sites, even to the extent of compromising its core mission? It's not our fault that we ban harassers and ban evaders while Twitter (or whatever it's called now) allows them to run rampant, and FurAffinity's management actively stokes the flames. Also it has to be said that not a small amount of the call is coming from inside the house. If certain popular artists could refrain from enthusiastically joining in the condemnation of cub artists themselves, perhaps it would be easier to sympathise if and when the witch hunt inevitably comes for them.

watsit said:
I can also imagine the feeling of being targeted isn't nice, which there has been a concerted effort in recent months from outside forces to swarm certain popular artists and liberally tag their stuff as cub (so that they in particular have to put up with it while similar art from others is left untouched).

Remind me how we know it's all the same ban evader again? Oh yeah, that's right. All their alts get banned.

It's a bit of an exaggeration to dignify literally one guy with the term "outside forces". This is far from the first time e621 has had to deal with persistent ban evaders. They always get bored eventually, and e621 has a notable advantage over most other sites in that a new account must wait 7 days before being allowed to do anything. The only other guy I can think of who has been perhaps a tad overenthusiastic in applying the cub and young tags does it from only one account, doesn't target specific artists, has other legit tagging activity (including removing those tags on occasion), and I just discovered in the course of researching this post that they are currently banned for 10 days for "slapping cub and/or young on posts with any remotely small character".

wat8548 said:
So you think e621 should be held responsible for social problems on other sites, even to the extent of compromising its core mission?

No, and it doesn't need to. Like certain other tag changes in recent-ish memory, we can attempt to look for a compromise that reduces the problems caused to artists and character owners while maintaining the same or similar enough tagging functionality. It wasn't a mistake when I quoted your proposal for renaming "cub" (or "young") to something that's less obviously referring to being underage, and thus has less stigma associated with it, while still serving the same exact purpose of signifying that some people may consider the characters to look young. That the admins seem to be separating the cub tag from young, making cub apply only to much more clearly/intentionally underage-looking characters, is an indication there might be something brewing in regards to this.

wat8548 said:
If certain popular artists could refrain from enthusiastically joining in the condemnation of cub artists themselves, perhaps it would be easier to sympathise if and when the witch hunt inevitably comes for them.

I certainly can't sympathize with people like that, but there are artists that have a genuine disagreement with the tag being applicable and are suffering undue consequences from it, that may lead them to having the art in question removed. This site's core missing is archiving furry art, and that's a lot more difficult when you have artists going (C)DNP or removing their art because of a highly controversial and stigmatized tag being pushed on their work, and causing them problems, where its applicability is questionable (at the end of the day, we're dealing with stylized cartoon animal characters; trying to apply strict age guidelines to a drawing is impossible, and when a subjective interpretation of a drawn character's age results in highly controversial and stigmatized tag being put on more borderline cases, it shouldn't be a surprise that problems arise).

Could call it "youthful_appearance" or something
Obviously I wish rabid twitter puritans would simply stop harassing artists, but that's not likely to happen at the moment.

watsit said:
stop the harassment

As if. It probably just encourages them to find another forest to set fire. Often they keep harassing the original artist, too, until a name change or the like.
These are the people that would 'pass' the test of red button, nuclear fiery death for everyone. Where passing is pressing the button.

notknow said:
Yeah unfortunately if it's a user that can evade ban like crazy I think it's better for Dacad to DNP anything new : \
Hope new artists know to just make a separated indetity and e-mail if they want to make porn so they can't have that type of problem if their artwork can be a bit cute...

Or get tags locked preemptively. You can report your own post...

darryus said:
I mean, I said this a while ago in regards to tags being on a user's favs, but the image will look just as much like cub art whether its got the cub tag or not. people are going to judge either way. I'm not sure if it's fair to put blame on the tagging system.

