The bulk update request #6005 (forum #383678) has been rejected by @slyroon.

I'll just drop by to announce my opinion that this is the worst decision ever. Or at least the worst thing done to this site's tagging system. I can't believe that someone actually though this was a good idea. And how easily all of you guys just ate it up. No, it's definitely not "for the best". I'm not going down silently. I highly doubt a user that search cubs there wants to see human lolis/shotas or teens but from now on they have to. Since there is no way to search for cubs and cubs only safe for blacklisting/excluding all tags related to humans and teens. This makes searching for specific pic or fetish a pain in the ass and severely limits the site's overall usability. Not to mention that Cub is a term closely tied with furry fandom. You're erasing part of the history right here. Every furry know exactly what cubs are. And also likely have no idea what exactly you meant by your "young" tag.

zombieastronaut said:
I'll just drop by to announce my opinion that this is the worst decision ever. Or at least the worst thing done to this site's tagging system. I can't believe that someone actually though this was a good idea. And how easily all of you guys just ate it up. No, it's definitely not "for the best". I'm not going down silently. I highly doubt a user that search cubs there wants to see human lolis/shotas or teens but from now on they have to. Since there is no way to search for cubs and cubs only safe for blacklisting/excluding all tags related to humans and teens. This makes searching for specific pic or fetish a pain in the ass and severely limits the site's overall usability. Not to mention that Cub is a term closely tied with furry fandom. You're erasing part of the history right here. Every furry know exactly what cubs are. And also likely have no idea what exactly you meant by your "young" tag.

I see you've ignored the replacement tags. young_<form> exists. A search for ~young_anthro ~young_feral should approximate what cub was. Blacklist young_human & young_humanoid if you don't want to see those.

zombieastronaut said:
Every furry know exactly what cubs are.

This is untrue. Different users had conflicting definitions, even within administration.

zombieastronaut said:
You're erasing part of the history right here.

lmao.

This thread appears to be one half people unwilling to learn how the tagging system works, and one half people being angry because they don't like being confronted with the idea that they're into art of characters that look underage (the third half of the thread, of course, is the lovely people coordinating on tagging and improving everyone's experience -- Thank you for your service.)

To the first half: Before you post, consider spending ten minutes reading the search cheat sheet and some tag wiki pages (or just some of the many helpful blacklist/search advice comments in this thread) before posting. Yes, you may have to type out fifteen characters instead of three. No, I don't think that's a good reason to angrypost.

To the second half: With all due respect to your sensibilities, while I'm sure your twitter friends who fave all of the same art agree with your arguments, I believe you will find it much harder to convince a less personally involved audience. Fair or not, the reality is that you're in the same boat many of us have been in for years, and these days it's a long, long way from shore. Consider your biases and review your invective carefully, lest you contribute to the same social threat you fear.

(To the third half, I love you.)

I'm sure that nobody that would benefit from reading this post actually will, but I was exasperated after reading three and a half pages of this thread. My apologies to the administration for regurgitating words of little value upon the board.

post #423225
Also, people wondering how this is even tagged 'young' in the first place. Am I blind?
young feral solo -young_feral -young_female rating:explicit pussy -penis -balls anthro

alphamule said:
post #423225
Also, people wondering how this is even tagged 'young' in the first place. Am I blind?
young feral solo -young_feral -young_female rating:explicit pussy -penis -balls anthro

it a pichu.

which is obviously not a reason to tag young, but that's all I can see.

sipothac said:
it a pichu.

which is obviously not a reason to tag young, but that's all I can see.

TBF, images like the first in the set are pretty obviously meant to be cub. Leaving them alone because not 100% certain which is right.

https://e621.net/forum_topics/42322?page=3#forum_post_392483 Guess it's time to break out the checklists so I can make it not feel like I'm cleaning a pool with a toothbrush. It helps sometimes to loosen the search parameters by removing the majority of the gender exclusions?

Dragon anthro cubs:
young anthro -young_anthro -feral -taur -humanoid -human solo dragon penis -young_male -intersex Done
young anthro -young_anthro -feral -taur -humanoid -human solo dragon pussy -young_female -intersex Done
young anthro -young_anthro -feral -taur -humanoid -human solo dragon penis maleherm Done
young anthro -young_anthro -feral -taur -humanoid -human solo dragon penis herm Done
young anthro -young_anthro -feral -taur -humanoid -human solo dragon penis gynomorph Done
young anthro -young_anthro -feral -taur -humanoid -human solo dragon pussy andromorph -female -male -gynomorph -herm -maleherm Done
parent:983290 This set was confusing. Some are labelled gynomorph and others male, but I can't figure out what made them different.
Feral:
young feral -young_feral feral -taur -humanoid -human solo dragon penis -young_male -intersex
young feral -young_feral feral -taur -humanoid -human solo dragon pussy -young_female -intersex
young feral -young_feral feral -taur -humanoid -human solo dragon penis maleherm
young feral -young_feral feral -taur -humanoid -human solo dragon penis herm
young feral -young_feral feral -taur -humanoid -human solo dragon penis gynomorph
young feral -young_feral feral -taur -humanoid -human solo dragon pussy andromorph -female -male -gynomorph -herm -maleherm

Avian anthro cubs:
young anthro -young_anthro -feral -taur -humanoid -human solo penis -young_male -intersex -female avian Done
young anthro -young_anthro -feral -taur -humanoid -human solo pussy -young_female -intersex avian Done
young anthro -young_anthro -feral -taur -humanoid -human solo penis maleherm -male -female -gynomorph -andromorph avian Done
young anthro -young_anthro -feral -taur -humanoid -human solo penis herm -maleherm -male -female -gynomorph -andromorph avian Done
young anthro -young_anthro -feral -taur -humanoid -human solo penis gynomorph -herm -maleherm -male -female -andromorph avian Done
young anthro -young_anthro -feral -taur -humanoid -human solo pussy andromorph -herm -maleherm -male -female -gynomorph avian Done

