The bulk update request #6439 is pending approval.

remove alias gay (0) -> male/male (460703)
remove alias homo (0) -> male/male (460703)
remove alias homosexual (0) -> male/male (460703)
remove alias male_only (0) -> male (2301350)
remove alias solo_male (0) -> male (2301350)
remove alias male_solo (0) -> male (2301350)
remove alias lesbian (0) -> female/female (94880)
remove alias female_only (0) -> female (2376960)
remove alias solo_female (0) -> female (2376960)
remove alias all_female (0) -> female (2376960)
remove alias female_solo (0) -> female (2376960)
remove alias intersex_only (0) -> intersex (224826)
remove alias straight (0) -> male/female (620830)

Reason: There is a huge problem with male/male being tagged on solo male posts, and I think I have come up with a solution.

When someone searches "gay" on a site like this, what they're expecting to see is something more like ~solo_male ~male/male. That's also how people use that tag. That's also why male/male gets tagged on solo male posts all the time - because gay is aliased to male/male. They're tagging gay either under the notion that solo male content is inherently homoerotic, or they're tagging the lore sexuality of the character. Most likely the first one in most cases, though this will still help reduce mistags in the second case as well.

has been aliased away for a long time, despite the fact that this or something akin to it is pretty much a staple of most other imageboard-type sites. Probably due to some faulty reasoning like "it's the same thing as ~solo_male ~male/male" - except it isn't. For plain searching, sure, but you can't combine it with other tilde modifiers, for one. And two (the biggest thing, really), you can't negate it from a search. There's no way to negate a pair of "or" tags like that.

Example: say you want to search for lizard anthro - any combination of female, gynomorph, or herm is fine, but you don't like solo male, and you don't like male/male unless it's a m/m/f threesome... Basically, you don't want to see what people typically think of as "gay" content. Likely a very common scenario, but you can't just search for that. You can -male/male, but that will also filter out m/m/f threesomes. solo_male isn't a valid tag, so you can't - that either. You can't -male because that filters out male/female. You can't just use tilde modifiers for the genders that you *do* want, because that also filters out male/female, unless you include male, but then you'll still end up with solo male. Lots of other similar situations like this exist, and for all the genders, but it's not searchable because someone decided that gender_only tags wouldn't be useful.

The easy solution is for those to just be valid tags again. But this also has the great benefit of finally giving tags like gay a valid alias target. If someone tags gay on a post, instead of adding male/male which will very frequently be invalid, it will add male_only which will likely be valid in nearly every case. It also gives much better search results for people who are using gay to search for stuff. Finally people will stop tagging male/male on solo male posts. Aliasing to lore tags instead, see discussion.

It also gives us a perfect alias target for solo_male, which is much less of an issue than gay is, but it would still be nice.

These gender_only tags could also be repopulated fairly quickly with scripting. Anything solo + male (minus comic, multiple_images, etc., you know the drill) can get tagged male_only. Anything male -female -intersex -ambiguous_gender can get it too. This will include some mistags inevitably, but the posts would've been tagged incorrectly to begin with, so at least it doesn't make anything worse. It would actually make mistags a lot more noticeable to people searching with this tag, so they'd be more likely to get fixed.

Included in this BUR are the same tags for female and intersex for the sake of consistency. There doesn't seem to be an issue with these being mistagged on solo posts much, but they would still be useful for people trying to filter out solo female/intersex or all female/intersex groups when they would still be fine with those genders in posts with other genders, as per my above example. However, I think leaving lesbian aliased to female/female will likely be for the best in this case, as nobody seems to perceive solo female content as inherently lesbian, so it never really gets tagged as such. lore tags

Anyway, that's my solution. Kill two avians with one stone. More revolutionary changes to the tag system wheeeeeeeeee

