So, while this post is inspired by a semi-recent controversy, I don't want this thread to be about discussing that controversy itself, the involved artist, or their art. Instead, I want to talk about the presentation of lore tags, and whether improvements could be made that would help defuse conflicts like this in the future.

Even when a post is tagged correctly by TWYS rules, the final decisions made on those tags can still have a psychological effect on both viewers and the artist, which can attract undue negative attention or stigma towards the artist in question. In an ideal world people wouldn't read tags with this mindset, but they do anyway. It can put artists in a position where pulling their art from the site might become a sensible decision in their eyes.

Lore tags were created as a way to partially address this problem: controversial_tag might have a companion not_actually_controversial_(lore). However, their visual separation between the TWYS tag and the lore tag might be preventing them from doing their best job for the sake of viewers and artists alike. Many viewers may see the TWYS tag alone and wrongly jump to conclusions about the artist themselves--it's totally unfair to do that, but at the end of the day it can still cause problems for the artist.

In cases where a lore tag directly contradicts a controversial TWYS tag, there may be some benefit to displaying the lore tag in-line next to the tag it contradicts, as a "special case". This can help ease the edge when an artist's work gets a tag they don't agree with, and should at least minimize the amount of undue negative attention that gets pointed at the artist.

For instance, instead of a taglist like this:
tag1 tag2 controversial_tag tag3 tag4 ... Lore: not_actually_controversial_(lore)

it might help to show it here, like this:
tag1 tag2 controversial_tag -> not_actually_controversial_(lore) tag3 tag4 ...

To be clear, this is about preventing harm from people wrongly passing judgment on artists or their works. This is not meant to supersede TWYS or change actual tagging policies in any way.

I think even just moving the lore tag section up above the general section instead of the very bottom section in the list would help a lot

I think it's important to keep the lore category totally separate since I think it makes it more clear that the standards it's tagged with are separate from general.

EDIT: also, I don't even know how this'd work logistically, we don't really have any way to, like, pair tags together like this. and I'm not really sure how this could be made possible.

cloudpie said:
I think even just moving the lore tag section up above the general section instead of the very bottom section in the list would help a lot

I feel like lore's function as a sort of clarification section it makes sense to be below general. although, meta being sandwiched between the two is quite odd. honestly, with the functions meta serves it probably ought to be higher up, probably directly below artist, even.

_{I just wish we could customize their placement on a per-user basis without having to use userscripts or something.}

sipothac said:
I think it's important to keep the lore category totally separate since I think it makes it more clear that the standards it's tagged with are separate from general.

Yeah, I totally get that. For the most part, I'd only want this system to apply to the most hotly controversial tags to avoid this sort of dilution. I'm also hoping that certain design decisions such as indentation, coloring, and the _(lore) suffix can more clearly distinguish that these tags aren't part of the same "class" of tags.

As for configurability, IMO it's necessary for anything like this to be on by default. The major concern that's being addressed here is the effect these tags have on how a general audience views and interacts with the art and artist(s). If lore tag "highlighting" was put behind a configuration setting, it would only affect people who consciously look at the lore tags to begin with.

cloudpie said:
I think even just moving the lore tag section up above the general section instead of the very bottom section in the list would help a lot

Or make it worse. As it is, it's fairly easy to overlook individual tags in the general tag list. Moving the lore tags up would make those ones more apparent, so a user would be more likely to see, for example, adult_(lore) and act as a tip off that it's then necessarily tagged young. And once people start complaining about "wrong" tags, the lore tags don't stop people from complaining about the "wrong" general tag still being there.

watsit said:
Or make it worse. As it is, it's fairly easy to overlook individual tags in the general tag list. Moving the lore tags up would make those ones more apparent, so a user would be more likely to see, for example, adult_(lore) and act as a tip off that it's then necessarily tagged young. And once people start complaining about "wrong" tags, the lore tags don't stop people from complaining about the "wrong" general tag still being there.

My hope is that visually pairing the tag with its contradicting lore tag will at least reduce the number of complaints regarding whether something's mistagged. Some controversial tags could also possibly get renames that, while clumsy, might at least "take the edge off" the complaints as a complement to this--but that's a discussion for a different thread.

m-b said:
My hope is that visually pairing the tag with its contradicting lore tag will at least reduce the number of complaints regarding this. Some controversial tags could also possibly get renames that, while clumsy, might at least "take the edge off" the complaints as a complement to this--but that's a discussion for a different thread.