In a few months/years, AI will make tagging systems redundant for 'good enough' searches, like the antis would do. I imagine if someone spiteful wanted to just make a scoring system based on training data and share with it their felonious friends... :(

watsit said:
The problem isn't what it looks like, since the issue is mostly with it being tagged young rather than it "looking young" (which there is disagreement on that point; different people will have different opinions on different pieces). And I wouldn't say the problem is the tagging system, but rather the social view of certain types of porn. Like was said earlier:

I honestly wouldn't doubt that would solve 90% of the issue people have, as long as they don't have to see that word "young" or "cub" next to their porn.

https://rule34.paheal.net/post/list/Porkyman/1

wat8548 said:
So you think e621 should be held responsible for social problems on other sites, even to the extent of compromising its core mission? It's not our fault that we ban harassers and ban evaders while Twitter (or whatever it's called now) allows them to run rampant, and FurAffinity's management actively stokes the flames. Also it has to be said that not a small amount of the call is coming from inside the house. If certain popular artists could refrain from enthusiastically joining in the condemnation of cub artists themselves, perhaps it would be easier to sympathise if and when the witch hunt inevitably comes for them.
Remind me how we know it's all the same ban evader again? Oh yeah, that's right. All their alts get banned.

It's a bit of an exaggeration to dignify literally one guy with the term "outside forces". This is far from the first time e621 has had to deal with persistent ban evaders. They always get bored eventually, and e621 has a notable advantage over most other sites in that a new account must wait 7 days before being allowed to do anything. The only other guy I can think of who has been perhaps a tad overenthusiastic in applying the cub and young tags does it from only one account, doesn't target specific artists, has other legit tagging activity (including removing those tags on occasion), and I just discovered in the course of researching this post that they are currently banned for 10 days for "slapping cub and/or young on posts with any remotely small character".

It's actually not (just) Twitter that should be dealing with these people. It's law enforcement. But that way lies other forms of stupidity.
FA actively encouraging strife isn't exactly smart in the long run, either. I've seen what it eventually leads to. It's a self-destructive behavior. Comparing it arson like mentioned above is not really an exaggeration.
It's gotten to point in some communities, where if your profile doesn't actively condemn *unpopular thing*, they'll assume you're literal Darkseid/Thanos or something, or at the very least, not towing the party li(n)e.

That 'one guy' thing reminds me of Anticrack. Ironically, this person is VERY cracked.

cloudpie said:
Could call it "youthful_appearance" or something

The neoteny tag exists... Not really a solution honestly

benjiboyo said:
The neoteny tag exists... Not really a solution honestly

The neoteny tag doesn't fit with our current tag layout since it just means young + adult_(lore)
It wouldn't work as a replacement for young either, though, since a hypothetical more neutral-sounding young tag would still need to be applicable to actual full-blown intentional cub characters. Neoteny specifically means an adult

cloudpie said:
The neoteny tag doesn't fit with our current tag layout since it just means young + adult_(lore)
It wouldn't work as a replacement for young either, though, since a hypothetical more neutral-sounding young tag would still need to be applicable to actual full-blown intentional cub characters. Neoteny specifically means an adult

speaking of, what do we do with the tag btw? invalid it, or alias is with adult_(lore)? also, is it possible to implicate young with adult_(lore)? considering the wiki.

Please don't take my tweets out of context and use them for your arguments. Thanks.

I was applauding itaku for giving the determination of a character's age to the artist, not witch-hunting artists.
I have just as many problems with this site as Dacad does.

Out of all the Morgana posts on here, I join the few where they think the canonical depiction is cub/underage. Hundreds of examples exist otherwise
I have canonical pikachus that are labeled cub.
I even have this absurd Charmeleon locked as cub https://e621.net/posts/4091966
I have so many works here that I don't agree with the locked tags.

Don't think of it as me condemning other artists. I'm allowed to stand up for myself and what I draw.

People and other websites can and WILL use e621's tagging system as proof to label you as something you aren't. Patreon *WILL* use tags on this website as proof, and cancel you.
It is a problem.

With that being said, do I want to break tagging? No. Do I want to supercede everyone elses opinion on basic pokemon? No.
I do however, want the double standard to end. Either tag cub/young together, or redefine and overhaul the tags.

wat8548 said:
So you think e621 should be held responsible for social problems on other sites, even to the extent of compromising its core mission? It's not our fault that we ban harassers and ban evaders while Twitter (or whatever it's called now) allows them to run rampant, and FurAffinity's management actively stokes the flames. Also it has to be said that not a small amount of the call is coming from inside the house. If certain popular artists could refrain from enthusiastically joining in the condemnation of cub artists themselves, perhaps it would be easier to sympathise if and when the witch hunt inevitably comes for them.
Remind me how we know it's all the same ban evader again? Oh yeah, that's right. All their alts get banned.