Followup: alias gay -> gay_(lore) imply male_only -> male alias solo_male -> male_only alias all_male -> male_only alias male_solo -> male_only alias lesbian -> lesbian_(lore) imply female_only -> female alias solo_female -> female_only alias all_female -> female_only alias female_solo -> female_only imply intersex_only -> intersex alias solo_intersex -> intersex_only alias all_intersex -> intersex_only alias intersex_solo -> intersex_only imply gynomorph_only -> gynomorph alias solo_gynomorph -> gynomorph_only alias all_gynomorph -> gynomorph_only alias gynomorph_solo -> gynomorph_only imply gynomorph_only -> intersex_only imply andromorph_only -> andromorph alias solo_andromorph -> andromorph_only alias all_andromorph -> andromorph_only alias andromorph_solo -> andromorph_only imply andromorph_only -> intersex_only imply herm_only -> herm alias solo_herm -> herm_only alias all_herm -> herm_only alias herm_solo -> herm_only imply herm_only -> intersex_only imply maleherm_only -> maleherm alias solo_maleherm -> maleherm_only alias all_maleherm -> maleherm_only alias maleherm_solo -> maleherm_only imply maleherm_only -> intersex_only alias straight -> heterosexual_(lore) alias hetero -> heterosexual_(lore) alias heterosexual -> heterosexual_(lore) alias homo -> homosexual_(lore) alias homosexual -> homosexual_(lore) imply gay_(lore) -> homosexual_(lore) imply lesbian_(lore) -> homosexual_(lore) category heterosexual_(lore) -> lore category homosexual_(lore) -> lore category gay_(lore) -> lore category straight_(lore) -> lore

The followup aliases of gay and such to male_only are wrong IMO as you can have a gay pairing with a background female character

akronymus said:
The followup aliases of gay and such to male_only are wrong IMO as you can have a gay pairing with a background female character

That's still the best solution we have. It's far better than aliasing to male/male, which is wrong probably the majority of the time.
gay simply can't be left as an invalid tag, either, because of the sheer frequency of its use. Nobody will be able to keep up with that. And people using that term to search will only be confused if it turns up an empty search.

scaliespe said:
That's still the best solution we have. It's far better than aliasing to male/male, which is wrong probably the majority of the time.
gay simply can't be left as an invalid tag, either, because of the sheer frequency of its use. Nobody will be able to keep up with that. And people using that term to search will only be confused if it turns up an empty search.

Yeah, I can see the problem now. I do think male_focus would make more sense, altough evwn that isnt a good solution.

how would you go about defining gay and lesbian in a TWYS standard other than just making them pairing tags? you can't because because a it's a part of a character's identity, not something that can be seen. a solo male character is not gay.

sipothac said:
how would you go about defining gay and lesbian in a TWYS standard other than just making them pairing tags? you can't because because a it's a part of a character's identity, not something that can be seen. a solo male character is not gay.

That's irrelevant. The issue is that users will tag their posts as gay (extremely frequently, in fact), which currently aliases to male/male, which is wrong if the post is solo male. Most people looking at porn on the internet seem to assume that solo male content is inherently homoerotic. Which, of course, isn't true, but people will tag it that way regardless. We need to be able to accommodate that.

scaliespe said:
That's irrelevant. The issue is that users will tag their posts as gay (extremely frequently, in fact), which currently aliases to male/male, which is wrong if the post is solo male. Most people looking at porn on the internet seem to assume that solo male content is inherently homoerotic. Which, of course, isn't true, but people will tag it that way regardless. We need to be able to accommodate that.

so, alias it to invalid_tag, then?

The issues with people tagging gay, lesbian, and straight as referring to a sexuality, while they're aliased to male/male, female/female, and male/female, referring to sex pairings, can be handled in other ways. As akronymus says, aliasing them to male_only and female_only (nothing for straight I guess) would be similarly wrong, as it's still conflating a sexuality (a non-visible trait) with some visible element of the image. There has been a suggestion in the past to alias sexuality tags to a generic sexuality tag that's put in the Invalid category, although that would mean that people who do tag gay/lesbian/straight for meaning pairing tags will lose the male/male/female/female/male/female tags on posts that should have them.

The [gender]_only tags can be better handled by excluding what you don't want (e.g. male_only -> -female -intersex -ambiguous_gender). As a tag, stuff like male_only and female_only would be rather rigid, as some people may be fine with male-only including ambiguous_gender characters (that aren't obviously female or intersex), and similar for female_only. Some people may be fine with female_only including "feminine intersex", and others not. They're also extra tags to worry about when fixing up mistagged sexes (e.g. someone tags male/ambiguous, but it's actually male/male and you correct it, you'd have to remember to tag male_only too; or if someone tags male/male, but it's really male/ambiguous, you have to remove male_only too when fixing it; or there's a character of a different sex in the background, but some people tag it male_only because the non-males aren't the focus (it's already an issue that solo often gets tagged for what should be duo/group+solo_focus)), resulting in x_only tags missing from many posts and being applied incorrectly to other posts, just as male/male, etc, are.