I don't know how this would be possible with a booru tagging system. we'd need a way of tags having a parent-child relationship, on a post-by-post basis, even. because we've had male_(lore), for example, used in relation to characters tagged female (ex. Phyco) and gynomorph (ex. PB), as well as lots of ambiguous characters.

if it was only one gender tag that a lore tag was always attached to I could potentially see just fudging with the way the tag list is sorted so they're always together, but otherwise...

sipothac said:
I don't know how this would be possible with a booru tagging system. we'd need a way of tags having a parent-child relationship, on a post-by-post basis, even. because we've had male_(lore), for example, used in relation to characters tagged female (ex. Phyco) and gynomorph (ex. PB), as well as lots of ambiguous characters.

Yeah, nothing supports this out-of-the-box as far as I'm aware. But in reality, this might only end up being needed by one controversial tag--or at the very least, a very small number of them. It might be easier to just hardcode some additional display logic rather than build a bespoke system around this. I don't see this needing to become a generally-applicable feature.

As an aside, if this functionality does have a positive impact, at that point it might justify looking into whether it'd be reasonable to build something more robust for things like gender tags. But at least at first, I think it makes the most sense to try and use this to address the more immediate controversy. (I'm avoiding mentioning the tag itself just to try and keep the discussion from getting steered away by it)

Do you mind providing at least two or three specific examples of lore tags that you've seen causing issues? Also, does every problematic tag get it's own personal "calm the fuck down" tag, or just one general tag? You have an understandable argument imo but the context and solution is still sort of ambiguous, and I'm just curious about this idea and it's application, regardless of whether it's possible to implement it..

catskill said:
Do you mind providing at least two or three specific examples of lore tags that you've seen causing issues? Also, does every problematic tag get it's own personal "calm the fuck down" tag, or just one general tag? You have an understandable argument imo but the context and solution is still sort of ambiguous, and I'm just curious about this idea and it's application, regardless of whether it's possible to implement it..

I think the biggest problem is with young and adult_(lore) since they're insanely controversial.
Then there's the [gender] and [othergender]_(lore), and you can't put the lore tag next to the offending tag when there is more than 1 gender in the image

m-b said:
Yeah, nothing supports this out-of-the-box as far as I'm aware. But in reality, this might only end up being needed by one controversial tag--or at the very least, a very small number of them. It might be easier to just hardcode some additional display logic rather than build a bespoke system around this. I don't see this needing to become a generally-applicable feature.

the way that tagging works is it's just one long string that's taken and parsed into a list of tags...

the only way I could potentially see of addressing this issue in the way you suggest would be to create essentially a full set of like <TWYS_gender>;_<ID/lore_gender>_(lore) tags which would potentially be even more confusing to users in their use and function.

catskill said:
Do you mind providing at least two or three specific examples of lore tags that you've seen causing issues? Also, does every problematic tag get it's own personal "calm the fuck down" tag, or just one general tag? You have an understandable argument imo but the context and solution is still sort of ambiguous, and I'm just curious about this idea and it's application, regardless of whether it's possible to implement it..

Fair enough--I assumed it was fresh on everyone's mind, but it's my fault for leaving it vague. I just didn't want it to go down the same road as other threads regarding the controversy, which has ended in many locks. The main tag this is actually written about is young and adult_(lore). I can't immediately think of another pair that needs this level of attention outright, but someone else might (or it might just be good to have a precedent set for managing the conflict). To keep it general, there have been controversies with artists disagreeing with the way their art is tagged under TWYS for this specific tag, and some have even complained of negative publicity from careless readers seeing the tag and interpreting it as a statement of fact rather than TWYS.

I don't think any other tags have incited this much controversy or harassment, so despite my general wording this was intended to have a fairly narrow scope. I just wanted the discussion to be able to focus more on the general concept without getting bogged down in the tag itself.

sipothac said:
the way that tagging works is it's just one long string that's taken and parsed into a list of tags...

the only way I could potentially see of addressing this issue in the way you suggest would be to create essentially a full set of like <TWYS_gender>;_<ID/lore_gender>_(lore) tags which would potentially be even more confusing to users in their use and function.

A hardcoded case for a single tag would just be rendered at page display time, with no need to touch anything in the database. Assuming that the page renders the way I hope it does (I haven't read e6's source code) a hardcoded solution would look clumsy, but it would at least work in the short-term, and there very well may never be another case where this is needed.