It's a bit of an exaggeration to dignify literally one guy with the term "outside forces". This is far from the first time e621 has had to deal with persistent ban evaders. They always get bored eventually, and e621 has a notable advantage over most other sites in that a new account must wait 7 days before being allowed to do anything. The only other guy I can think of who has been perhaps a tad overenthusiastic in applying the cub and young tags does it from only one account, doesn't target specific artists, has other legit tagging activity (including removing those tags on occasion), and I just discovered in the course of researching this post that they are currently banned for 10 days for "slapping cub and/or young on posts with any remotely small character".

talentlesshack said:
I even have this absurd Charmeleon locked as cub https://e621.net/posts/4091966

The disclaimer in the description might make it seem like you're trying to stir up trouble or something, but besides that I can't really see anything that warranted locking the cub tag to that post, and personally I don't think it really needs to be tagged cub anyway. That said, in cases where people do keep adding and removing those tags I can see the argument in favour of locking them on, because with sensitive topics it's generally better to err on the side of caution.

themasterpotato said:
The disclaimer in the description might make it seem like you're trying to stir up trouble or something, but besides that I can't really see anything that warranted locking the cub tag to that post, and personally I don't think it really needs to be tagged cub anyway. That said, in cases where people do keep adding and removing those tags I can see the argument in favour of locking them on, because with sensitive topics it's generally better to err on the side of caution.

I'm not trying to stir up any trouble. I just want to clarify any sources looking inward that aren't familiar with the way things work here. For instance, any inbound links into Patreon are scrutinized heavily and they will snoop through all of your things to police your work offsite. I'd much rather educate the unfamiliar 1% than leave things up to chance. I don't have a problem with community tagging, I just want to make it clear to the layman that they are community provided.

wat8548 said:
I still don't get why it matters to you what your posts are tagged as. It's not like we're pulling a FurAffinity and arbitrarily declaring "you must be this tall to ride". The tags are there for the benefit of the site's users. They are neither a marketing tool (promotional tags are in fact explicitly banned) nor part of some grand conspiracy to... do something nefarious, I presume you're implying? Tags describe what appears to be visually present in the image and that's it. This whole hooha reminds me of a thousand flamewars from years ago over how crossdressing male characters would consistently get their tags locked as female when there was no visual evidence present within the bounds of the post that they were anything but. If we survived that, we can survive acknowledging that small characters with big heads do in fact look a bit like children sometimes.

My main issue with the case here is that it's really friggin' inconsistent. Plenty of posts depicting the same characters, with the same proportions, don't get tagged "young" or "cub". The tags are almost always added onto Dacad's works specifically, by a serial ban evader clearly acting in bad faith, and then locked by Rainbow Dash after the fact. It almost seems like it was locked like that specifically to loophole Dacad's CDNP status, but it's happened with another artist, so... I'm legitimately confused, and clearly Dacad is as well.

It's just super inconsistent and I legitimately can't see a reason why it would be the case. If the post has anthro/feral characters, and no human characters whatsoever, the "young" tag is obviously implying that it's cub. Like... The young tag is literally just a significantly broader tag for the same thing. A furry character being from 0 to 17 years old is a cub as far as I am concerned, and most furries have thought the same for years. (Before the argument is made... While it obviously means something more specific in a zoological context, that doesn't mean it's not what it means in the context of furries - words often have multiple different meanings that depend on context.)

Dacad also has plenty of reason to worry about those tags being applied to his work. A lot of which were spoken of in this thread already though, so I don't feel the need to go into detail, but it's mainly laws, income, etc.

Patreon doesn't have to look at the tags here before they do it, anyways? :shrugs:

That thing with cub being ambiguous between different groups of people is itself part of the problem. Here, it does NOT apply to teenage builds. We're already overhauling the tags, because of the shota/loli/young_male/young_female/male_cub/female_cub/*tons of others* thing. It's why other than for cub tag itself, almost all of them seem to be getting split into more useful tags.

The wikis are a mess right now and most of staff was unaware that the cub wiki was including all under 18 characters. That's really unhelpful to us and we are going to fix it.

alphamule said:
Here, it does NOT apply to teenage builds.