scaliespe said:
Followup: alias gay -> male_only alias homo -> male_only alias homosexual -> male_only imply male_only -> male alias solo_male -> male_only alias all_male -> male_only alias male_solo -> male_only imply female_only -> female alias solo_female -> female_only alias all_female -> female_only alias female_solo -> female_only imply intersex_only -> intersex alias solo_intersex -> intersex_only alias all_intersex -> intersex_only alias intersex_solo -> intersex_only imply gynomorph_only -> gynomorph alias solo_gynomorph -> gynomorph_only alias all_gynomorph -> gynomorph_only alias gynomorph_solo -> gynomorph_only imply gynomorph_only -> intersex_only imply andromorph_only -> andromorph alias solo_andromorph -> andromorph_only alias all_andromorph -> andromorph_only alias andromorph_solo -> andromorph_only imply andromorph_only -> intersex_only imply herm_only -> herm alias solo_herm -> herm_only alias all_herm -> herm_only alias herm_solo -> herm_only imply herm_only -> intersex_only imply maleherm_only -> maleherm alias solo_maleherm -> maleherm_only alias all_maleherm -> maleherm_only alias maleherm_solo -> maleherm_only imply maleherm_only -> intersex_only

oh jeeze, I didn't even look at the suggested followup. this would almost certainly be the cause of so many more mistags.

people aready use gay when tagging male/male since it's faster to type, changing its definition like this would be huge.

I feel like this wouldn't make too much since since male solo would be the same thing?

scaliespe said:
but you can't combine it with other tilde modifiers, for one. And two (the biggest thing, really), you can't negate it from a search. There's no way to negate a pair of "or" tags like that.

I would actually consider PRing my search syntax that allows for tag grouping (for combining multiple OR groups) and or negation like that (it uses the exact same database as e6 does so it'd basically just be drag and drop), but the main issue is that it would upset a lot of people and break a lot of older things. So I feel like we're probably gonna be stuck with this outdated tag searching system until the end of time because of reluctance.

But I would die on that hill, e6's search syntax is riding on old 2006-esque ideas, and is very barebones and could be much more useful if it was ever updated. Mainly by that I mean tag grouping. e6 not having tag grouping is the entire reason I mirrored the database to make my own syntax lmao

definitelynotafurry4 said:
I feel like this wouldn't make too much since since male solo would be the same thing?

3 male characters in the same picture, with none other depicted. Thats an easy counterexample

Changed my vote to neutral because of the suggested followup

akronymus said:
3 male characters in the same picture, with none other depicted. Thats an easy counterexample

then m -f -intersex -ambiguous

scaliespe said:
That's irrelevant. The issue is that users will tag their posts as gay (extremely frequently, in fact), which currently aliases to male/male, which is wrong if the post is solo male. Most people looking at porn on the internet seem to assume that solo male content is inherently homoerotic. Which, of course, isn't true, but people will tag it that way regardless. We need to be able to accommodate that.

Why not gay_(lore) ? You can't really just look at a character and know their sexual orientation just by looking at them.

sipothac said:
so, alias it to invalid_tag, then?

Because there aren't enough posts tagged invalid_tag already?

hjfduitloxtrds said:
Why not gay_(lore) ? You can't really just look at a character and know their sexual orientation just by looking at them.

Because gay is also used for same-sex activities, not strictly for sexual orientation. People do tag/search gay meaning male/male. Two bisexual males having sex would be gay sex, but they wouldn't be gay as in homosexual characters. Some people may also take a gay_(lore) tag to mean male/male_(lore) when it otherwise needs to be tagged male/ambiguous or something for TWYS. No matter what it's aliased to it will have mistags, it's something we just have to put up with, and adding more tags like gay_(lore) would add more confusion.

I am strongly opposed to this, since I do not believe for a second that these would be adequately tagged.

hjfduitloxtrds said:
Why not gay_(lore) ? You can't really just look at a character and know their sexual orientation just by looking at them.

this wouldn't fix any of the problems this BUR purports to exist, because "gay" is part of a character's identity. a gay character can be getting railed from behind by another dude, jerking it by himself, be be balls deep in some chick, and none of these would necessarily make a character not gay.

also, this BUR does not seem to include anything about ambiguous_gender.

so-- is a post with a male character getting molested by disembodied_hands male_only? is post with a male character being fellated by a character who only has the back of their head visible male_only? is a post with a male character analy penetrating a fully visible but totally androgynous null male_only?

how would you rule on these and however many dozens of situations.