All species, but these actually have few results, so just did this for brevity. There is no need to do this for each species, to get short results. Rest can be just male and female, afterwards.
young anthro -young_anthro -feral -taur -humanoid -human solo penis maleherm -male -female -gynomorph -andromorph Done
young anthro -young_anthro -feral -taur -humanoid -human solo penis herm -maleherm -male -female -gynomorph -andromorph Done
young anthro -young_anthro -feral -taur -humanoid -human solo penis gynomorph -herm -maleherm -male -female -andromorph Done
young anthro -young_anthro -feral -taur -humanoid -human solo pussy andromorph -herm -maleherm -male -female -gynomorph Done

Canine anthro cubs:
young anthro -young_anthro -feral -taur -humanoid -human solo penis -young_male -intersex -female canine
young anthro -young_anthro -feral -taur -humanoid -human solo pussy -young_female -intersex canine

Template:

Full list of species sorted by count: https://e621.net/tags?page=&search%5Bcategory%5D=5&search%5Border%5D=count

I think this is the correct forum to bring this up in. There's conflicting tags now that don't make any sense, and it's hard to filter searches. Both "Young" and "Adult_(lore)" can exist in the same image, but because there's a lack of middle ground anymore, it's becoming increasingly difficult to filter content you aren't looking for as well as content you are looking for. A wonderful example of this is the Saturday Morning comic. Three characters are blatantly teenagers, which is why they have the "young" tag, and that makes sense. But if you try to filter out content that was formally marked as "cub", the algorithm filters them out as well. Inversely, if you are specifically looking for cub related content and search "young", you will find images that aren't related to your search as well. If you choose to edit out either "young" or "adult_(lore)", there's still a good chance you'll restrict content you don't want to restrict. The post mentioned below is a good example of this. It has "shota" and "young" while also having "adult_(lore)" as a tag. "Teenager" turns into "adolescent", but it's lacking that tag. So which is it? Not all of Dacad's Riolus are exclusively cub nor adult, it's a mix of both. So would this one be considered cub, teen, or adult? This isn't the only image with this kind of contradiction, but how do we tag it accurately? It was easy before and now there's contradictions salt and peppering the new system. I'm all up for change, but at the very least it should be just as easy to navigate as what got replaced.

https://e621.net/posts/2706853?q=dacad+riolu+solo

(I have no idea if this is the appropriate place to post this discretion. If it isn't, could someone direct me to the proper place? It's been bothering me for a while and I figure I can't be the only one.)

ray_clocks said:
I think this is the correct forum to bring this up in. There's conflicting tags now that don't make any sense, and it's hard to filter searches. Both "Young" and "Adult_(lore)" can exist in the same image, but because there's a lack of middle ground anymore, it's becoming increasingly difficult to filter content you aren't looking for as well as content you are looking for. A wonderful example of this is the Saturday Morning comic. Three characters are blatantly teenagers, which is why they have the "young" tag, and that makes sense. But if you try to filter out content that was formally marked as "cub", the algorithm filters them out as well. Inversely, if you are specifically looking for cub related content and search "young", you will find images that aren't related to your search as well. If you choose to edit out either "young" or "adult_(lore)", there's still a good chance you'll restrict content you don't want to restrict. The post mentioned below is a good example of this. It has "shota" and "young" while also having "adult_(lore)" as a tag. "Teenager" turns into "adolescent", but it's lacking that tag. So which is it? Not all of Dacad's Riolus are exclusively cub nor adult, it's a mix of both. So would this one be considered cub, teen, or adult? This isn't the only image with this kind of contradiction, but how do we tag it accurately? It was easy before and now there's contradictions salt and peppering the new system. I'm all up for change, but at the very least it should be just as easy to navigate as what got replaced.

https://e621.net/posts/2706853?q=dacad+riolu+solo

(I have no idea if this is the appropriate place to post this discretion. If it isn't, could someone direct me to the proper place? It's been bothering me for a while and I figure I can't be the only one.)

Your argument hinges on the idea that the cub tag was for a specific age range. It wasn't, that was the whole point of getting rid of the tag. It applied to the same age range as young does, just exclusively to anthro, feral, and taur. We have age group tags, and we've had them for a good while.

• baby
• toddler
• child
• adolescent

donovan_dmc said:
Your argument hinges on the idea that the cub tag was for a specific age range. It wasn't, that was the whole point of getting rid of the tag. It applied to the same age range as young does, just exclusively to anthro, feral, and taur. We have age group tags, and we've had them for a good while.

• baby
• toddler
• child
• adolescent

Alright, I searched young and filtered out the tags you provided. There are more than 187,500 images that fall in line with the search. With only the tag young, there are still baby, toddler, child, and adolescent in the mix going that far back. How would you filter those out since the tag young can also incorporate characters that are depicted as adults?

ray_clocks said:
Alright, I searched young and filtered out the tags you provided. There are more than 187,500 images that fall in line with the search.

Yes, those the tags (like many other subtags) are underused. Sitting here complaining about it doesn't solve that problem. Any "solution" will result in the same issue.

ray_clocks said:
since the tag young can also incorporate characters that are depicted as adults?

If tagged correctly, it cannot. Adult characters should not be tagged as young.

I have always assumed that someone could be young without being a cub in the same fashion that teen can also encompass 18 and 19 years old (or even the very early 20's for some).

And even to some 30 years old is young considering the overall life expectancy. Maybe the term got removed because of the stigma around it but I think that it won't make people think otherwise about some pic...

ginkei said:
I have always assumed that someone could be young without being a cub in the same fashion that teen can also encompass 18 and 19 years old (or even the very early 20's for some).

And even to some 30 years old is young considering the overall life expectancy. Maybe the term got removed because of the stigma around it but I think that it won't make people think otherwise about some pic...

it was mostly just because the definition of young + anthro OR feral OR taur -humanoid_taur was decided to be invalid and was thus replaced with the more specific, more useful young_anthro, young_feral, and young_taur, along side the creation of the rest of the young_<form> tags.

