The bulk update request #5321 is pending approval.

create alias pornographic_short_film (662) -> invalid_tag (1)
create alias no_climax (0) -> invalid_tag (1)
remove alias silent_video (0) -> no_sound (44853)
remove alias soundless (0) -> no_sound (44853)
remove alias silent (0) -> no_sound (44853)
remove alias without_sound (0) -> no_sound (44853)
remove alias no_audio (0) -> no_sound (44853)

Reason: pornographic_short_film is searchable with animated short_playtime rating:e, no_climax and no_sound are searchable just by negating their opposing tags (i.e. -orgasm or -sound). Tags like these can contribute to bloat in the taglist and make it more difficult for people to find what they're looking for.

How reliable is the sound tag? If it's less than perfect there's an argument to retain no_sound for searching for things that are verified to have no sound.

vulpes_artifex said:
How reliable is the sound tag? If it's less than perfect there's an argument to retain no_sound for searching for things that are verified to have no sound.

Doesn't the same argument work in reverse? If the no_sound tag is less than perfect, the sound tag can be used for verified audible posts. Rather than having two systems that may be prone to failure (not being tagged), I'd say it's safest to have one.

vulpes_artifex said:
How reliable is the sound tag? If it's less than perfect there's an argument to retain no_sound for searching for things that are verified to have no sound.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean but - the solution to imperfect tagging of sound isn't to have a second tag, it's to add sound to posts that need it.

strikerman said:
Doesn't the same argument work in reverse? If the no_sound tag is less than perfect, the sound tag can be used for verified audible posts. Rather than having two systems that may be prone to failure (not being tagged), I'd say it's safest to have one.

Yeah, but the consequences of a post unexpectedly having sound (if you're unwise enough to browse e621 in public) are much greater than the reverse.

vulpes_artifex said:
Yeah, but the consequences of a post unexpectedly having sound (if you're unwise enough to browse e621 in public) are much greater than the reverse.

at that point, that's on you for not muting your device

strikerman said:
no_climax and no_sound are searchable just by negating their opposing tags (i.e. -orgasm or -sound). Tags like these can contribute to bloat in the taglist and make it more difficult for people to find what they're looking for.

These should be aliased to invalid_tag instead^[1]. They would still be usable for tagging and searching if not regularly cleaned up, each still taking up room in the tag list just in a different category, and there's nothing to replace them with that a tagger would need to look at.

^[1] For no_climax, at least. I don't have an opinion on whether no_sound should stay alongside sound, but if it's also deemed invalid, it should be aliased the same as no_climax.

I don't think sound tag is applied automatically, so no_sound is useful to filter out already tagged posts.
Or else you'd have to remember which posts you've checked already.

waydence said:
I don't think sound tag is applied automatically, so no_sound is useful to filter out already tagged posts.

no_sound needs to be manually tagged too.

watsit said:
These should be aliased to invalid_tag instead^[1]. They would still be usable for tagging and searching if not regularly cleaned up, each still taking up room in the tag list just in a different category, and there's nothing to replace them with that a tagger would need to look at.

^[1] For no_climax, at least. I don't have an opinion on whether no_sound should stay alongside sound, but if it's also deemed invalid, it should be aliased the same as no_climax.

Fair point, ty for calling that out. I edited the BUR, but aliasing no_sound would need to be in a separate BUR since it has its own aliases.

waydence said:
I don't think sound tag is applied automatically, so no_sound is useful to filter out already tagged posts.

I wonder if it'd be possible to apply it automatically

the use of having tags for both both x and not_x is that it makes tagging posts easier since all posts should be in one or the other so finding under tagged posts is easier. in addition, meta-type tags in general are neant to provide the viewer with useful information, if a webm post has no_sound in the taglist you know it has no sound before you play it, if the tag is were to be nuked/invalidated there's ambiguity if the post actually has no sound or if it's missing the sound tag.

kora_viridian said:
I'm pretty sure animated GIFs and animated PNGs can never have sound, so it would be easy to tag those.

no_sound is only for webm and swf posts.

edit: also for no_climax I feel like it'd be better if the tag was moved into invalid category, I haven't looked through it, but from the tagname it might occasionally be used for orgasm_denial-type stuff which is a valid situation.

What if pornographic_short_film was aliased to animated?

cloudpie said:
What if pornographic_short_film was aliased to animated?

or maybe long_playtime

sipothac said:
the use of having tags for both both x and not_x is that it makes tagging posts easier since all posts should be in one or the other so finding under tagged posts is easier. in addition, meta-type tags in general are neant to provide the viewer with useful information, if a webm post has no_sound in the taglist you know it has no sound before you play it, if the tag is were to be nuked/invalidated there's ambiguity if the post actually has no sound or if it's missing the sound tag.

Again... Doesn't the logic work in reverse? The sound tag lets you know that a post has sound, without it there's ambiguity over whether it's hypothetically missing the no_sound tag. The way we clear up that ambiguity is by just having one tag. Its presence means one thing, its absence means another.

strikerman said:
Again... Doesn't the logic work in reverse? The sound tag lets you know that a post has sound, without it there's ambiguity over whether it's hypothetically missing the no_sound tag. The way we clear up that ambiguity is by just having one tag. Its presence means one thing, its absence means another.

uhh... no? the way to clear up ambiguity is to have tags for both boolean states.
if the post is tagged with no_sound you can be certain there's no sound.
if the post is tagged with sound you can be certain there's sound.
no ambiguity.

the ambiguity only happens when one of those two tags don't exist. if a post is missing the sound tag and the no_sound tag does not exist either the post is undertagged or there's no sound, and you can only know which is true after watching the video.

sipothac said:
uhh... no? the way to clear up ambiguity is to have tags for both boolean states.
if the post is tagged with no_sound you can be certain there's no sound.
if the post is tagged with sound you can be certain there's sound.
no ambiguity.

the ambiguity only happens when one of those two tags don't exist. if a post is missing the sound tag and the no_sound tag does not exist either the post is undertagged or there's no sound, and you can only know which is true after watching the video.