Neutral - only if a bot manages those tags.

I don't really want to create new tags that, while not mandatory, sure do want to be tagged. We already have so many basic tags to add to each post that I don't want any more. I don't think changing gay -> male/male is worth my future fatigue.

I'm thinking the [gender]_only tags can be entirely scripted. Is that a good thing? Just +1M easily botted tag edits or however many. The filtered out posts have mixed genders, an extra gender mistagged, or no tagged genders. Is it good if something can be tagged entirely from existing tags without ever looking at the posts? I'm not even talking about compounding existing mistags. Is a tag fundamentally good to use if you don't need to look at a post to add it? (I will just say that the bot adding aspect ratio tags is unneeded spam for 99.99% of users.)

I know people would use these tags. Seems like every other month I see someone complain about these aliases, but I'm not particularly sympathetic.

Really don't like adding self-evident tags to solo posts, like how other boorus add [gender]_focus tags to solo posts.

I can pick out some things from the OP.

Probably the only way to "fix" gay -> male/male is to say we no longer want to deal with this upkeep and alias to male. Users be damned. Learn to use our actual tags and stop using something that was aliased because it's problematic. It's no longer 2015. Git gud. That's what the site would be saying. I would add, personally, that I don't care at all that people may even (correctly) use gay as a shortcut for male/male. Their reluctance to change is the problem. m/m also works. Even mm works lol.

Lastly, gay -> male_only will still create mistags because orgy and parallel_sex exist. Have to take an L somewhere.

I agree with abadbird here; these tags would serve more purpose then several other currently botted tags (primarily in combinations with other searches that the equivalents can't be), and could be fairly easily botted. Undertagging of non-focus character genders could be an issue, though. I don't think manually adding them would have enough utility for the effort.

I think I've said this a few times in the past in reference to like the mess that is the xyz_threesome tags, but I think we could have group_sex gender ratio tags that'd be more coherent, more widely applicable, and more generally useful than those, and potentially, the <gender>_only tags as well.

the general concept would be...

• if a group sex situation was made up entirely of one gender it'd get the <gender>_only_group tag
• if a group sex situation was made up of a large majority (~66%+) of one gender it'd get the <gender>_majority_group tag
• if a group sex situation was made up of a roughly equal gender make up (none more than ~66%) it'd get the mixed_gender_group tag

EDIT:

abadbird said:
Neutral - only if a bot manages those tags.

if it's managed by a bot, wouldn't it just be the same as m -f -intersex -ambiguous? what's the point? slight convenience? seeing the tags' populations?

abadbird said:
Probably the only way to "fix" gay -> male/male is to say we no longer want to deal with this upkeep and alias to male.

Even that wouldn't be a full fix, you'll still get mistags because "gay" is also a term referring to lesbians and lesbian activities (it's basically a synonym for homosexuals or same-sex pairings, most often used for males but it's not exclusive to them).

sipothac said:
I think I've said this a few times in the past in reference to like the mess that is the xyz_threesome tags, but I think we could have group_sex gender ratio tags that'd be more coherent, more widely applicable, and more generally useful than those, and potentially, the <gender>_only tags as well.

the general concept would be...

• if a group sex situation was made up entirely of one gender it'd get the <gender>_only_group tag
• if a group sex situation was made up of a large majority (~66%+) of one gender it'd get the <gender>_majority_group tag
• if a group sex situation was made up of a roughly equal gender make up (none more than ~66%) it'd get the mixed_gender_group tag

One female and two males is a 66% male majority group (3 characters is a group), which seems wrong to call it a "male_majority_group" that's just a typical threesome. It would also get confusing when dealing with more than 2 sexes; say, 3 males, 1 female, 1 gynomorph, and 1 ambiguous_gender. That's only 50% male, but males vastly outnumber any other sex 3:1. Especially if people disagree on what the ambiguous_gender character is (if someone thinks it's a male, it would be male-majority, but if someone thinks it's an andromorph or truly ambiguous, it's not).