I keep seeing this this but the wiki still explicitly states that cub includes teenagers and has done so for over 12 years. If this is a policy change that has actually been officially decided on, then why does the wiki still say otherwise?

edit: looks like the wiki has been changed after I posted this and it no longer includes teenagers

rainbow_dash said:
The wikis are a mess right now and most of staff was unaware that the cub wiki was including all under 18 characters. That's really unhelpful to us and we are going to fix it.

So then if we're going to have the cub tag's usage become arbitrarily more specific, are we going to have some kind of replacement for furry teenagers? (Other than just "anthro" and "teenager" together.)

It seems legitimately so random to just exclude a SINGULAR range of underage character out of the tag. Like, legitimately what's the reason for that?

The wiki page for the tag is also now super redundant in it's explanation due to just having teenager removed.
"While most cubs are quite young (4-10, in human years), the phrase cub can refer to most physically immature and legally underage characters, ranging from infants, to children." The age range described here is literally just 2 years off the maximum for the range decided for children. Not to mention the fact that teenagers would still count as "physically immature/legally underage" considering that's 13 year olds to 17 year olds. Now age of consent differs from country to country, but I'm pretty sure 15-16 are the most common. Should 13 and 14 year old characters still be tagged as cub due to being legally underage? They're also definitely physically immature. Literally a 1 year difference between 12 and 13, you don't suddenly become no longer physically immature in a single year like that.

This change just seems horrendously pointless and inconsistent, removing the tag altogether would arguably be a better decision because there's broader umbrella tags people could use to avoid the content (such as literally the default blacklist option of "young -rating:s", and for people that are fine with teenager characters you could just replace "young" in that with anything that isn't a teenager.)

I just can't wrap my head around this change at all. It's so random and inconsistent.

guestblacklistevader said:
So then if we're going to have the cub tag's usage become arbitrarily more specific, are we going to have some kind of replacement for furry teenagers? (Other than just "anthro" and "teenager" together.)

It seems legitimately so random to just exclude a SINGULAR range of underage character out of the tag. Like, legitimately what's the reason for that?

Cub has always been the odd one out by being specifically for young ~anthro ~feral, where no other age group has anthro+feral-specific tags like that. That tags like teenage_anthro, feral_child, etc, are dubious themselves also, makes cub stick out like a sore thumb. If the benefit it's trying to provide are running into severe negatives (causing more artists to get upset and remove their art), some adjustments to reduce the problem is reasonable.

guestblacklistevader said:
The wiki page for the tag is also now super redundant in it's explanation due to just having teenager removed.

First draft changes are prone to issues like that. It can be clarified with better wording, now that the admins' intent is more clear. Something like "prepubescent" or "prepubescent-appearing" may be better than "physically immature/legally underage", given people tend to associate a teenage-like appearance with reaching puberty while not yet an adult.

watsit said:
Cub has always been the odd one out by being specifically for young ~anthro ~feral, where no other age group has anthro+feral-specific tags like that. That tags like teenage_anthro, feral_child, etc, are dubious themselves also, makes cub stick out like a sore thumb. If the benefit it's trying to provide are running into severe negatives (causing more artists to get upset and remove their art), some adjustments to reduce the problem is reasonable.

I'd say it sticks out even more due to now essentially being a "anthro + feral + age range + age range + age range" combination tag.

While it was definitely the odd one out before, it made some sense for it to exist like that seeing as this is a furry-centric site and the concept of cub meaning "any underage furry character" is a furry-centric idea. However, if the issue comes down to wanting to keep everything consistent, then doesn't this change make it even more inconsistent?

Wouldn't it be better to do away with the tag entirely and use other tags as replacement? For blacklisting purposes, "young" already does the trick for any underage character at all, and if people are okay with specific young age ranges, can't they just use the age range tags accordingly?

guestblacklistevader said:
I'd say it sticks out even more due to now essentially being a "anthro + feral + age range + age range + age range" combination tag.

If it results in fewer people taking down their art, I'd say the change is an improvement. Perhaps not ideal, but better than not doing anything.

guestblacklistevader said:
Wouldn't it be better to do away with the tag entirely and use other tags as replacement? For blacklisting purposes, "young" already does the trick for any underage character at all, and if people are okay with specific young age ranges, can't they just use the age range tags accordingly?