This is an awful, awful change, how did this happen? I like borderline content, but I don't want to see little kids. Now the two are lumped together, making the tag useless for me and leaving no alternative. Such a huge change should have taken years.

nobodyknowsimhere said:
but I don't want to see little kids.

Congrats on using the same invalid argument every other person complaining has made. The cub tag applied to the same age range as young since its creation. The only change that's happened is cub being split into young anthro & young feral.

nobodyknowsimhere said:
This is an awful, awful change, how did this happen? I like borderline content, but I don't want to see little kids. Now the two are lumped together, making the tag useless for me and leaving no alternative. Such a huge change should have taken years.

cub never described an age range that was different from young 🙄, use adolescent if you only want to see borderline stuff.

nobodyknowsimhere said:
This is an awful, awful change, how did this happen? I like borderline content, but I don't want to see little kids. Now the two are lumped together, making the tag useless for me and leaving no alternative. Such a huge change should have taken years.

Cub was never officially "little kids" and very often also used on teenagers. The tags you're looking to blacklist are baby, toddler and child. Or search adolescent instead of young.

pleaseletmein said:
cub never described an age range that was different from young 🙄, use adolescent if you only want to see borderline stuff.

I don't disagree with the change in principal, but the rush job was a bad idea. The tags were already ambiguous, but putting them both into one category without cleaning them up first just makes a bad situation worse. Look at young -child, by the way- nobody is actually using the additional tags.

nobodyknowsimhere said:
Look at young -child, by the way- nobody is actually using the additional tags.

Yes, subtags are underused. That is always the case. Complaining about it doesn't fix it. You know what does fix it? Tagging the posts.

nobodyknowsimhere said:
I don't disagree with the change in principal, but the rush job was a bad idea. The tags were already ambiguous, but putting them both into one category without cleaning them up first just makes a bad situation worse.

What cleanup is there to do that we didn't do? The change was splitting cub into young_anthro and young_feral. At least 130,000/160,000 posts were tagged before the change went through. Additionally, set #54530 contains all of the posts that were previously in the cub tag. If by cleanup you mean adding on the age subtags, that's a project for the entirety of the young tag. Restricting it to cub doesn't make it any easier due to both sharing the same age range, as multiple people have told you.

nobodyknowsimhere said:
I don't disagree with the change in principal, but the rush job was a bad idea. The tags were already ambiguous, but putting them both into one category without cleaning them up first just makes a bad situation worse. Look at young -child, by the way- nobody is actually using the additional tags.

This actually seems like a relatively easy fix. Since these tags are used very often, I think they should be added as clickable buttons in the upload page, just like body types, sex, rating, etc.

If they're added as a default option, they usage should dramatically increase.

kyiiel said:
This actually seems like a relatively easy fix. Since these tags are used very often, I think they should be added as clickable buttons in the upload page, just like body types, sex, rating, etc.

If they're added as a default option, they usage should dramatically increase.

This is a great idea actually, we should have buttons for the contentious content, rather than just suggestions as placeholder text in the box which disappear after you start typing something.

| young | gore | scat | watersports | etc. |

If young is selected, another row of buttons can appear:

| baby | toddler | child | adolescent |

Including the forms would end up taking a lot of space, though.

faucet said:
Including the forms would end up taking a lot of space, though.

Both UI and code complexity? XD

faucet said:
This is a great idea actually, we should have buttons for the contentious content, rather than just suggestions as placeholder text in the box which disappear after you start typing something.

| young | gore | scat | watersports | etc. |

If young is selected, another row of buttons can appear:

| baby | toddler | child | adolescent |

Including the forms would end up taking a lot of space, though.

young doesn't necessarily mean contentious content (young rating:safe). Ideally age would be in its own section, always displayed.

actual contentious content buttons could appear when something other than rating:safe is selected, but that's kinda outside the scope of my suggestion.

sipothac said:
just ignore the fact that we have young split into 4 smaller age groups. cub wasn't even an age group it was just young + anthro/feral.

also, that's not what obfuscation means.

I'm sorry, but this just doesn't work, ESPECIALLY for ferals. Looking through "feral young rating:e solo", the majority of these are just on-model Pokemon/Digimon, naturally small animals, and anything drawn in the slightest bit of a cutesy style, with only a few actual cubs sprinkled in between. You say to use the baby/toddler/child/teen tags, but all that does is create further confusion and mess. First, hardly anyone knows these tags exist, let alone uses them. Then there's the issue of actually classifying what belongs to what. It's hard enough to judge age for anthro characters; how in the blazes are were supposed to apply these to animals and fictional creatures, many of which don't even have such growth stages?

For proof that these tags are utterly useless:
feral baby rating:e solo has less than 2 pages (82 posts). This is the youngest category possible, so you'd expect to find content akin to literal newborn puppies, right? Instead we have arbitrary things like ABDL, canonically young (definitely not baby) MLP characters, random cute-looking animals such as hamsters, and normal-looking on-model Pokemon.
feral toddler rating:e solo has only 15 posts. A couple of the solo posts tagged with baby were also tagged with child.
feral child rating:e solo has 2 pages (111 posts). We see a lot of the same things here. Canonically teenage MLP characters (that look no different than the thousands of other MLP posts that aren't tagged young), dragons and animals drawn in a cutesy style, on-model Pokemon, etc.
feral adolescent rating:e solo has 1 page (43 posts). Ironically, some of the actors under this tag look younger than a lot of the characters in all the other tags.