(Sorry for the double reply; I didn't see the second post until having sent the first reply)

I just had the idea of maybe hiding the general tag when the respective lore tag is also tagged. This would only work for young+adult_(lore) (since the latter can only apply with the former also tagged; should probably add an implication there). So for example, when adult_(lore) is tagged, young wouldn't show up in the tag list (it would still be on the post, the post would show up when searching young and be excluded when blacklisting it, it just wouldn't appear on the page for the viewer). Out of sight, out of mind, kinda. That could probably cause other problems I'm not foreseeing, though. It was just an idea that popped to mind.

sipothac said:
the way that tagging works is it's just one long string that's taken and parsed into a list of tags...

I don't see why you think this is some kind of disqualifying factor. Doesn't parsing already group tags into type? If that is the case, then grouping it slightly differently should be possible with little performance impact.

Watsit: That seems as if it would partially obscure the question of 'what tag do I blacklist/negate to not see content like this?', proportionate to the percentage of posts that possessed both tags
(although as that percentage went up, so would the overlap between the result of blacklisting adult_(lore) and blacklisting young)

Also on non- solo posts or multiple_scenes posts, it's not clear whether applying the rule would be potentially hiding relevant information or not -- to be precise, we have no way to discriminate between 'all characters depicted that appear young are canonically adult_(lore)', and '>=1 characters depicted that appear young are canonically adult_(lore), but other young characters are not adult_(lore)'.

savageorange said:
I don't see why you think this is some kind of disqualifying factor. Doesn't parsing already group tags into type? If that is the case, then grouping it slightly differently should be possible with little performance impact.

because you'd need to have tags pared on a case-by-case basis. every <gender>_(lore) tag can be applied to _{at least} 3 of the general category gender tags you'd need to create an entire new system separate from tagging that grabs one tag after the fact and appends it to its "proper" place on the tag list.

watsit said:
I just had the idea of maybe hiding the general tag when the respective lore tag is also tagged. This would only work for young+adult_(lore) (since the latter can only apply with the former also tagged; should probably add an implication there). So for example, when adult_(lore) is tagged, young wouldn't show up in the tag list (it would still be on the post, the post would show up when searching young and be excluded when blacklisting it, it just wouldn't appear on the page for the viewer). Out of sight, out of mind, kinda. That could probably cause other problems I'm not foreseeing, though. It was just an idea that popped to mind.

it'd also have to hide every one of the other young-related tags. and then you'd also have situations like casey_hopper_(comfytail) who is canonically an adult but is placed in situations with canonical children, so I don't know how we'd handle that.

sipothac said:
because you'd need to have tags pared on a case-by-case basis. every <gender>_(lore) tag can be applied to _{at least} 3 of the general category gender tags you'd need to create an entire new system separate from tagging that grabs one tag after the fact and appends it to its "proper" place on the tag list.

Even if it makes sense to do more tags down the line, I think it also makes more sense to put a quick hack in for young alone. It's the most inflammatory one, and it would be good to have proof that doing this actually helps, before attempting to build a more general system for it.

I peeked at e621's code for rendering the tag sidebar. If a dev would be willing to put up with an ugly first implementation, it looks like you could put a quick fix in there to implement this feature in just a handful of lines. It'd definitely not be suitable if the feature was scaled up to cover any other tags, but if it ends up backfiring and needs to get reverted, it also means no database changes or major refactors took place.

I'd love to have someone with more authority on e621's codebase chime in here with their own opinions; maybe I'm just excessively tolerant to short-term hacks.

snpthecat said:
I think the biggest problem is with young and adult_(lore) since they're insanely controversial.
Then there's the [gender] and [othergender]_(lore), and you can't put the lore tag next to the offending tag when there is more than 1 gender in the image

m-b said:
Fair enough--I assumed it was fresh on everyone's mind, but it's my fault for leaving it vague. I just didn't want it to go down the same road as other threads regarding the controversy, which has ended in many locks. The main tag this is actually written about is young and adult_(lore).

I mean, I figured it was about something like that anyway, but I don't pay attention to drama so I didn't know it was this whole sprawling situation. I don't have much to add on the subject myself since it's just not my place lol. But I can imagine having something like you proposed would be helpful for noobs. Could be as simple as having some fine text telling people that tags are user-generated and to take things with a grain of salt. Idk. :P Just don't get too caught up in it.

Hmm. Most of the harassment towards artists is going to be from people who have young blacklisted, right? What if the lore tag only appends to the general tag when the general tag is blacklisted?

watsit said:
This would only work for young+adult_(lore) (since the latter can only apply with the former also tagged; should probably add an implication there).