That's certainly an argument you can make. I wouldn't be entirely opposed to the idea.

guestblacklistevader said:
I'd say it sticks out even more due to now essentially being a "anthro + feral + age range + age range + age range" combination tag.

No?

Young is very useful as it's an umbrella tag for any minor, the reason why there are so many age range tags under young is because they are visually distinct and visual distinction is the entire point of tags. It's moreso like "anthro + feral + minor" (minor is just aliased to young because that's what it means).

While it was definitely the odd one out before, it made some sense for it to exist like that seeing as this is a furry-centric site and the concept of cub meaning "any underage furry character" is a furry-centric idea. However, if the issue comes down to wanting to keep everything consistent, then doesn't this change make it even more inconsistent?

I was unaware of this, but earlier when I making a massive BUR for age_on_age tags, this did come up and the disagreement among people in the replies over the nuance of cub was a major part of it.

Wouldn't it be better to do away with the tag entirely and use other tags as replacement? For blacklisting purposes, "young" already does the trick for any underage character at all, and if people are okay with specific young age ranges, can't they just use the age range tags accordingly?

I use young all the time when searching, it's much easier than typing in cub ~ child ~ loli ~ shota ~ teenager (equivalent to young -baby), I agree that more specific age ranges should be used when possible, but if a user is unsure if a character is a child or teenager then leaving it tagged as young will still allow for blacklists to function correctly and people who don't want to see either won't have to.

So yeah, there's also the benefit of making people less hesitant to apply a tag, since people who don't want to see sexualized minors AT ALL don't care what age category they're in (which last I checked, is most people).

So the norm now is that cub is just another "specific age range" tag? It won't be frowned upon to forget this tag while uploading? I usually have a hard time distinguishing between character ages .3.

magikarp said:
No?

Young is very useful as it's an umbrella tag for any minor, the reason why there are so many age range tags under young is because they are visually distinct and visual distinction is the entire point of tags. It's moreso like "anthro + feral + minor" (minor is just aliased to young because that's what it means).

I was talking about the cub tag, not the young tag. Young applies to any underage character, furry or otherwise. Cub used to apply to any underage furry character, but now randomly excludes one age range of underage furry character. (aka, not "anthro + feral + minor" because it excludes an age range of minors.)
You aren't wrong about the usefulness of the young tag, but that's not what I was picking at.

magikarp said:
I use young all the time when searching, it's much easier than typing in cub ~ child ~ loli ~ shota ~ teenager (equivalent to young -baby), I agree that more specific age ranges should be used when possible, but if a user is unsure if a character is a child or teenager then leaving it tagged as young will still allow for blacklists to function correctly and people who don't want to see either won't have to.

So yeah, there's also the benefit of making people less hesitant to apply a tag, since people who don't want to see sexualized minors AT ALL don't care what age category they're in (which last I checked, is most people).

The example you provided of young -baby is actually an example of what I was talking about that people could use accordingly to avoid specific age ranges.

watsit said:
If it results in fewer people taking down their art, I'd say the change is an improvement. Perhaps not ideal, but better than not doing anything.

I mean, that isn't really the case seeing as Dacad came into the thread to complain about it. It's clearly not the "cub" tag he's taking issue with specifically in this case, it's him taking issue with characters in his artwork being labelled as minors at all.

Some may only care about the "stigmatized terminology" but most artists that don't want their characters labelled as minors will take issue with their characters being labelled as minors. Not to mention how some artists feel they're being targeted due to the tags being applied super inconsistently, and in the case of Dacad, a serial ban evader that's been tagging his work in bad faith getting those tags locked onto said posts.

watsit said:
That's certainly an argument you can make. I wouldn't be entirely opposed to the idea.

I genuinely think it would be a significantly better way of handling it. I mean, if this is a furry-centric site, but we don't want to use the furry-centric meaning of the term "cub", then why not just do away with it as a tag entirely?
If the issue is with people not liking the stigma of the term, then why not rename the tag and change nothing else?
Why keep it, and then make it so arbitrarily specific as a tag? I legitimately can't think of any logical reason why.