We don't do both positive and negative versions of the same tag. When both exist, one gets removed. Otherwise, you could end up with excessive tag duplication. Imagine if your exact logic was used with other tags, where confirmed absence is important (the commonly blacklisted tags, for instance). Every properly tagged image would have to have one version of the tag! We don't do that, and there's no reason for sound to be an exception.

I also don't see why someone would search for videos with no sound. That's what mute is for. On the other hand, searching for videos with sound is very common. So, we keep the positive version.

scth said:
We don't do both positive and negative versions of the same tag. When both exist, one gets removed.

We might need to remove either short_playtime or long_playtime then. One is for under 30 seconds, the other is 30+ seconds

cloudpie said:
We might need to remove either short_playtime or long_playtime then. One is for under 30 seconds, the other is 30+ seconds

Huh, thought there was a middle ground there. With the current definitions, yes.

scth said:
We don't do both positive and negative versions of the same tag.

I mean, most of them aren't binary states like sound and no_sound, but we have other similar tag situations. like, every single post on the website should have one of the seven gender tags and one of the six form tag, OR the post should be tagged zero_pictured, if this isn't true the post is undertagged. also pretty much every post should contain one each of the aspect ratio, filesize, and resolution tags.

darryus said:
I mean, most of them aren't binary states like sound and no_sound, but we have other similar tag situations. like, every single post on the website should have one of the seven gender tags and one of the six form tag, OR the post should be tagged zero_pictured, if this isn't true the post is undertagged. also pretty much every post should contain one each of the aspect ratio, filesize, and resolution tags.

Well, yeah. Those aren't just binary states. Having a negative version could apply to any tag, having one tag as part of a larger group always apply is rather rare. Creation of new tag groups like that would also be very difficult, at this point; there's enough trouble keeping up with existing ones (see https://tagme.dev, particularly the character count project).

Yes, having a no_x tag for an undertagged x could be useful for searching. The issue is that this applies to just about every tag. Why should sound be special?

cloudpie said:
We might need to remove either short_playtime or long_playtime then. One is for under 30 seconds, the other is 30+ seconds

One thing with those tags in particular is that the metatag duration exists. short_playtime is equivalent to duration:<30, long_playtime is equivalent to duration:>=30. That makes the tags redundant, although I don't think you can alias to a metatag.
(Edit: you can't alias to a metatag, and duration doesn't work correctly with gif files)

scth said:
Yes, having a no_x tag for an undertagged x could be useful for searching. The issue is that this applies to just about every tag. Why should sound be special?

because it's a meta tag, one of its main purposes is to provide information to the user when seen in the tag list. and sound _is_ special because it's, y'know... sound; I'd say that being certain if a post does or does not contain sound is pretty important on a website that hosts primarily pornographic content.

There are a few posts under no_climax that have characters being denied an orgasm, so that might be better to alias it to something else or simply plain invalidate it.

watsit said:
These should be aliased to invalid_tag instead

wolfmanfur said:
that might be better to alias it to something else or simply plain invalidate it.

i can't win

wolfmanfur said:
There are a few posts under no_climax that have characters being denied an orgasm, so that might be better to alias it to something else or simply plain invalidate it.

If it's just a few, I don't think it's worth having it stick around needing people to check it. Orgasm denial is a relatively common kink that people will be able to notice the tag is missing for and add on their own, IMO, without needing no_climax in the Invalid category where most instances are just delete-on-sight.

watsit said:
If it's just a few, I don't think it's worth having it stick around needing people to check it. Orgasm denial is a relatively common kink that people will be able to notice the tag is missing for and add on their own, IMO, without needing no_climax in the Invalid category where most instances are just delete-on-sight.

To put numbers to words, orgasm_denial no_climax only has 4 results

strikerman said:
To put numbers to words, orgasm_denial no_climax only has 4 results

I'm pretty sure there are more than 4, "orgasm denial" is very specific akin to "bared teeth". it's likely there are posts there that should have been tagged orgasm_denial, but were tagged no_climax instead.

pornographic_short_film short_playtime 3 results
pornographic_short_film -short_playtime 210 results
I thought this was tagged automatically like aspect ratios (granted, not for GIFs)?

alphamule said:
pornographic_short_film short_playtime 3 results
pornographic_short_film -short_playtime 210 results
I thought this was tagged automatically like aspect ratios (granted, not for GIFs)?

"Short film" doesn't necessarily mean it's less than 30 seconds. A "short film" is a common term for an self-contained film that's shorter than a traditional movie. It can be several minutes or even a few dozen minutes.

watsit said:
"Short film" doesn't necessarily mean it's less than 30 seconds. A "short film" is a common term for an self-contained film that's shorter than a traditional movie. It can be several minutes or even a few dozen minutes.

Derp, OK. Proof that I needed to go to bed. Also made that other tagging mistake that I caught, using an obsolete tag.

We currently have a problem with animations where they're tagged with "cum" while not actually showing any and only implying orgasm.

Actually I was going to say that the no_climax tag should stay so people could search for "cum -no_climax" so they could actually get posts with orgasms in them. Though alternatively, -dry_orgasm would be a better tag to do that although that still doesn't solve the "posts having 'cum' tag but not containing orgasm' issue.

Cum on, you don't need to resurrect two threads and make another for the same issue

I still think pornographic_short_film should be aliased to animated instead of invalid_tag, since all short films here are by definition animated