So we've got a measly total of 251 solo feral posts using the new age classification tags.
There are 3745 posts under feral young rating:e solo. That means after several months, only 6.7% of feral cub posts have adopted the new tagging system, and a lot of them have done it in a way that isn't at all intuitive or useful.
Everyone has their own idea of what goes where, and a lot of the things they're tagging simply don't and can't adhere to such specific classifications. The cub tag wasn't perfect, but you at least were more likely to find actual cubs with it. We all know that people like to slap the 'young' tag onto things on a whim, and any disagreement will just result in drama and bans. It's useless as a search term and far too over-encompassing to be useful for blacklists. Theoretically, you could find a close equivalent by searching feral ~baby ~toddler ~child, but since nobody uses or knows how to use these tags, that's simply not an option. And even if it was, that's a very bloated and resource-heavy query for what used to be 1 tag.

In essence, 'cub' served as a sanctuary to more reliably find or filter out actual child-like content, while young was more of a prudish, virtuous tag tacked onto anything remotely cute or small just to be safe. We can pretend all we want, but it doesn't really matter what was written in the wiki, because at the end of the day, it's the community that does the tagging. And if the community has evolved different meanings for certain tags, then the smart thing to do would be to adapt the site to the community, rather than expecting the opposite to occur. This is especially true if your only alternative is to make the tags even MORE complex and unclear than they were.

dslurper34 said:
I'm sorry, but this just doesn't work, ESPECIALLY for ferals. Looking through "feral young rating:e solo", the majority of these are just on-model Pokemon/Digimon, naturally small animals, and anything drawn in the slightest bit of a cutesy style, with only a few actual cubs sprinkled in between. You say to use the baby/toddler/child/teen tags, but all that does is create further confusion and mess. First, hardly anyone knows these tags exist, let alone uses them. Then there's the issue of actually classifying what belongs to what. It's hard enough to judge age for anthro characters; how in the blazes are were supposed to apply these to animals and fictional creatures, many of which don't even have such growth stages?

For proof that these tags are utterly useless:
feral baby rating:e solo has less than 2 pages (82 posts). This is the youngest category possible, so you'd expect to find content akin to literal newborn puppies, right? Instead we have arbitrary things like ABDL, canonically young (definitely not baby) MLP characters, random cute-looking animals such as hamsters, and normal-looking on-model Pokemon.
feral toddler rating:e solo has only 15 posts. A couple of the solo posts tagged with baby were also tagged with child.
feral child rating:e solo has 2 pages (111 posts). We see a lot of the same things here. Canonically teenage MLP characters (that look no different than the thousands of other MLP posts that aren't tagged young), dragons and animals drawn in a cutesy style, on-model Pokemon, etc.
feral adolescent rating:e solo has 1 page (43 posts). Ironically, some of the actors under this tag look younger than a lot of the characters in all the other tags.

So we've got a measly total of 251 solo feral posts using the new age classification tags.
There are 3745 posts under feral young rating:e solo. That means after several months, only 6.7% of feral cub posts have adopted the new tagging system, and a lot of them have done it in a way that isn't at all intuitive or useful.
Everyone has their own idea of what goes where, and a lot of the things they're tagging simply don't and can't adhere to such specific classifications. The cub tag wasn't perfect, but you at least were more likely to find actual cubs with it. We all know that people like to slap the 'young' tag onto things on a whim, and any disagreement will just result in drama and bans. It's useless as a search term and far too over-encompassing to be useful for blacklists. Theoretically, you could find a close equivalent by searching feral ~baby ~toddler ~child, but since nobody uses or knows how to use these tags, that's simply not an option. And even if it was, that's a very bloated and resource-heavy query for what used to be 1 tag.

In essence, 'cub' served as a sanctuary to more reliably find or filter out actual child-like content, while young was more of a prudish, virtuous tag tacked onto anything remotely cute or small just to be safe. We can pretend all we want, but it doesn't really matter what was written in the wiki, because at the end of the day, it's the community that does the tagging. And if the community has evolved different meanings for certain tags, then the smart thing to do would be to adapt the site to the community, rather than expecting the opposite to occur. This is especially true if your only alternative is to make the tags even MORE complex and unclear than they were.

It's not exactly taggers' fault that it's far more ambiguous than for human-like species. Ignoring the joke about species like mayflies all being less than 2 weeks old thus none of them are adult according to TWYS. It's obvious when you have something like newborns in a species that almost always have obvious signs. i.e. Chirpy babies are newborns in fluffy pony lore to point where it's pretty much a species trait for their young to make that noise. Searching for "young_feral -teenager" wouldn't make much sense, to be fair. Adding "set:cub_apocalypse" in place of "cub" works wonders, too.

dslurper34 said:
-snip-

cub was not a distinct age group. it had been any visibly under-18 character who was of anthro or feral form.

if you think that blacklisting cub was an effective method of avoiding """"""actually young"""""" posts I can guarantee you that it wasn't.

alphamule said:
It's not exactly taggers' fault that it's far more ambiguous than for human-like species. Ignoring the joke about species like mayflies all being less than 2 weeks old thus none of them are adult according to TWYS. It's obvious when you have something like newborns in a species that almost always have obvious signs. i.e. Chirpy babies are newborns in fluffy pony lore to point where it's pretty much a species trait for their young to make that noise. Searching for "young_feral -teenager" wouldn't make much sense, to be fair. Adding "set:cub_apocalypse" in place of "cub" works wonders, too.

Of course it's not the taggers' fault, the new system is far too confusing and oddly specific (yet extremely subjective) for anyone to use effectively. The fact that people are still relying on set:cub_apocalypse in place of actual existing tags just proves what a bad change this was. I wish we could add new posts to the set, but at that point, we may as well just bring the cub tag back (which we should). The new age-group tags are entirely useless for blacklisting purposes, considering they aren't mandatory (not to mention very confusing and subjective to use) and thus people will just slap on the young tag to be safe and call it a day.

sipothac said:
cub was not a distinct age group. it had been any visibly under-18 character who was of anthro or feral form.

if you think that blacklisting cub was an effective method of avoiding """"""actually young"""""" posts I can guarantee you that it wasn't.