My main reason for using the cub tag years ago, was to look for cub content. But now I'm legitimately just better off using the young tag to find it. Either because of cub posts not being tagged as cub (but still being tagged as young), or, as the reason is now, the site making arbitrary changes to the tag that makes it significantly less useful for searching. (And the change arguably does nothing to change how people blacklist it, because the default "young -rating:s" blacklist already covers that.)

I feel that, if the change is just to loophole the CDNP status of a bunch of artists, then that's the lamest possible answer. Y'know?

guestblacklistevader said:
I mean, that isn't really the case seeing as Dacad came into the thread to complain about it. It's clearly not the "cub" tag he's taking issue with specifically in this case, it's him taking issue with characters in his artwork being labelled as minors at all.

Sure, there's still room for improvement. Really, given the TWYS standard, terms like young, teenager, or child aren't accurate; they indicate a physical age or level of development that you can't actually "see", as two characters can look identical but be two completely different ages (given how teenagers can sometimes pass as adults,, or how 20 and sometimes even 30 year olds can convincingly play the part of a teenage character, or how sometimes the oldest character is played by the youngest actor or vice-versa, etc). Since it's based on visual appearance, terms like "youthful" or "youthful_appearance" would be more accurate to what the tags are trying to indicate, and not carry the same implication of characters being underage/minor when they aren't necessarily.

Separating cub from all young furry characters means there is now a potential for improvement here. Renaming tags like young to something more neutral like youthful means that the more borderline cases need not be given the tags young or cub, while youthful can still serve the same purpose of helping find or blacklist characters that some may infer to be young.

watsit said:
Sure, there's still room for improvement. Really, given the TWYS standard, terms like young, teenager, or child aren't accurate; they indicate a physical age or level of development that you can't actually "see", as two characters can look identical but be two completely different ages (given how teenagers can sometimes pass as adults,, or how 20 and sometimes even 30 year olds can convincingly play the part of a teenage character, or how sometimes the oldest character is played by the youngest actor or vice-versa, etc). Since it's based on visual appearance, terms like "youthful" or "youthful_appearance" would be more accurate to what the tags are trying to indicate, and not carry the same implication of characters being underage/minor when they aren't necessarily.

Separating cub from all young furry characters means there is now a potential for improvement here. Renaming tags like young to something more neutral like youthful means that the more borderline cases need not be given the tags young or cub, while youthful can still serve the same purpose of helping find or blacklist characters that some may infer to be young.

I actually agree with having a tag that's something like "youthful" or "youthful_appearance". Though I feel that'd make it difficult to actually search for cub content if the cub tag is being neutered, because "youthful" or "youthful_appearance" are (at least in my opinion) significantly broader than "young" or "cub".

I suppose lore tags could come in handy in that case though? Although then there'd be some other changes necessary, since you don't exactly just slap lore tags onto characters that have ages that align with what they're already tagged as. At least from what I've seen of lore tags anyway.

Some dumb suggestions now that cub won't be a very broad term:
-Keep the idea of the "youthful" in place of cub for a broad tag
-Cub now is only for young feral furries
-Make a "Kemo_shota" tag for anthro characters that are younger than teens.

magikarp said:
I agree that more specific age ranges should be used when possible, but if a user is unsure if a character is a child or teenager then leaving it tagged as young will still allow for blacklists to function correctly and people who don't want to see either won't have to.

We still regularly have to deal with border cases of whether a character "looks more" male or female. The border case of whether a character is young at all still exists. I don't think border cases are, in themselves, a barrier to introducing a new series of compulsory tags. For age tags specifically, I would say it's always a good idea for the sake of blacklists to assume the worst if you aren't 100% confident in your assertion that a character is older.

notknow said:
Some dumb suggestions now that cub won't be a very broad term:
-Keep the idea of the "youthful" in place of cub for a broad tag

Would need some extra supplementation or whatever in order to work effectively though, imo.

notknow said:
-Cub now is only for young feral furries

Going to purely the zoological-context's definition of the term "cub" would be even more confusing for most furries I'd think. Especially considering what the tag meant for many years, and what it continues to be used for within furry communities.

notknow said:
-Make a "Kemo_shota" tag for anthro characters that are younger than teens.

Kemono and shota are already existing tags, and on e6 the term "kemono" is applied to a specific style of anthro, and not anthros in general. Probably wouldn't fit in as a result, or would be overly redundant and not actually apply as a broader category.