This would also be very annoying to maintain for larger groups, trying to count how many of a given sex there is would get annoying. And it increases the problem of determining what counts (does a female in the background of a scene that only has gay male sex count? what about a scene that's largely all male-only sex, but there's a few that can be argued to be ambiguous?), leading to extra tags missing or being mistagged depending on the latest tag changes someone makes.

Aliasing gay to male honestly seems like a better solution to that problem to me, better than tbe current alias anyway. There may still be occasional mistags, but probably much fewer

Calling solo male stuff gay is just blatantly incorrect, and I can't support it even if it might match the usage by uninformed taggers. I'd sooner make it an invalid tag.

vulpes_artifex said:
Calling solo male stuff gay is just blatantly incorrect, and I can't support it even if it might match the usage by uninformed taggers. I'd sooner make it an invalid tag.

I mean, we would have to then alias solo_female to lesbian, wouldn't we? Otherwise the implication is that women don't look at porn of naked guys, which seems ... like a very old-fashioned hill to die on.

watsit said:
This would also be very annoying to maintain for larger groups, trying to count how many of a given sex there is would get annoying.

I dunno dude, I just feel like we need something more scalable and usable than xyz_threesome or just nothing.

watsit said:
And it increases the problem of determining what counts (does a female in the background of a scene that only has gay male sex count? what about a scene that's largely all male-only sex, but there's a few that can be argued to be ambiguous?), leading to extra tags missing or being mistagged depending on the latest tag changes someone makes.

dealing with situations like the one in post #3038824 was kind of what my wording was meant to deal with, because, I feel like one of the problems with <gender>_only tags is that they're inevitably going to have situations like this, where all of the characters having sex are one gender with characters of another who are either cuckold/cuckqueans or just bystanders. having the wording be specifically in reference to characters involved in the group sex situation sidesteps this and makes it so it's not just "m -f -intersex -ambiguous but it's a tag".

but yeah, the potential for mistags is still pretty high, so that's still going to be a worry if this kind of tag did get put into use, so... :/

sipothac said:
this wouldn't fix any of the problems this BUR purports to exist, because "gay" is part of a character's identity. a gay character can be getting railed from behind by another dude, jerking it by himself, be be balls deep in some chick, and none of these would necessarily make a character not gay.

Because gay is aliased to male/male, someone who attempts to tag gay may sometimes not notice it aliases to male/male, so in response, I suggested creating lore tags for sexual orientations and aliasing to them instead so as not to have things tagged male/male when they are not.

hjfduitloxtrds said:
Because gay is aliased to male/male, someone who attempts to tag gay may sometimes not notice it aliases to male/male, so in response, I suggested creating lore tags for sexual orientations and aliasing to them instead so as not to have things tagged male/male when they are not.

Yeah, changing gay/lesbian and such to lore tags seems like the best course of action I've seen suggested in the thread.

hjfduitloxtrds said:
Because gay is aliased to male/male, someone who attempts to tag gay may sometimes not notice it aliases to male/male, so in response, I suggested creating lore tags for sexual orientations and aliasing to them instead so as not to have things tagged male/male when they are not.

But then someone tagging gay for gay sex, when the characters aren't gay, would be mistagging an incorrect sexual orientation.

watsit said:
But then someone tagging gay for gay sex, when the characters aren't gay, would be mistagging an incorrect sexual orientation.

To me, that seems kind of a necessary drawback, unless the plain gay/lesbian/straight and so on get aliased to invalid and lore tags introduced separately. But it seems like the most common opinion is that they should under no circumstances be aliased to invalid.

abadbird said:

Probably the only way to "fix" gay -> male/male is to say we no longer want to deal with this upkeep and alias to male. Users be damned. Learn to use our actual tags and stop using something that was aliased because it's problematic. It's no longer 2015. Git gud. That's what the site would be saying. I would add, personally, that I don't care at all that people may even (correctly) use gay as a shortcut for male/male. Their reluctance to change is the problem. m/m also works. Even mm works lol.