Yes, officially and technically, the cub tag wasn't a distinct age group. And yet, everyone familiar with the cub tag knows what it was primarily used for in reality, and even the wiki itself acknowledged this.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to prove by bringing up completely unrelated tags. Shota/loli is for humans, not furries. Adding cub shota loli to your blacklist was indeed quite effective. Much more effective than the current system of "either blacklist young and miss out on any porn containing vaguely cute or short/small characters, or suck it up and deal with having to see actual cub porn", that is.

dslurper34 said:
Yes, officially and technically, the cub tag wasn't a distinct age group. And yet, everyone familiar with the cub tag knows what it was primarily used for in reality, and even the wiki itself acknowledged this.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to prove by bringing up completely unrelated tags. Shota/loli is for humans, not furries. Adding cub shota loli to your blacklist was indeed quite effective. Much more effective than the current system of "either blacklist young and miss out on any porn containing vaguely cute or short/small characters, or suck it up and deal with having to see actual cub porn", that is.

shota and loli aren't for humans only they're for any sexualized male or female young character.

sipothac said:
shota and loli aren't for humans only they're for any sexualized male or female young character.

I've never noticed these tags were being used on furry content, lol. We seriously prioritized getting rid of cub over fixing these pointlessly redundant tags?

dslurper34 said:
I've never seen these tags used on furry content, lol. We seriously prioritized getting rid of cub over these pointlessly redundant tags?

I mean, if you have it blacklisted you probably wouldn't, huh?

if anything, cub was the redundant tag, it had no purpose to exist after the young_<form> tags came into existence. loli and shota would have the function of separating out young characters who are in the background of explicit posts and young characters who are the subject of explicit posts.

sipothac said:
I mean, if you have it blacklisted you probably wouldn't, huh?

Fair enough

sipothac said:
if anything, cub was the redundant tag, it had no purpose to exist after the young_<form> tags came into existence. loli and shota would have the function of separating out young characters who are in the background of explicit posts and young characters who are the subject of explicit posts.

All I know is that aliasing cub to young has completely broken mine and a lot of other people's blacklists (and vice-versa), so clearly, it had an important use within the community. It definitely wasn't perfect and probably needed some restructuring or repurposing into what it was actually being used for, but just waking up and deleting the tag one day with no warning or community outreach (and no, a buried forum post doesn't count) was probably the absolute worst way to handle this, considering it affects nearly everyone.

Furthermore, I don't even feel comfortable using the new age tags because of how specific yet unclear they are. I can hardly guess the age of people in real life, let alone in drawings... so how in blazes am I supposed to figure out the difference between a child, teenager and adult drawing of a non-humanoid species that has no resemblance to anything existing here on Earth? I'm worried that someone will disagree with my judgement and try to start shit over it, or that a mod will randomly decide that I wasn't tagging in good faith and give me a negative note. I'm sure a lot of other people feel this way too.

dslurper34 said:
All I know is that aliasing cub to young has completely broken mine and a lot of other people's blacklists (and vice-versa), so clearly, it had an important use within the community. It definitely wasn't perfect and probably needed some restructuring or repurposing into what it was actually being used for, but just waking up and deleting the tag one day with no warning or community outreach (and no, a buried forum post doesn't count) was probably the absolute worst way to handle this, considering it affects nearly everyone.

all that happened was a tag split.

the only thing that's changed is that nearly everything that used to be tagged cub had been moved over to young_anthro or young_feral (manually or by a script), and we changed some people's blacklist from containing the word cub to contain the word young instead.

fewer than 8% of the posts currently tagged with young_anthro now were absent of the cub tag when it existed, and, looking through all of these posts very few of that 8% are posts featuring adolescent or borderline characters... and actually looking at the stuff that _did_ get tagged cub it seems to contain just about as many adolescent/borderline characters, maybe slightly fewer. that is to say, it seems to me that people who used cub as a blacklist item were more or less just using a watered down version of young.

dslurper34 said:
Furthermore, I don't even feel comfortable using the new age tags because of how specific yet unclear they are. I can hardly guess the age of people in real life, let alone in drawings... so how in blazes am I supposed to figure out the difference between a child, teenager and adult drawing of a non-humanoid species that has no resemblance to anything existing here on Earth? I'm worried that someone will disagree with my judgement and try to start shit over it, or that a mod will randomly decide that I wasn't tagging in good faith and give me a negative note. I'm sure a lot of other people feel this way too.

the specific young age group subtags aren't new, they've existed as long as the site has.

as long as you're not participating in tag wars or doing some other form of very obvious vandalism like clearing a post of tags or mass undoing someone's edits, you're not going to get dinged.

dslurper34 said:
The new age-group tags are entirely useless for blacklisting purposes, considering they aren't mandatory

Cub also was not mandatory. The only mandatory tag was young. Nothing has changed in that regard.

dslurper34 said:
Of course it's not the taggers' fault, the new system is far too confusing and oddly specific (yet extremely subjective) for anyone to use effectively.

If you think the new system is too confusing and oddly specific (yet extremely subjective), you should keep in mind that the old system with cub was worse. It was just a familiar worse.

dslurper34 said:
All I know is that aliasing cub to young has completely broken mine and a lot of other people's blacklists (and vice-versa), so clearly, it had an important use within the community. It definitely wasn't perfect and probably needed some restructuring or repurposing into what it was actually being used for, but just waking up and deleting the tag one day with no warning or community outreach (and no, a buried forum post doesn't count) was probably the absolute worst way to handle this, considering it affects nearly everyone.

Changing tags will require people redoing their blacklists regardless of what tag gets changed or how it's changed. That doesn't make the changes bad. It means that people will need to do a little update to their blacklists. It's no different from running across a new tag that you decide you want to blacklist. The blacklist isn't broken; the tag just needs to be added. It's been made clear throughout this thread which two tags one can blacklist to replace cub.

Was the system really harmed by removing cub? Or is the pain over the removal of cub due to sentiment over an old and familiar tag coupled with a desire to not want to change old, familiar habits? The latter is certainly understandable and relatable but shouldn't be a reason to prevent change. Sometimes, we have to murder our darlings.