People did not like it when I made that a bur... i mean i wrote a pretty spiteful reason, but still, on a level head it still isn't the best idea

m-b said:

Even when a post is tagged correctly by TWYS rules, the final decisions made on those tags can still have a psychological effect on both viewers and the artist, which can attract undue negative attention or stigma towards the artist in question. In an ideal world people wouldn't read tags with this mindset, but they do anyway. It can put artists in a position where pulling their art from the site might become a sensible decision in their eyes.

Lore tags were created as a way to partially address this problem: controversial_tag might have a companion not_actually_controversial_(lore). However, their visual separation between the TWYS tag and the lore tag might be preventing them from doing their best job for the sake of viewers and artists alike. Many viewers may see the TWYS tag alone and wrongly jump to conclusions about the artist themselves--it's totally unfair to do that, but at the end of the day it can still cause problems for the artist.

This does not solve the actual issue. Many tags are actually locked against TWYS. Young is especially susceptible to this type of mis-tagging. Many posts are tagged young and locked young, when characters do not appear young. Actually this makes the blacklist useless, because posts will be blocked which users don't necessarily find offensive.

m-b said:

In cases where a lore tag directly contradicts a controversial TWYS tag, there may be some benefit to displaying the lore tag in-line next to the tag it contradicts, as a "special case". This can help ease the edge when an artist's work gets a tag they don't agree with, and should at least minimize the amount of undue negative attention that gets pointed at the artist.

To be clear, this is about preventing harm from people wrongly passing judgment on artists or their works. This is not meant to supersede TWYS or change actual tagging policies in any way.

The tagging policies need to be changed, or at least discussed further. It's not about artists disagreeing, it's about TWYS being the official policy, but actually not followed by the moderators who are locking the tags. I just hope something is done before too much art is lost.

hjfduitloxtrds said:
(Cut for brevity)

For the sake of this discussion, this is pretty much exactly why I didn't want to say the name of the tag. This isn't a discussion about whether TWYS is correct, nor is it a discussion about whether a given post was tagged correctly. This is a discussion about whether design changes could be made to lower the tension around this issue.

Nothing more, please. The rest of the issue has been done to death and is practically guaranteed to end in a flamewar that locks the thread.

m-b said:
For the sake of this discussion, this is pretty much exactly why I didn't want to say the name of the tag. This isn't a discussion about whether TWYS is correct, nor is it a discussion about whether a given post was tagged correctly. This is a discussion about whether design changes could be made to lower the tension around this issue.

Nothing more, please. The rest of the issue has been done to death and is practically guaranteed to end in a flamewar that locks the thread.

I'm not trying to start a flame war. I just don't think this solves the underlying problem. Mistagging and locking the tags will only get more artists to go DNP, whether there are visible *_(lore) tags or not. I don't think this will fix the issue, that's really the point I was trying to make. No more no less.

hjfduitloxtrds said:

I'm not trying to start a flame war. I just don't think this solves the underlying problem. Mistagging and locking the tags will only get more artists to go DNP, whether there are visible *_(lore) tags or not. I don't think this will fix the issue, that's really the point I was trying to make. No more no less.

Fair enough, that's a valid enough point to have. I didn't mean for it to imply I was accusing you of starting a flame war, moreso that the topic itself can easily be derailed and get out of hand when it goes down that path. I still think that it's best to see design and communication of the tag as a better "first-resort" for resolving these conflicts, even if you think this idea in particular won't work out. There are a ton of underlying reasons (some of them legal) for why this specific tag is applied the way it is, and for now I think it's best to consider those policies immutable as, comparatively, that's going to require moving a mountain.

m-b said:
Fair enough, that's a valid enough point to have. I didn't mean for it to imply I was accusing you of starting a flame war, moreso that the topic itself can easily be derailed and get out of hand when it goes down that path. I still think that it's best to see design and communication of the tag as a better "first-resort" for resolving these conflicts, even if you think this idea in particular won't work out. There are a ton of underlying reasons (some of them legal) for why this specific tag is applied the way it is, and for now I think it's best to consider those policies immutable as, comparatively, that's going to require moving a mountain.

why not
_{tag_1
tag_2
->not_actually_controversial_(lore)
controversial_tag
tag_3
tag_4}
?

hjfduitloxtrds said:
why not
_{tag_1
tag_2
->not_actually_controversial_(lore)
controversial_tag
tag_3
tag_4}
?

or even better:
_{->not_actually_controversial_(lore)
tag_1
tag_2
tag_3
tag_4
...
tag_1000
controversial_tag}
this would be even better yet.