Lastly, gay -> male_only will still create mistags because orgy and parallel_sex exist. Have to take an L somewhere.

watsit said:
The issues with people tagging gay, lesbian, and straight as referring to a sexuality, while they're aliased to male/male, female/female, and male/female, referring to sex pairings, can be handled in other ways. As akronymus says, aliasing them to male_only and female_only (nothing for straight I guess) would be similarly wrong, as it's still conflating a sexuality (a non-visible trait) with some visible element of the image. There has been a suggestion in the past to alias sexuality tags to a generic sexuality tag that's put in the Invalid category, although that would mean that people who do tag gay/lesbian/straight for meaning pairing tags will lose the male/male/female/female/male/female tags on posts that should have them.

hjfduitloxtrds said:
Because gay is aliased to male/male, someone who attempts to tag gay may sometimes not notice it aliases to male/male, so in response, I suggested creating lore tags for sexual orientations and aliasing to them instead so as not to have things tagged male/male when they are not.

Okay, coming back to this, I think this last suggestion would probably be better overall. The suggested followup has been adjusted to alias to lore tags instead.

...and remember, the voting is for simply establishing the (gender)_only tags, not for the suggested followup. I feel like the whole thread got derailed about what to do about gay that it largely missed the point that being able to filter posts that contain only a single gender would actually be pretty useful.

edit: also, can we agree that gay really needs to be unaliased from male/male regardless? It continues to cause piles of mistags, and - honestly, I agree with abadbird's sentiment above: "Learn to use our actual tags and stop using something that was aliased because it's problematic. It's no longer 2015. Git gud."

scaliespe said:
Okay, coming back to this, I think this last suggestion would probably be better overall. The suggested followup has been adjusted to alias to lore tags instead.

...and remember, the voting is for simply establishing the (gender)_only tags, not for the suggested followup. I feel like the whole thread got derailed about what to do about gay that it largely missed the point that being able to filter posts that contain only a single gender would actually be pretty useful.

I don't think they're really necessary when just -ing the genders you don't want to see functions exactly the same and has wider functionality.

if the tag was specifically pointed at characters involved in group sex it might have some maginal utility for situations such as post #3038824 which is an all-male orgy with a single female character standing in the background not interacting in the group sex.

sipothac said:
I don't think they're really necessary when just -ing the genders you don't want to see functions exactly the same and has wider functionality.

Except it doesn't:

scaliespe said:
Example: say you want to search for lizard anthro - any combination of female, gynomorph, or herm is fine, but you don't like solo male, and you don't like male/male unless it's a m/m/f threesome... Basically, you don't want to see what people typically think of as "gay" content. Likely a very common scenario, but you can't just search for that. You can -male/male, but that will also filter out m/m/f threesomes. solo_male isn't a valid tag, so you can't - that either. You can't -male because that filters out male/female. You can't just use tilde modifiers for the genders that you *do* want, because that also filters out male/female, unless you include male, but then you'll still end up with solo male. Lots of other similar situations like this exist, and for all the genders, but it's not searchable because someone decided that gender_only tags wouldn't be useful.

The purpose of these tags is largely not for searching for, but for negating from searches. You just aren't able to search for something like, for example, content that has female/herm/gynomorph characters but not exclusively, and not only male characters, without just excluding all males or always including them.

scaliespe said:
Except it doesn't:

anthro lizard ~f ~gynomorph ~herm?

and blacklisting is even more versatile since it has kinda built-in conditionals functionality.

scaliespe said:
Basically, you don't want to see what people typically think of as "gay" content. Likely a very common scenario, but you can't just search for that. You can -male/male, but that will also filter out m/m/f threesomes.

... because it includes "gay" content. A male sticking it into another male, who is sticking it into a female, has "gay" sex, alongside "straight" sex. Once a non-male (including ambiguous) character is included, it's no longer male_only, regardless of whether the males are doing things to each other or not. male/male is still the best option for handling "gay" stuff.

sipothac said:
if the tag was specifically pointed at characters involved in group sex it might have some maginal utility for situations such as post #3038824 which is an all-male orgy with a single female character standing in the background not interacting in the group sex.

Is it? A couple of the characters involved seem questionably ambiguous, which would preclude male_only even in that situation. Tag wars over whether a character is ambiguous or not would result in male_only getting messed up (missing from a male_only post, or being left on a non-male-only post) or being erroneously used as justification for removing non-male tags.

watsit said:
Is it? A couple of the characters involved seem questionably ambiguous, which would preclude male_only even in that situation. Tag wars over whether a character is ambiguous or not would result in male_only getting messed up (missing from a male_only post, or being left on a non-male-only post) or being erroneously used as justification for removing non-male tags.

hmm... actually, yeah you're right, the orc/goblin character in the center is probably androgynous enough to be ambiguous... and, although it's kinda hard to tell, looking at it that kobold/bear paring on the lower right of the image that look like they might be doing vaginal, which would mean the chatacter is an andromorph.

but either way, even of the example isn't actually as good, I still think the argument itself stands, that, in concept, there might be some actual utility for like male_only_orgy or something, more than just male_only.

sipothac said:
but either way, even of the example isn't actually as good, I still think the argument itself stands, that, in concept, there might be some actual utility for like male_only_orgy or something, more than just male_only.