Furthermore, I don't even feel comfortable using the new age tags because of how specific yet unclear they are. I can hardly guess the age of people in real life, let alone in drawings... so how in blazes am I supposed to figure out the difference between a child, teenager and adult drawing of a non-humanoid species that has no resemblance to anything existing here on Earth?

Cub was hardly any different, if not worse.

dslurper34 said:
I'm sorry, but this just doesn't work, ESPECIALLY for ferals. Looking through "feral young rating:e solo", the majority of these are just on-model Pokemon/Digimon, naturally small animals, and anything drawn in the slightest bit of a cutesy style, with only a few actual cubs sprinkled in between.

Reminder that we do not tag based on canonical age or fictional species lore. It doesn't matter if it's "an on-model Pokemon/Digimon". That is not something TWYS takes into account.

I do not like this and think it just made general searching far more cumbersome than it ever needed to be.
You basically mixed at least three separate tags into one very large tag that is way too broad to be useable. For example: I am safe to assume that people searching "cub" don't want to see human loli/shota.
Yes, the "young_<form>" tags exist, but that is a solution to a problem that was explicitly caused by this change. Specific tags are good and should be used, but when it's required to use at least two or three of them to get the same result as before it just makes searching feel as clunky as using text commands in DOS.

brokenscale said:
I do not like this and think it just made general searching far more cumbersome than it ever needed to be.
You basically mixed at least three separate tags into one very large tag that is way too broad to be useable. For example: I am safe to assume that people searching "cub" don't want to see human loli/shota.
Yes, the "young_<form>" tags exist, but that is a solution to a problem that was explicitly caused by this change. Specific tags are good and should be used, but when it's required to use at least two or three of them to get the same result as before it just makes searching feel as clunky as using text commands in DOS.

You are right in some aspects but you could stumble on syota content if you searched for cub, so before you searched for "cub -shota -loli" now you do "young_anthro -loli -shota".

But I understand if you liked to search for both type of cubs (anthro or feral) and now you need both tabs for searching them (young isn't just for furry but for every young character) but I don't think they will like a suggestion for "young_furry" lol.

notknow said:
You are right in some aspects but you could stumble on syota content if you searched for cub, so before you searched for "cub -shota -loli" now you do "young_anthro -loli -shota".

But I understand if you liked to search for both type of cubs (anthro or feral) and now you need both tabs for searching them (young isn't just for furry but for every young character) but I don't think they will like a suggestion for "young_furry" lol.

They can use the ~ operation, but you only get one set of those so that might not be the best solution

clawstripe said:
If you think the new system is too confusing and oddly specific (yet extremely subjective), you should keep in mind that the old system with cub was worse. It was just a familiar worse.

Changing tags will require people redoing their blacklists regardless of what tag gets changed or how it's changed. That doesn't make the changes bad. It means that people will need to do a little update to their blacklists. It's no different from running across a new tag that you decide you want to blacklist. The blacklist isn't broken; the tag just needs to be added. It's been made clear throughout this thread which two tags one can blacklist to replace cub.

Was the system really harmed by removing cub? Or is the pain over the removal of cub due to sentiment over an old and familiar tag coupled with a desire to not want to change old, familiar habits? The latter is certainly understandable and relatable but shouldn't be a reason to prevent change. Sometimes, we have to murder our darlings.

Cub was hardly any different, if not worse.

To be fair, it kind of did break blacklists... There's no change you can make to your blacklist to get the equivalent of allowing young while blacklisting cub.
Even the admins regularly used cub as it own distinction vs young

aidt said:
To be fair, it kind of did break blacklists... There's no change you can make to your blacklist to get the equivalent of allowing young while blacklisting cub.

just add
young_anthro young_feral
to your blacklist on separate lines, that's the entirety of what cub was.

snpthecat said:
just add
young_anthro young_feral
to your blacklist on separate lines, that's the entirety of what cub was.

A quick search says otherwise...

aidt said:
A quick search says otherwise...

You misspelt young_feral, which contributed to the count

Cub_apocalypse set has 144975 posts, the (corrected) results turn up 9750 posts, of which there are posts in which cub was originally mistagged, animal_humanoids (which might be a problem, though it can be blacklisted/searched for with young_humanoid animal_humanoid), and posts where young was in contention

aidt said:
A quick search says otherwise...

There are about 10,000 posts without young anthro or young feral, which is quite an amazing percentage of that set, considering there's 144,000 posts in that set. That's less than 7% of that set that isn't tagged with either. In other words, 93% of that set is.

It drops down to 8200 (5.7%) when you include the other tags in the same category. set:cub_apocalypse -young_anthro -young_feral -young_human -young_humanoid -young_taur

donovan_dmc said:
There are about 10,000 posts without young anthro or young feral, which is quite an amazing percentage of that set, considering there's 144,000 posts in that set. That's less than 7% of that set that isn't tagged with either. In other words, 93% of that set is.

It drops down to 8200 (5.7%) when you include the other tags in the same category.
set:cub_apocalypse -young_anthro -young_feral -young_human -young_humanoid -young_taur

And if you include solo in the search, set:cub_apocalypse -young_anthro -young_feral -young_human -young_humanoid -young_taur solo drops down to 675 posts (0.4%) of the set

snpthecat said:
You misspelt young_feral, which contributed to the count

Cub_apocalypse set has 144975 posts, the (corrected) results turn up 9750 posts, of which there are posts in which cub was originally mistagged, animal_humanoids (which might be a problem, though it can be blacklisted/searched for with young_humanoid animal_humanoid), and posts where young was in contention

Oh you right my b

snpthecat said:
And if you include solo in the search, set:cub_apocalypse -young_anthro -young_feral -young_human -young_humanoid -young_taur solo drops down to 675 posts (0.4%) of the set

I guess that's pretty good, but I still can't wrap my head around it all... Plus aren't a lot of these still just borderline teens and not actual cubs? Cub was a lot easier for me :(

aidt said:
Plus aren't a lot of these still just borderline teens and not actual cubs? Cub was a lot easier for me :(

The fact of the matter is that by definition, young ~anthro ~feral & cub should have resulted in the same search. The two only differed due to definitions people made up on their own, or certain users/artists not wanting cub on their uploads due to it being a more loaded and thus controversial term.

