The bulk update request #7667 is pending approval.

remove alias four_boys (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias 3guys (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias 4_guys (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias two_guys (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias 3_guys (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias four_guys (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias two_boys (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias 1guy (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias 1boy (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias 1_guys (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias 4guys (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias 4boys (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias 2_guys (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias 1male (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias 5guys (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias 2guys (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias 3boys (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias 2_boys (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias 3_boys (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias 1_boy (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias 4_boys (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias 2boys (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias one_guy (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias one_boy (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias three_guys (0) -> male (2515272)

Reason: Alright, so these aliases are really old. We’ve gotten used to not having tags like this, but I think it’s time to reconsider. The tag system in general is far more robust than it was 9 years ago, and this is something that would actually be useful now.

Look, we have tags for basically every body part count going up to ten. 10_arms, 10_legs, 10_horns, 10_heads, 10_fingers, 10_toes - the list goes on. This, for whatever reason, seems to be considered acceptable and not gratuitous, but gender count tags are too much? Come on, these would be far more useful. People would actually use this. There is so much you just can’t search for with our current system of base gender tags, gender pairing tags, and non-gendered character count tags. Want to find a M/F/F threesome? Good luck with that.

I’m not expecting this to go over quietly, but I’m starting a conversation because I think it’s an important one. We can improve our gender tagging, so let’s talk about how.

The bulk update request #7668 is pending approval.

remove alias three_boys (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias 5boys (0) -> male (2515272)
remove alias 4_girls (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias 2_girl (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias four_girls (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias 1girl (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias 2_girls (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias four_girl (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias 4girls (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias 7girls (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias 2girl (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias two_girl (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias 2girls (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias 3girls (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias three_girls (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias one_girl (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias 4_girl (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias 5_girls (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias 1girls (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias two_girls (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias 3_girl (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias 4girl (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias 3_girls (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias 1_girl (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias three_girl (0) -> female (2557474)

Reason: Part 2 - female

The bulk update request #7669 is pending approval.

remove alias 3girl (0) -> female (2557474)
remove alias 1_intersex (0) -> intersex (247066)
remove alias 1_futa (0) -> intersex (247066)
remove alias 1intersex (0) -> intersex (247066)
remove alias 1_futanari (0) -> intersex (247066)
remove alias 1futa (0) -> intersex (247066)
remove alias 1futanari (0) -> intersex (247066)

Reason: Part 3 - intersex

LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOOO

strikerman said:
LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOOO

IT’S HAPPENING

Thank fuck.

scaliespe said:
Look, we have tags for basically every body part count going up to ten. 10_arms, 10_legs, 10_horns, 10_heads, 10_fingers, 10_toes - the list goes on.

I'm of the opinion the majority of those should go too. I believe it's starting to get into Maw Kogging territory.

Since we can't even agree how the solo, duo, etc, tags work (per-image, per-panel, per-scene?), and how often genders are mistagged and warred over, do we need to combine character counts with each gender? What limit would there be on count? Would this not then be expanded to character forms too?

clawstripe said:
I'm of the opinion the majority of those should go too. I believe it's starting to get into Maw Kogging territory.

Perhaps so, I’m not a big fan of all of those tags myself. Personally, I’d rather trade one for the other, though. :p

watsit said:
Since we can't even agree how the solo, duo, etc, tags work (per-image, per-panel, per-scene?), and how often genders are mistagged and warred over, do we need to combine character counts with each gender?

Sure.

watsit said:
What limit would there be on count?

We can hash out details, but at minimum a count of 5 per gender sounds okay to me.

watsit said:
Would this not then be expanded to character forms too?

We could in theory, but no reason to worry about that now. One step at a time and whatnot.

I feel that this is very much in-line with the discussion I raised recently on topic #43680 about precedents setting other precedents.
Just because tag X exists doesn't mean that tag Y can follow in its footsteps.

I'm against the whole <number>_<gender> thing because it is unsustainable and completely neglects our existing solo/duo/group system.
Who does these tags apply to? The ones in focus, silhouettes, public by-standers, disembodied body parts, offscreen characters, etc.?

You will also end up "inspiring" people to create <number>_<form> tags (e.g., 1_anthro, 2_feral, etc.) or <number>_<gender>_<number>_<gender> tags (e.g., 1_male_2_female for your threesome argument).

thegreatwolfgang said:
I'm against the whole <number>_<gender> thing because it is unsustainable and completely neglects our existing solo/duo/group system.

How does this neglect solo/duo/group? It's literally expanding upon them via an actual count of genders. For a post that's tagged male female tro, how many males are there? How many females? Now look at male 2males female 1female trio and count them. The total count tags aren't being neglected. They will still be used.

thegreatwolfgang said:
You will also end up "inspiring" people to create [...] <number>_<gender>_<number>_<gender> tags (e.g., 1_male_2_female for your threesome argument).

Nah we're clamping down on those hard. See [clothed%]_[gender/form]_[clothed%]_[gender/form] in topic #43781, and i'm sure we've learnt from last time

donovan_dmc said:
How does this neglect solo/duo/group? It's literally expanding upon them via an actual count of genders. For a post that's tagged male female tro, how many males are there? How many females? Now look at male 2males female 1female trio and count them. The total count tags aren't being neglected. They will still be used.