?

pleaseletmein said:
orgy male/male -male/female -male/intersex

?

yeah, you're probably right. although orgy m/m -f/* -i/* would probably be best

sipothac said:
anthro lizard ~f ~gynomorph ~herm?

and blacklisting is even more versatile since it has kinda built-in conditionals functionality.

Okay, I just realized I didn't correctly convey the situation that brought me to this issue in the first place. I think my earlier statement made this a lot more confusing than it had to be. My apologies. So, let me rephrase the issue.

> say you want to search for lizard anthro - a male character paired with any combination of female, gynomorph, or herm is fine, but you don't like solo male, and you don't like male/male unless it's a m/m/f threesome... and you don't want to filter out solo female/herm/gyno.

Filtering out the "homosexual" pairings: male/male and female/female (maybe including intersex/intersex or its subtags depending on how you want to define those) works fine for duo searches, but it breaks down when it comes to any kind of group scene. From my experience, this is a fairly common situation for people who are searching for, let's say... heterosexual-leaning content. Whether males paired with herms and gynomorphs can be "hetero" is debatable, but I have encountered a lot of people who lump them in with females as far as their preferences go, so this is an entirely plausible situation. And, despite its reputation as a "hetero" interest, I know many people who like m/f but not f/f. I think, a lot of the time, the male serves as a sort of "self-insert" for the (presumably male) viewer, so situations with two females (or gyno/herm etc.) interacting without a male end up unsatisfying. And yet, solo female/herm/gyno is fine, especially posts that imply the viewer as an unseen second character, like anything with looking_at_viewer. Ultimately, you have to resort either to multiple separate searches or a specially configured blacklist to achieve this, but neither of these are ideal.

The issue with relying on the blacklist for search filtering is that most people likely already use their blacklist for... well, blacklisting. They use it for tags that they simply never want to see in any context, not just stuff that they want to be excluded from the current search. Having to reconfigure your blacklist for every search just to filter the results properly is very inconvenient, and has the drawback that these posts still show up when paging through the search results, which then have to be manually skipped. If there's a way to get the desired results with a simple tag rather than having to resort to a combination of search and blacklist, that's much better.

Multiple searches technically works, but still pretty inconvenient. The current method relies upon that and a bunch of ~ and -. Any way you look at it, this is a comparatively advanced method that the average user probably won't even be able to figure out. I'm surprised by how many people don't even seem to know what ~ does or that it even exists. Having a single tag for this is simple and easy and anyone can do it. Tags like this may not be strictly necessary - you can achieve similar-ish results with more complicated methods - but it would enhance the user-friendliness of the search system considerably.

There's also the unfortunate fact that, due to the limitations of the current search system, the ~ modifier can only be used for one set of search items at a time. Personally, almost all of my own searches begin with ~scalie ~dragon ~kobold because the latter two don't imply the former even though they're relevant to what I'm trying to find. _{(The lack of a proper umbrella tag for all "reptilian" species is really annoying... but that's a separate issue)} In any case, that leaves the ~ modifier unusable for things like gender filtering. It would be great if the search system supported grouping or modifiers, but it doesn't so we have to make do. Having tags like the ones I'm proposing here would be really nice for more specific gender searching while also using the ~ for something else such as species - or, let's say you want to search ~anthro ~humanoid, or maybe ~solo ~solo_focus. There are already so many other things that one might need to use that for. Here's another use case that just occurred to me: ~solo ~solo_focus -female_only -female_focus (for example). Because ~solo ~solo_focus is useful particularly because most solo_focus posts are relevant to someone searching for solo images (I use this a lot), but you can't really filter out any genders because that gender might be visible in the background. So if you want to search ~solo ~solo_focus but just don't want a female to be the focus, use this. Since female_focus can't be used on all-female or solo images, that alone unfortunately doesn't work. And you can't just ~male ~intersex because the tilde modifier is already in use for something else. There are a lot of other situations like this, probably. At least until the search system is upgraded to support grouping multiple separate sets of ~ modifiers (read: probably never), this is likely the best option we have.

watsit said:
... because it includes "gay" content. A male sticking it into another male, who is sticking it into a female, has "gay" sex, alongside "straight" sex. Once a non-male (including ambiguous) character is included, it's no longer male_only, regardless of whether the males are doing things to each other or not. male/male is still the best option for handling "gay" stuff.