This change stemmed from topic #41653, if you'd like to do a little more reading.

donovan_dmc said:
The fact of the matter is that by definition, young ~anthro ~feral & cub should have resulted in the same search. The two only differed due to definitions people made up on their own, or certain users/artists not wanting cub on their uploads due to it being a more loaded and thus controversial term.

This change stemmed from topic #41653, if you'd like to do a little more reading.

Thanks!
The second message from there perfectly sums up the way I and I imagine most people differentiated between these two tags:

Watsit said:
young is any character under 18, including humans and humanoids. Cub is a preteen anthro, feral, or (sometimes) taur character.

According to a DM from an admin someone got in topic #39531, it's supposed to be for "childlike" characters rather than teenagers. Given there are posts locked young -cub, cub isn't supposed to include all young characters, which teenagers is the oldest set of.

There's also this from 9 months ago:

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.

So I'm guessing removing the cub tag just kinda stemmed from a vocal minority type deal?

aidt said:
So I'm guessing removing the cub tag just kinda stemmed from a vocal minority type deal?

A "vocal minority" (which also feels like a loaded term here) is how most tag decisions are made. This decision had some of if not the most visibility for BUR requests. The initial request has 36 upvotes, 3 downvotes, and 1 meh. That is an insane number of votes, considering most don't get over 10.

aidt said:
There's also this from 9 months ago:

what about this post from 3 months ago? where Admin Dash said that "[her] interpretation of the tag was not how it [was] used".

also RD was the person who put most of the BURs on this thread into effect.

aidt said:
So I'm guessing removing the cub tag just kinda stemmed from a vocal minority type deal?

nearly every single tagging decision made on this site is by a very small minority of users, currently fewer than 320 usable accounts have a 5 digit tag edit count and, of that, I recognize like 40 users that are definitely still active.

but it's probably closer to a decision made by a "panel of experts" rather than a "vocal minority". we're the weird nerds that discuss tagging philosophy in our free time. we look at tag usage, tag naming, etc. and we strive to make decisions that would create a tag system that is both robust and easy for a normal user to understand. sometimes we get rid of tags that are jargon-y or have weird definitions. cub was honestly, to some extent, both.

sipothac said:
nearly every single tagging decision made on this site is by a very small minority of users, currently fewer than 320 usable accounts have a 5 digit tag edit count and, of that, I recognize like 40 users that are definitely still active.

For reference, the voters on the BUR with 5 digit tag counts:

All but one of these people upvoted.

The downvotes/meh:

And a full list for fun

A large chunk of the voters are the actual users that maintain the tagging system.

donovan_dmc said:
For reference, the voters on the BUR with 5 digit tag counts:

5 Digit Post Update Count Voters

Donovan_DMC: 508,613 (yes I can't actually vote, but my support is implied)
gattonero2001: 257,704
faucet: 253,190
Kemonophonic: 220,870
DubsTheFox: 135,322
Mairo: 119,871
Wandering_Spaniel: 107,204
Watsit: 67,054
Siral_Exan: 66,929
Clawstripe: 49,464
Strikerman: 31,749
pleaseletmein: 28,144
Labra: 27,043
alphamule: 24,817 (downvote)
OneFattyCatty: 22,602
theghost123: 22,222
wat8548: 20,879
DemonTheDarkHound: 15,123
scaliespe: 14,205
Benjiboyo: 10,084

All but one of these people upvoted.

And the only downvote from 5 digit tag count was because...

alphamule said:
Only downvoted because gonna be such a pain...

A public announcement should've been made instead of holding a vote among the top 1% of taggers and forum-perusers who are going to have a huge bias compared to the large majority of users that don't have nearly as much free time on their hands
Just my personal opinion :3

Cubs have always been associated with furry, anthropomorphic animals. Be it if that animal is "feral" or standing upright is of no contest. The definition heavily implies adolescent no matter what the age group might be. It doesn't however imply a human in any shape or form and agree with the argument there of that it is a bit silly to now have young_human, young_anthro, young_feral when simply the tag young, and anthro would suffice in the meta. For years E621 has been oversimplifying their tags and honestly it has only complicated things. I remember how searching for badger would pull up mustelid and I keep getting otters. Annoying. I hope that discussions as of these would always be welcome so that those that do and don't wish to see content can better shape the site for better user experience.

aidt said:
A public announcement should've been made

We had one planned. It was overshadowed by the problems with North Carolina, similar to the current problems with Arizona.

lyndafire said:
It doesn't however imply a human in any shape or form and agree with the argument there of that it is a bit silly to now have young_human, young_anthro, young_feral when simply the tag young, and anthro would suffice in the meta.

young anthro will never return the same results as young_anthro due to posts with multiple characters.

donovan_dmc said:
We had one planned. It was overshadowed by the problems with North Carolina, similar to the current problems with Arizona.

young anthro will never return the same results as young_anthro due to posts with multiple characters.

Of course, young is all encompassing, human, animal,'feral', or 'anthro'. It is a very very broad term that is an umbrella for then breaking down further. Sadly though it is a bit of a mess right now as many pictures might have the young tag and anthro tag but not young_anthro, same with young and human but not young_human. This makes it harder to filter what you do or do not want to see. Better results for a Do would be young anthro -human if you wish to see only 'cub' as I had defined. But in a do not scenario -young works well to eliminate anything that is young.

young is a bit hard to deny the meaning of, which I can advocate a big thumbs up on that. Though I look back at the beginning of the post and all the tags that was put into cub then cub into youth and I ponder, is there really a such thing as over taging? I feel there should be more tags but as young is an umbrella, have better catagories that will encompass said tag. In Example: Kemono as in this case, Kemonoshota is more or less a type of style of art, much like east vs western style of art. Yes, it belongs under the young tag but it very much is pointing at the east vs west style. Should the tag be split into two? Young that denotes the age of the characters involved and Kemono the type of style? There are many eastern styles and western styles for sure but food for thought.