Since <number>_<gender> could not be directly implicated with the existing solo/duo/group system, a lot of people would just end up tagging the number of genders and skipping the number of characters.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Since <number>_<gender> could not be directly implicated with the existing solo/duo/group system, a lot of people would just end up tagging the number of genders and skipping the number of characters.

Like we don't already have that issue? Plus it isn't like these are being removed from the uploader, their usage would be nonexistent if they weren't there. It's also not hard to at bare minimum count up the number of <number><gender> tags and apply group if it's >=3, same can be applied with other counts (though not in an automated manner)

donovan_dmc said:
Like we don't already have that issue? Plus it isn't like these are being removed from the uploader, their usage would be nonexistent if they weren't there. It's also not hard to at bare minimum count up the number of <number><gender> tags and apply group if it's >=3, same can be applied with other counts (though not in an automated manner)

Giving people the choice of tagging number of genders would exacerbate the current issue.
Give them less of a choice and it will force them to dig around to find the proper tags to use.

Sure, you can automate >3_<gender> to imply group, but good luck clearing the mess that is to come with the smaller numbers.

donovan_dmc said:
Like we don't already have that issue?

No need to make it worse.

I foresee this causing a lot of mistagged posts, as a result of people assuming the sex of particular characters that someone later fixes, but then gets reverted, changed back, reverted, causing the <number>_<gender> tags to go out of sync with what each character ends up being recognized as.

I'm still of the position that any problem that could possibly be solved by adding <#>_<gender>, <gender>_only, or any other similar tags could necessarily be solved by a better, more scalable tag group; one that wouldn't add ~150 more tags.

EDIT: I think that, in concept, my group ratio tags suggestion would cause less bloat, be less annoying to manage, and be overall more useful than opening the floodgates to this. probably some kinks to work out but, still.

scaliespe said:
Look, we have tags for basically every body part count going up to ten. 10_arms, 10_legs, 10_horns, 10_heads, 10_fingers, 10_toes - the list goes on.

oh, yeah, lookit all those tags that barely break 5 pop with one that's literally empty and one that manages to get to 30, wow!

honestly, body part counts never needed to go past 8 for stuff that comes in pairs (legs, arms, eyes, etc.), maybe 6 for digits (fingers, toes, etc.), and 4 for things that are normally singles (tails, mouths, heads, etc.), more than that would be a hassle.

The intersex tags will be fun to deal with too, since they can't be implied by anything. 2_andromorphs and 1_herm would need to be tagged 3_intersexes, which can't be done through implications. Even more things to watch for mistags for miscounting, or more that needs manual fix ups for dealing with gender mistags.

watsit said:
The intersex tags will be fun to deal with too, since they can't be implied by anything. 2_andromorphs and 1_herm would need to be tagged 3_intersexes, which can't be done through implications. Even more things to watch for mistags for miscounting, or more that needs manual fix ups for dealing with gender mistags.

This could easily be automated, though. But that aside, we arguably don’t even need the intersex count tags. I’m not sure that they’ll actually be useful for anything, since they could just be any combination of the 4 intersex genders. That doesn’t really tell you much about the post. We may as well only tag the individual intersex gender counts and leave the intersex umbrella tag aside.

scaliespe said:
This could easily be automated, though. But that aside, we arguably don’t even need the intersex count tags. I’m not sure that they’ll actually be useful for anything, since they could just be any combination of the 4 intersex genders. That doesn’t really tell you much about the post. We may as well only tag the individual intersex gender counts and leave the intersex umbrella tag aside.

except, not necessarily no, general stuff is tagged scene by scene, not over the entire content of a post. a single post (animation or sequence) could contain one scene of an andromorph with a gynomorph, and a scene of the same andromorph with a female, and another one where he's scene with another andromorph. that one post would be 1_andromorph 1_gynomorph 1_female 2_andromorph 2_intersex duo

EDIT: and if you decide that this one tag group breaks this rule and does apply to the entire post rather than individual scenes, than we'd have to throw the <3+>_<gender> -> group implication suggestion out since these tags are now tagged on entirely non-compatible standards.

i definitely do see the point of this, piper perri surrounded is a pretty helpful example.

when i want to search a fem/inine characters outnumber against single masculine character, i would actually do this:

post #4486557
5_gynomorph(s) and 1_male

other examples:

post #4285078
6_male(s)

post #4109438
5_ambigiuous

besides the tag:

post #4722234
1_male 4_female(s)
post #2709209
2_male(s) 5_female(s)

the list goes on.

but since those numbered gender is aliased, i had to search group female male which leaves with very conflicting results. either the number of characters is not enough or characters of gender outnumber other that i didn't searched for.

While the idea is nice, in theory.
I'm against reinstating those tags.

People already struggle with Solo, duo, trio, group and zero_pictured. Adding genders into the mix, will just add to the issue.

As an example:
Having both solo and 1_male as usable tags, doesn't incentivize using both. It will reduce the amount who uses solo, causing a further devaluing of an already underused tag.
Same if you scale the tags up "duo" and "2_males" etc.

https://e621.net/posts?tags=-solo+-duo+-trio+-group+-zero_pictured
https://e621.net/posts?tags=-male+-female+-intersex+-ambiguous_gender+-zero_pictured

These two searches show that there are already a significant number of posts not tagged with either the amount or the genders displayed in the posts. Adding a third option is just going to add to this mess.