Is it? A couple of the characters involved seem questionably ambiguous, which would preclude male_only even in that situation. Tag wars over whether a character is ambiguous or not would result in male_only getting messed up (missing from a male_only post, or being left on a non-male-only post) or being erroneously used as justification for removing non-male tags.

Eh, I think you'd be surprised how common it is for people to be okay with a male sticking it into another male in a threesome situation when they otherwise don't like plain male/male, like in a lucky pierre situation. Like the presence of the female makes it less gay. Or, likely just as a preference thing for bisexual people who'd rather see both males and females in a scene rather than just one or the other.

However, the second paragraph suggests an interesting possibility. Let me know if this is absurd, but I think this might be feasible:
what if ambiguous_gender is disregarded entirely for gender_only posts?
I know, sounds weird, but hear me out. Ambiguous gender is really just a fallback for when the character can't be visibly identified as opposed to being a "true" gender tag. There are no characters that "are" ambiguous_gender, they're just not taggable as their actual gender due to lack of visual information. This is very often because they're either highly obscured (by another character, or clothing, or scenery) or because they're too small to make out clearly (like background characters). If we only tag gender_(only) according to visible genders, the tag remains valid regardless of whether or not a certain character's gender can actually be tagged. I think it will still remain perfectly relevant to people searching for or filtering out (gender)_only because ambiguous_gender characters, by their definition, can be that gender. People searching the tag are likely looking for what appears to be only characters of that gender (where an ambiguous one will still fit into that request). Meanwhile, people filtering out the tag are looking for posts that specifically contain characters of other genders, and an ambiguous character that may be the gender they're trying to filter out is going to be an unsatisfactory result.
As a consequence, ambiguous_gender_only cannot exist. But that's fine, because I don't see that having any actual utility whatsoever.

Barring that, we just have to come to terms with the fact that ambiguous_gender screws with a lot of gender searching. It's already a mess in male/male content where the receiving character is mostly obscured, and could in fact be any gender, but it's still tagged male/male by lore. Someone tags male/male again but leaves ambiguous_gender on, such that the post remains tagged with both: male/male duo ambiguous_gender. This isn't really any different. In fact, a tag like this may make it easier to spot mistags or do tagging projects in general.

scaliespe said:
-snip-

I'm not going to lie, this seems like extremely niche problems that I'm not sure that should be solved in the method suggested by the BUR. also, I feel like this is kind of what the blacklist is for, having a few entries of combinations of gender or paring tags you want to avoid should solve this.

scaliespe said:
However, the second paragraph suggests an interesting possibility. Let me know if this is absurd, but I think this might be feasible:
what if ambiguous_gender is disregarded entirely for gender_only posts?
I know, sounds weird, but hear me out. Ambiguous gender is really just a fallback for when the character can't be visibly identified as opposed to being a "true" gender tag. There are no characters that "are" ambiguous_gender, they're just not taggable as their actual gender due to lack of visual information. This is very often because they're either highly obscured (by another character, or clothing, or scenery) or because they're too small to make out clearly (like background characters). If we only tag gender_(only) according to visible genders, the tag remains valid regardless of whether or not a certain character's gender can actually be tagged. I think it will still remain perfectly relevant to people searching for or filtering out (gender)_only because ambiguous_gender characters, by their definition, can be that gender. People searching the tag are likely looking for what appears to be only characters of that gender (where an ambiguous one will still fit into that request). Meanwhile, people filtering out the tag are looking for posts that specifically contain characters of other genders, and an ambiguous character that may be the gender they're trying to filter out is going to be an unsatisfactory result.
As a consequence, ambiguous_gender_only cannot exist. But that's fine, because I don't see that having any actual utility whatsoever.

as a non-binary person I'm not really sure I _love_ the idea of treating ambiguous_gender as "just a fallback".