Another food for thought; In the back end, aliases will be grouped, pruned and removed as other keywords come into and fall out of common use. However, is it possible to set up custom keyword aliases? A second argument I could make is the length of typing out long keywords. Cub is only three letters vs young_anthro. Not to go off on a tangent for too long, but I ask too because a lot of the times species will default to latin names and I find it excruciating annoying.

lyndafire said:
Not to go off on a tangent for too long, but I ask too because a lot of the times species will default to latin names and I find it excruciating annoying.

You're not alone, there is general sentiment of reversing those aliases to point to the more common name. You can create a BUR to request changes

I'll mention again that 93% of the active posts in the cub tag had some young_<form> tag added before the alias happened. Any search difficulties already existed, or result from uploaders not bothering to read wikis.

I'll also point out that ~66% (168k/248k) of young itself has at least one of young anthro, young feral, young human, young humanoid, young taur. That's about the same percentage of posts where cub was present. (When cub should have been on at least 85% of young posts)

donovan_dmc said:
I'll mention again that 93% of the active posts in the cub tag had some young_<form> tag added before the alias happened. Any search difficulties already existed, or result from uploaders not bothering to read wikis.

I'll also point out that ~66% (168k/248k) of young itself has at least one of young anthro, young feral, young human, young humanoid, young taur. That's about the same percentage of posts where cub was present. (When cub should have been on at least 85% of young posts)

How many of them had age tags added before the alias?

Also, just to make sure I'm doing this right... To get the rough equivalent of what 'cub' used to be, I should now be using '~young_feral ~young_anthro ~baby ~toddler ~child'?

Edit: That doesn't seem to work, since it'll still show posts with non-furries... I'm a bit at a loss on what to use

aidt said:
Also, just to make sure I'm doing this right... To get the rough equivalent of what 'cub' used to be, I should now be using '~young_feral ~young_anthro ~baby ~toddler ~child'?

Edit: That doesn't seem to work, since it'll still show posts with non-furries... I'm a bit at a loss on what to use

you can also add young_human and young_humanoid to your blacklist if you do not wish to see them.

aidt said:
How many of them had age tags added before the alias?

Also, just to make sure I'm doing this right... To get the rough equivalent of what 'cub' used to be, I should now be using '~young_feral ~young_anthro ~baby ~toddler ~child'?

Edit: That doesn't seem to work, since it'll still show posts with non-furries... I'm a bit at a loss on what to use

is sufficient. If people were tagging human babies/toddlers/children as "cubs" then they were just plain wrong.
Thankfully we do have the more specific tags now, though.

lafcadio said:
~young_feral ~young_anthro is sufficient. If people were tagging human babies/toddlers/children as "cubs" then they were just plain wrong.
Thankfully we do have the more specific tags now, though.

They weren't wrong at the time, because that's what the admins were telling them to do... And that's what it was being used for in reality, so wrong or not, that's what I'm hoping to replicate
'~young_feral ~young_anthro -teenager' would work I think, but a lot of posts are missing that tag

aidt said:
How many of them had age tags added before the alias?

No idea. That isn't relevant here. The tag wasn't defined with a more strict age range than young.

donovan_dmc said:
No idea. That isn't relevant here. The tag wasn't defined with a more strict age range than young.

I'm starting to get the vibe that nobody here wants to address the elephant in the room... Can we start by admitting that the cub tag was used by the majority (even admins) as a way to filter actual cubs from older teenage-looking furries?
I'm not saying that it should've been used like that, just that it WAS for the most part and now a lot of people are being dismissed and left to fend for themselves, even though a lot were just doing what site staff told them to do

aidt said:
I'm starting to get the vibe that nobody here wants to address the elephant in the room... Can we start by admitting that the cub tag was used by the majority (even admins) as a way to filter actual cubs from older teenage-looking furries?

Some users, including some staff members used it like that, yes. I reject that "the majority" used it as such.

aidt said:
I'm starting to get the vibe that nobody here wants to address the elephant in the room... Can we start by admitting that the cub tag was used by the majority (even admins) as a way to filter actual cubs from older teenage-looking furries?
I'm not saying that it should've been used like that, just that it WAS for the most part and now a lot of people are being dismissed and left to fend for themselves, even though a lot were just doing what site staff told them to do

it really was not often used that way, if you glance at the pre-split cub tag, you can see that it contained a fairly large chunk posts with adolescent characters. and the inverse is also true, that the posts which were not tagged cub often contained child and younger characters.

searching/blacklisting cub in order to filter pre-adolescent characters was, at best, slightly diluting results. but, from what I'm seeing it was essentially just placebo for people who were using it this way.

pepperr said:
(its annoying having to try to moderate my favorites for things that are clearly not children)

how about maybe you just don't do that?

pepperr said:
may i also suggest separating "cub" from "young" when it comes to the whole tag autocorrect and auto-searching thing, or just removing it from all tags substitute things when searching
cub in my opinion means a character is a child, and young does not explicitly mean child
(its annoying having to try to moderate my favorites for things that are clearly not children)

There is an actual child tag for that age range. As opposed to adolescent and the like.
If you mean mistags, that's a different issue entirely and those posts should be corrected. post #3851376 is 100% young though.

pepperr said:
my fault for that one i guess but the two should be separated when it comes to searching the word, young does not mean child

child

Cub never meant a specific age group. It was just young + anthro/feral/taur.

nimphia said:
child

Cub never meant a specific age group. It was just young + anthro/feral/taur.

guess in many cases it's just mistagging, disregard