Also, the practicality of implementing these tags now, with the amount of content on the site, is questionable. Even to just get a fraction tagged would take a lot of time and dedication from many users. And I don't have enough faith in the average user to use those "new" tags correctly and consistently for something that's applicable to almost all content on the site.

snake-girl said:
i definitely do see the point of this, piper perri surrounded is a pretty helpful example.

when i want to search a fem/inine characters outnumber against single masculine character, i would actually do this:

so, like the thing is, what utility does this serve? we know that posts can contain multiple characters of multiple genders, what does counting them do to help anything.

when are you going to be browsing for images with exactly 5 males? when are you going to try to find a post you remember and somehow remember that it had exactly 3 males, 2 females, and 1 ambiguous? is anyone going to blacklist posts because "3 intersex characters is fine but 4 is too many"?

at most I can see maybe the examples show utility for the 1_<gender> tags, but like, harem already exists, so...

snake-girl said:
when i want to search a fem/inine characters outnumber against single masculine character, i would actually do this:

post #4486557
5_gynomorph(s) and 1_male

Are you going to know the exact number of a particular gender in some image for such a search to be useful? What if it actually had 6 gynomorphs? What if it had 5, but you can't see one or two of their dongs, so it's tagged 4_gynomorphs and 1_female and 1_male or 3_gynomorphs and 2_female and 1_male? That's another issue with such exacting tags, people aren't likely to know or remember the exact details, or their recollection doesn't align with how it's tagged (e.g. they remember 5 gynomorphs, but don't remember one was tagged female on a technicality instead), limiting their utility. On top of the issues of them being used correctly.

Honestly, it's about time. Every other booru has done this forever except e621 because some former admin over a decade ago said "these tags are pointless" and for some reason we kept to that.

faucet said:
Honestly, it's about time. Every other booru has done this forever except e621 because some former admin over a decade ago said "these tags are pointless" and for some reason we kept to that.

first off, not _every_ other booru does, just most of the porn ones.

the reason that other boorus have <#>_<gender> tags is just because they nicked their tags from danbooru and the only reason danbooru has/needs them is because they have a search limit of 2 tags.

also, none of the other boorus care about the quality of tagging.

dba_afish said:
so, like the thing is, what utility does this serve? we know that posts can contain multiple characters of multiple genders, what does counting them do to help anything.

when are you going to be browsing for images with exactly 5 males? when are you going to try to find a post you remember and somehow remember that it had exactly 3 males, 2 females, and 1 ambiguous? is anyone going to blacklist posts because "3 intersex characters is fine but 4 is too many"?

at most I can see maybe the examples show utility for the 1_<gender> tags, but like, harem already exists, so...

i've prefaced at the last sentence that searching my inlined tags when if i and others in the context of really want to search for 6 female characters for example (can be for necessity or curiosity) than other number of characters, it's merely pointless because "group female" will give me a random count of female characters less than 6 instead of 6 that blends each other, predominantly trio/3 characters when i DON'T want to. it's more uncommon to search for larger count of characters due to the cost of drawing them. i'm not great at wording things, but i've tried to express that it can be utilitarian at least for me.

watsit said:
Are you going to know the exact number of a particular gender in some image for such a search to be useful? What if it actually had 6 gynomorphs? What if it had 5, but you can't see one or two of their dongs, so it's tagged 4_gynomorphs and 1_female and 1_male or 3_gynomorphs and 2_female and 1_male? That's another issue with such exacting tags, people aren't likely to know or remember the exact details, or their recollection doesn't align with how it's tagged (e.g. they remember 5 gynomorphs, but don't remember one was tagged female on a technicality instead), limiting their utility. On top of the issues of them being used correctly.

so there is no responsibility to fix whether someone or themselves got it wrong? i don't get it, i clearly see the dongs of each character visible with responsibility of inspection and twys standards? your point also applies to any singular gender tags, generally any character tagged female will guarantee be just a gynomorph/herm by possessing barely visible penis because couple of users "aren't likely to know or remember the exact details".

dba_afish said:
except, not necessarily no, general stuff is tagged scene by scene, not over the entire content of a post. a single post (animation or sequence) could contain one scene of an andromorph with a gynomorph, and a scene of the same andromorph with a female, and another one where he's scene with another andromorph. that one post would be 1_andromorph 1_gynomorph 1_female 2_andromorph 2_intersex duo

EDIT: and if you decide that this one tag group breaks this rule and does apply to the entire post rather than individual scenes, than we'd have to throw the <3+>_<gender> -> group implication suggestion out since these tags are now tagged on entirely non-compatible standards.

This objection only applies to animations and comics though, which is a comparatively small fraction of the site. The vast majority of content here is neither. That idea is still applicable to most of the site.

Tbh, the only reason I'm seeing people not want this is the fear that people won't know how to use it (or that no one will use it, in which case you're pretty clearly wrong, we get forum posts and discord questions about it often enough to assume there's a relatively large group of people who would use them, but don't care entirely enough to speak up). And all I have to ask is: why do we always pander to the lowest common denominator with these things? There are definitely more than enough people who will accurately use these tags to justify their existence, and we already have other count tags for other things that are infinitely more useless when it comes to searching relevancy. This is like saying we should get rid of solo/duo/trio/group because people don't know how to use them, it doesn't make sense imo.

slyroon said:
Also, the practicality of implementing these tags now, with the amount of content on the site, is questionable. Even to just get a fraction tagged would take a lot of time and dedication from many users. And I don't have enough faith in the average user to use those "new" tags correctly and consistently for something that's applicable to almost all content on the site.

I would say that we don't need to worry about actually tagging the majority of the site. That would be a huge undertaking, yes, but these tags are not required on every post.

It's like clothed. By my calculations, that tag is probably missing from somewhere between 1 and 2 million posts. But that doesn't make it useless - searching clothed still gives good results because of all the posts that it is tagged on. The posts that it is tagged on will come up in your search. The ones that aren't tagged won't, but you have so many results with that search already that it really isn't the end of the world if you don't get some of them. It's still useful even if technically severely undertagged. It doesn't need to be tagged on every post on the site to be useful to us. So the scale of tags like this doesn't really matter... Even having these tags on a few thousand posts is better than zero, because those few thousand posts are much easier to search than they were before. The other millions of untagged posts are not affected in any way, and you can still find them with all the old methods.

Tags like clothed and like these gender count tags are purely supplemental. The current tag system will continue to work the same way, so nothing breaks by implementing these. However, it allows us to search for things that we couldn't before. Even if only a fraction of the site is tagged with gender counts, you'll still be able to search using these new tags and get good results once they've been populated a bit. That's the whole point. User searches for something, user gets results that match that thing. Untagged posts won't come up, but there are so many posts already that that's not really a big deal. You can continue to stick to the very well established tags if you really need to find everything. These tags just add an additional benefit without changing anything about the current system. And hey, if it really does end up as a complete dumpster fire, we can always just alias them back to where they are now. It costs nothing to give it a shot, as it's easily reversible if it doesn't work out.

scaliespe said:
This objection only applies to animations and comics though, which is a comparatively small fraction of the site. The vast majority of content here is neither. That idea is still applicable to most of the site.

more than 10% of the site is comics, sequences, animations, or similar that's a pretty large portion.

definitelynotafurry4 said:
Tbh, the only reason I'm seeing people not want this is the fear that people won't know how to use it (or that no one will use it, in which case you're pretty clearly wrong, we get forum posts and discord questions about it often enough to assume there's a relatively large group of people who would use them, but don't care entirely enough to speak up). And all I have to ask is: why do we always pander to the lowest common denominator with these things? There are definitely more than enough people who will accurately use these tags to justify their existence, and we already have other count tags for other things that are infinitely more useless when it comes to searching relevancy.

the main problem is that these tags have negligible utility at best, especially compared to the insane amount of upkeep that'd be required to actually keep them well tagged.

like, we can't even keep a bunch of the individual gender tags from being constantly inundated with mistags. there's not a chance that we'd be able to handle a whole other layer on top of this.

definitelynotafurry4 said:
This is like saying we should get rid of solo/duo/trio/group because people don't know how to use them, it doesn't make sense imo.

honestly, I still don't think trio is particularly useful, got unaliased in late 2020, implied to group months later and ever since has just been group's weird younger brother that gets brought along to everything even though he very rarely contributes.

solo, duo, group had served well enough for the majority of the sites' life and adding trio seemed kinda pointless. I literally don't think I've ever once used trio for anything, and I struggle to think of any way that it has a notable amount of utility over what came before.

dba_afish said:
the main problem is that these tags have negligible utility at best

They have better utility than a lot of tags we have on this site... Sorting tags by count I've personally never used most of the tags on the first page. Does anyone actually search mammal? I suppose it's good for blacklist purposes? Idk, even then there's too many false negatives because of multi-character images of two separate classes of animal. This is the highest used tag on the site, and yet most people probably have never thought about it because 99% of the time it's added via implication. We tag simple_background, but I have not once ever seen anyone even talk about the tag. Does it have a niche use case somewhere?

What I'm trying to get at is who exactly would these tags hurt? It's not gonna hurt the users that don't care about them, it's not as if tagging will ever be 100% accurate anyways. I don't care for the existence of the tags above because they're just image descriptors, which is exactly what our tags are used for, even if I personally won't find a use for them. If we have 5_fingers (along with counts up to 10_fingers, honestly, fingers, at all does this have utility?) and x_bodypart, how are we going to complain about x_gender? It just doesn't really make sense to me

Firstly, is it really necessary to call them 1_girl, etc? Instead of, say, one_female which is much closer to the current tag standards?

Secondly, if this is done, at least keep some sanity to it. How about... leave ambiguous out. Nobody's going to search for something like five_ambiguous. And there's way too many group posts where this applies: "Well, there's at least one female and one male on the background so those can be tagged, but most seem more or less ambiguous and trying to figure out the exact counts is doomed."

Or even better, just start with one_* as an experiment. No other counts. That already helps a lot with searchability. If that ends up massively undertagged/mistagged after, say, a year... a failed experiment.

genjar said:
...

Afterwards (if accepted), I think this BUR would help:

alias 1boys -> one_male
alias 1_boys -> one_male
alias 2boys -> two_male
alias 2_boys -> two_male
alias 3boys -> three_male
alias 3_boys -> three_male
alias 4boys -> four_male
alias 4_boys -> four_male
alias 5boys -> five_male
alias 5_boys -> five_male
alias 1guys -> one_male
alias 1_guys -> one_male
alias 2guys -> two_male
alias 2_guys -> two_male
alias 3guys -> three_male
alias 3_guys -> three_male
alias 4guys -> four_male
alias 4_guys -> four_male
alias 5guys -> five_male
alias 5_guys -> five_male
alias 1boy -> one_male
alias 1_boy -> one_male
alias 2boy -> two_male
alias 2_boy -> two_male
alias 3boy -> three_male
alias 3_boy -> three_male
alias 4boy -> four_male
alias 4_boy -> four_male
alias 5boy -> five_male
alias 5_boy -> five_male
alias 1guy -> one_male
alias 1_guy -> one_male
alias 2guy -> two_male
alias 2_guy -> two_male
alias 3guy -> three_male
alias 3_guy -> three_male
alias 4guy -> four_male
alias 4_guy -> four_male
alias 5guy -> five_male
alias 5_guy -> five_male
alias 1males -> one_male
alias 1_males -> one_male
alias 2males -> two_male
alias 2_males -> two_male
alias 3males -> three_male
alias 3_males -> three_male
alias 4males -> four_male
alias 4_males -> four_male
alias 5males -> five_male
alias 5_males -> five_male
alias 1male -> one_male
alias 1_male -> one_male
alias 2male -> two_male
alias 2_male -> two_male
alias 3male -> three_male
alias 3_male -> three_male
alias 4male -> four_male
alias 4_male -> four_male
alias 5male -> five_male
alias 5_male -> five_male
alias 1girls -> one_female
alias 1_girls -> one_female
alias 2girls -> two_female
alias 2_girls -> two_female
alias 3girls -> three_female
alias 3_girls -> three_female
alias 4girls -> four_female
alias 4_girls -> four_female
alias 5girls -> five_female
alias 5_girls -> five_female
alias 1girl -> one_female
alias 1_girl -> one_female
alias 2girl -> two_female
alias 2_girl -> two_female
alias 3girl -> three_female
alias 3_girl -> three_female
alias 4girl -> four_female
alias 4_girl -> four_female
alias 5girl -> five_female
alias 5_girl -> five_female
alias 1female -> one_female
alias 1_female -> one_female
alias 2female -> two_female
alias 2_female -> two_female
alias 3female -> three_female
alias 3_female -> three_female
alias 4female -> four_female
alias 4_female -> four_female
alias 5female -> five_female
alias 5_female -> five_female
alias 1futanari -> one_intersex
alias 1_futanari -> one_intersex
alias 2futanari -> two_intersex
alias 2_futanari -> two_intersex
alias 3futanari -> three_intersex
alias 3_futanari -> three_intersex
alias 4futanari -> four_intersex
alias 4_futanari -> four_intersex
alias 5futanari -> five_intersex
alias 5_futanari -> five_intersex
alias 1futa -> one_intersex
alias 1_futa -> one_intersex
alias 2futa -> two_intersex
alias 2_futa -> two_intersex
alias 3futa -> three_intersex
alias 3_futa -> three_intersex
alias 4futa -> four_intersex
alias 4_futa -> four_intersex
alias 5futa -> five_intersex
alias 5_futa -> five_intersex
alias 1intersex -> one_intersex
alias 1_intersex -> one_intersex
alias 2intersex -> two_intersex
alias 2_intersex -> two_intersex
alias 3intersex -> three_intersex
alias 3_intersex -> three_intersex
alias 4intersex -> four_intersex
alias 4_intersex -> four_intersex
alias 5intersex -> five_intersex
alias 5_intersex -> five_intersex

genjar said:
Secondly, if this is done, at least keep some sanity to it. How about... leave ambiguous out. Nobody's going to search for something like five_ambiguous. And there's way too many group posts where this applies: "Well, there's at least one female and one male on the background so those can be tagged, but most seem more or less ambiguous and trying to figure out the exact counts is doomed."

ambiguous_gender is just as important as any of the other gender categories, don't just ignore it because you think people don't care about it.

dba_afish said:
ambiguous_gender is just as important as any of the other gender categories, don't just ignore it because you think people don't care about it.

Don't strawman. I said that it's nearly impossible to determine in many cases. Not that 'people don't care about it'.
As a general rule, background characters tend to be ambiguously ambiguous gender. Even Danbooru only uses 'girl', 'boy', and 'other'. For a good reason - trying to tag gyno/andro/herm/ambiguous is a headache that nobody wants.

Frankly, it’s about time. Probably the most demanded e6 tags I’ve seen, and by people on other websites even.
I'm tired of "people will tag this wrong" as an excuse for never tagging things. That’s gonna happen no matter what. Oh well.

genjar said:
Don't strawman. I said that it's nearly impossible to determine in many cases. Not that 'people don't care about it'.
As a general rule, background characters tend to be ambiguously ambiguous gender. Even Danbooru only uses 'girl', 'boy', and 'other'. For a good reason - trying to tag gyno/andro/herm/ambiguous is a headache that nobody wants.

I mean, if we can't create this tag group without excluding one (or more) of the 7 gender categories, it's just another reason to not add this tag group.

I've wondered why the color tags were more robust then counting the number of people in a picture.

I could not agree with this change more, +1. Can't wait for this thread to go on for the next year about it.

genjar said:
Don't strawman. I said that it's nearly impossible to determine in many cases. Not that 'people don't care about it'.
As a general rule, background characters tend to be ambiguously ambiguous gender. Even Danbooru only uses 'girl', 'boy', and 'other'. For a good reason - trying to tag gyno/andro/herm/ambiguous is a headache that nobody wants.

Except for everyone who likes or wants to avoid that kind of content?
I could see grouping intersex, but lumping ambiguous in there would be foolish.

scaliespe said:
And hey, if it really does end up as a complete dumpster fire, we can always just alias them back to where they are now. It costs nothing to give it a shot, as it's easily reversible if it doesn't work out.

this is a really not great approach to stuff like this. we don't want to jerk our userbase around by flipping back and forth on decisions.

definitelynotafurry4 said:
They have better utility than a lot of tags we have on this site... Sorting tags by count I've personally never used most of the tags on the first page. Does anyone actually search mammal? I suppose it's good for blacklist purposes? Idk, even then there's too many false negatives because of multi-character images of two separate classes of animal. This is the highest used tag on the site, and yet most people probably have never thought about it because 99% of the time it's added via implication. We tag simple_background, but I have not once ever seen anyone even talk about the tag. Does it have a niche use case somewhere?

this argument seems nonsequitur to me.

if we, for some reason, didn't have any of the species tags for the class taxons before today, and there was a set of BURs to validate them and give it implications and everything, there would be absolutely no reason to not add them. because, even though they're massive tags with relatively low utility, they have nearly zero upkeep and their addition would have literally zero effect on the tagging habits of users. these tags are nearly always added through implication, pretty much no one is ever going to add mammal to stuff manually.

the suggested gender count tags, however, are the exact opposite, they're only ever going to be added manually, have a high probability to be mistagged meaning they need to be upkept by someone(s), and their addition have a fairly high likelihood that it will affect the tagging habits of the userbase.

and again, what is their actual utility? why do we need these tags? what problems does the addition of these tags solve, exactly?

definitelynotafurry4 said:
If we have 5_fingers (along with counts up to 10_fingers, honestly, fingers, at all does this have utility?) and x_bodypart, how are we going to complain about x_gender? It just doesn't really make sense to me

I already said above that we probably shouldn't have individual supernumerary bodypart count tags above 8x or 4x depending on if they're pairs by default or not. honestly, for digit counts above 5 I'm not sure if individual counts are necessary just alias them all to multi_<digits> or something.

Also, don't forget, "REEEEEEEEEEE!! YER MisGEnDERIn' Mah CHarAcTAAAh!¡1!"

So, that 1_male 2_female post might have to also be tagged 1_male_(lore) 1_female_(lore) 1_gynomorph_(lore), 1_andromorph_(lore) 1_gynomorph_(lore) 1_herm_(lore), or some other combination. With possibly eight gender tags (ambiguous, nullo, male, female, andromorph, gynomorph, maleherm, and herm) limited to, say, no more than 5 each (1_x, 2_x, 3_x, 4_x, and 5+_x) in both General and Lore, that's eighty tags right there.

If the male is the same both visibly and lore-wise, should he be tagged with both or skip the lore tag? What if she's trans? Shall we throw in 1_trans_(lore), etc. as well, as that's only fair? Now you've just upped the count to eighty-five tags. Yes, the system can handle it, but the majority of Users? They aren't stupid, but there's limits to their patience and willingness to bother and those limits are frequently very low. An uploader would effectively have to count and tag their character gender counts twice, but most uploaders struggle with simply just tagging character genders once and we have buttons on the upload form for those. Remember, power taggers like you guys are a tiny minority.

Also, to be honest, these tags would only be of any potential use with group posts in which we might want to break down the number of genders. They're pointless on solo and duo posts. Yet there's no human way we can limit them to just group posts. Users will slap on 1_male and not bother with solo because obviously a post tagged with only 1_male is solo, so why isn't the system automagically implying that? (We know it can't because the system has no way of detecting if that 1_male isn't accompanied by 1_female, 2_nullo_(lore), is actually a 1_trans_(lore), and 5+herm.)

I believe the complexity involved and the headaches from cleaning up "mISgeNderiN'! mAH¡ chARaCtaaaH1 REEEEE¡EEEEEE!1" tag wars will far outweigh any benefits from breaking down group gender counts.

clawstripe said:
nullo

I don't think nullo/null/whatever could be made to be full, coherent separate gender categories. since the gender tags are mostly based on gender expression a null could still have a feminine build and/or tits and express as a female, a masculine build and/or facial hair and express as a male, or an androgynous build and express as ambiguous.

if we wanted to have null be a gender tag we'd essentially have to make a separate categories for fnulls, mnulls, and ?nulls, and even then it'd be kind of a mess. because how null is kind of based on context rather than content alone, like not all featureless_crotch characters are necessarily nulls.

we've had some discussion about moving null -> null_(lore), which I think would be for the best rather than trying to shoehorn it into the gender categories, but no one's gotten around to making a BUR for it.

clawstripe said:
Also, don't forget, "REEEEEEEEEEE!! YER MisGEnDERIn' Mah CHarAcTAAAh!¡1!"

So, that 1_male 2_female post might have to also be tagged 1_male_(lore) 1_female_(lore) 1_gynomorph_(lore), 1_andromorph_(lore) 1_gynomorph_(lore) 1_herm_(lore), or some other combination. With possibly eight gender tags (ambiguous, nullo, male, female, andromorph, gynomorph, maleherm, and herm) limited to, say, no more than 5 each (1_x, 2_x, 3_x, 4_x, and 5+_x) in both General and Lore, that's eighty tags right there.

If the male is the same both visibly and lore-wise, should he be tagged with both or skip the lore tag? What if she's trans? Shall we throw in 1_trans_(lore), etc. as well, as that's only fair? Now you've just upped the count to eighty-five tags. Yes, the system can handle it, but the majority of Users? They aren't stupid, but there's limits to their patience and willingness to bother and those limits are frequently very low. An uploader would effectively have to count and tag their character gender counts twice, but most uploaders struggle with simply just tagging character genders once and we have buttons on the upload form for those. Remember, power taggers like you guys are a tiny minority.

Also, to be honest, these tags would only be of any potential use with group posts in which we might want to break down the number of genders. They're pointless on solo and duo posts. Yet there's no human way we can limit them to just group posts. Users will slap on 1_male and not bother with solo because obviously a post tagged with only 1_male is solo, so why isn't the system automagically implying that? (We know it can't because the system has no way of detecting if that 1_male isn't accompanied by 1_female, 2_nullo_(lore), is actually a 1_trans_(lore), and 5+herm.)

I believe the complexity involved and the headaches from cleaning up "mISgeNderiN'! mAH¡ chARaCtaaaH1 REEEEE¡EEEEEE!1" tag wars will far outweigh any benefits from breaking down group gender counts.

This is an odd argument... We don't have lore equivalents for any other gendered tags, just the genders themselves :P

(I've come around to disliking this proposal, but this still stands.)

dba_afish said:
I don't think nullo/null/whatever could be made to be full, coherent separate gender categories.

It can't, but that won't stop some people from trying. See TheGreatWolfgang's comment about setting precedents. It doesn't help that the null wiki explicitly calls it a "quasi-gender", and people identify with it, so there's going to be some desire for people to tag it like the others. I for one can't wait for the future attempts to legitimize tags like 3_mostly_nude_females, 2_clothed_males, and 1_feral_andromorph.

Plus it's going to really trigger my OCD. Either the tags all start with numerals (1_male, 2_females, etc) which will spam the top of the General tags list and push the more useful tags down, or they're going to be spelled out (one_male, two_females, etc), which would put four before two, five before four, so they're not in order.

watsit said:
It doesn't help that the null wiki explicitly calls it a "quasi-gender", and people identify with it, so there's going to be some desire for people to tag it like the others.

we should really get around to *_(lore)-ifying it at some point. making it on the same level as trans_(lore) would probably help somewhat.

although, then again, people still create stuff like the <family_member>_penetrating_<family_member>, so...

watsit said:
3_mostly_nude_females

isn't that the name of a band?

scaliespe said:
Look, we have tags for basically every body part count going up to ten. 10_arms, 10_legs, 10_horns, 10_heads, 10_fingers, 10_toes - the list goes on. This, for whatever reason, seems to be considered acceptable and not gratuitous, but gender count tags are too much?

All of those features are fairly easy to evaluate. Toes don't have 6+1 gendered variations, and people don't usually go berserk when x_anatomy gets mistagged like they do for gender. When uploading a certain post, I researched the creature (for its species/character name), read its mythology, and checked if the artist actually depicted that. They did. 100_heads is not a serious tag lol, but we should still keep it :). It's useful, fun, and at least once true.

watsit said:
I foresee this causing a lot of mistagged posts, as a result of people assuming the sex of particular characters that someone later fixes, but then gets reverted, changed back, reverted, causing the <number>_<gender> tags to go out of sync with what each character ends up being recognized as.

I mostly agree with this. This change would raise the bar significantly for something we're already pretty bad at... and, like, dare I say we're probably the best group of gender taggers/identifiers on the Internet... because we try, some of us, at all.

definitelynotafurry4 said:
What I'm trying to get at is who exactly would these tags hurt?

Everyone. This change would put yet another tag system on everyone's plate to uphold. I would rather users, including myself, spend less time tagging and more time doing the things we actually want to do, because that's usually not tagging. I don't even want to be typing this post, or my other forum posts. I have things I want to do, and trying to steer the site right takes away from that. Every time someone brings up one of these controversial threads, they expend a lot of everyone's time. I imagine how much more productive the userbase could become if we stopped tagging the most pointless things like red_wings and brown_face and pink_balls and fixing other users' garbage fire messes and instead focused on Actual Good Things To Do™. We have too many tags already...

-
I'm neutral to the idea, but ultimately ensuring correctness is not possible. From my experience, tag-based tickets are not handled anywhere close to fast enough to support this. Getting a gender ruling and tag lock on a post can take over a month. That's usually for gendering one character on one post, never mind the more involved mistagging reports involving many posts. This change will require making multiple gender rulings per post, and if the tag reporting mechanism became healthy, then we'd have many more tag lock requests than we're currently seeing. We literally do not have the tag-lock empowered users on hand to implement this effectively, and this is a forever commitment.

One ironically silly thing about this is, even if we tag all the x_gender correctly, x_gender searches will still be bad because we still won't be able to search more/less than x_gender effectively. Genders would need to become their own field separate from normal tags for a somewhat user-friendly experience. Requiring multiple ~ and - just to get an acceptable range of x_gender is bad. Feels like the only implication system that would work is: 1_male implicates <2_males which implicates <3_males etc or vice versa. I rather doubt that someone searching 3_males cares too much if they also get 5_males results...

abadbird said:
One ironically silly thing about this is, even if we tag all the x_gender correctly, x_gender searches will still be bad because we still won't be able to search more/less than x_gender effectively. Genders would need to become their own field separate from normal tags for a somewhat user-friendly experience. Requiring multiple ~ and - just to get an acceptable range of x_gender is bad. Feels like the only implication system that would work is: 1_male implicates <2_males which implicates <3_males etc or vice versa. I rather doubt that someone searching 3_males cares too much if they also get 5_males results...

this is the problem I was trying to solve when suggesting the <gender>_majority/exclusive_group tags, I think that those (maybe along with a horizontal expansion of harem) would solve kind of solve the problems that people seem to think gender count tags would solve while being easier to use and not be a huge mess.

dba_afish said:
this is the problem I was trying to solve when suggesting the <gender>_majority/exclusive_group tags, I think that those (maybe along with a horizontal expansion of harem) would solve kind of solve the problems that people seem to think gender count tags would solve while being easier to use and not be a huge mess.

The <gender>_majority feels rather ambiguous to me. How much of a majority? 75%, 66%, 51%? Does it count relative to each other gender (e.g. 1 female, 1 ambiguous, and 2 males = male majority) or total character count (2 non-males and 2 males = no majority)? We'd still need to do a head-count as if tagging <count>_<gender> to get a proper ratio, making it equally susceptible to incorrect sex determination (1 female and 2 males = male majority, but one of the males should actually be considered ambiguous, making it 1 female, 1 ambiguous, and 1 male = no majority), but then adding a layer of ambiguity on top of the result.

watsit said:
The <gender>_majority feels rather ambiguous to me. How much of a majority? 75%, 66%, 51%? Does it count relative to each other gender (e.g. 1 female, 1 ambiguous, and 2 males = male majority) or total character count (2 non-males and 2 males = no majority)? We'd still need to do a head-count as if tagging <count>_<gender> to get a proper ratio, making it equally susceptible to incorrect sex determination (1 female and 2 males = male majority, but one of the males should actually be considered ambiguous, making it 1 female, 1 ambiguous, and 1 male = no majority), but then adding a layer of ambiguity on top of the result.

my idea was a roughly 2:1 ratio to qualify for the tag, so if more than 66% of the characters in a group were male it'd be male_majority_group, I thought that would be an easy ratio that you could estimate it without needing to manually count large groups. >50% would be more annoying since then you would be more inclined to count manually for accuracy and 75% would mean that you wouldn't be able to apply the tag to threesomes without adding a caveat.

if we had a group where no gender passed the 2:1 check we could either have a separate tag for a group with a roughly equal or mixed gender makeup, or just leave it without.

I didn't say it was a perfect solution (rarely anything truly is), I know that somewhat androgynous-looking characters would potentially add some problems, but that's kind of true for TWYS in general. I just think tagging by ratio would do more than <#>_<gender> possibly could, while also having fewer potential annoyances.

abadbird said:
Everyone. This change would put yet another tag system on everyone's plate to uphold. I would rather users, including myself, spend less time tagging and more time doing the things we actually want to do

But no one is forcing anyone to tag. No one should be doing this if it's not something they want to spend their time doing. There's always going to be someone else to pick up the torch if someone else drops it. If this isn't something you actually want to do, then why are you doing it? I do it in my free time when I have nothing better to do, and adding at most 3 extra tags is going to take less than 5 seconds of my time. Furthermore, no staff is gonna give you a record for not tagging these, either... If you really don't want to add them, then as long as you have >10 non-implied general tags, you are following site rules. So even if this is accepted literally nothing has to change for you if you don't want it to. Accepting the change would be your choice as a tagger, if you don't add it, someone else eventually will.

definitelynotafurry4 said:
But no one is forcing anyone to tag. No one should be doing this if it's not something they want to spend their time doing. There's always going to be someone else to pick up the torch if someone else drops it. If this isn't something you actually want to do, then why are you doing it? I do it in my free time when I have nothing better to do, and adding at most 3 extra tags is going to take less than 5 seconds of my time. Furthermore, no staff is gonna give you a record for not tagging these, either... If you really don't want to add them, then as long as you have >10 non-implied general tags, you are following site rules. So even if this is accepted literally nothing has to change for you if you don't want it to. Accepting the change would be your choice as a tagger, if you don't add it, someone else eventually will.

changing the tagging system in such a massive way will affect the tagging habits of normal users, potentially for the worse.

even ignoring that, I don't know why we'd want to even make such a big change for a tag family that lacks-- any amount of potential utility.

these aren't even good tags! the only arguments I'm really seeing outside of Snake-Girl's is just "Other boorus do it". like fuckken, other boorus also have an "I Came!" buttons on posts, think we ought to do that as well?

dba_afish said:
a tag family that lacks-- any amount of potential utility.

You've yet to explain this. It's 20-16-6, so (at least in this sample) people do want it, which is utility.

definitelynotafurry4 said:
You've yet to explain this. It's 20-16-6, so (at least in this sample) people do want it, which is utility.

To add, probably the single most common complaint about e621 I see voiced by people outside of this site, is the lack of these tags.
"lol they tag everything under the sun but they don't even have 1guy." etc
There's clearly a demand.

definitelynotafurry4 said:
You've yet to explain this. It's 20-16-6, so (at least in this sample) people do want it, which is utility.

People asking for it isn't utility. Utility is a question of practice, not desire. For example, actual instances of people finding a post on, say, danbooru, on the basis of such tags, which they couldn't have done here, would represent actual utility.

As far as I can see most cases in which there could be real utility would be within group posts. There are approximately 423,300 posts in group [1], and some significant fraction of them would need to be tagged before much real utility was seen, AFAICS.

[1] group age:<2_years 131.6k + group age:2_years..5_years 126.6k + group age:>5_years 165.1k posts. Split up to avoid maxing out the post counter.

definitelynotafurry4 said:
You've yet to explain this. It's 20-16-6, so (at least in this sample) people do want it, which is utility.

donteven said:
To add, probably the single most common complaint about e621 I see voiced by people outside of this site, is the lack of these tags.
"lol they tag everything under the sun but they don't even have 1guy." etc
There's clearly a demand.

demand is not utility. demand on its own means nothing.

can anyone explain the actual use case of these tags? how do they serve one of the core functions of a valid tag?

are these tags for searching for a specific post?
are these tags for browsing a bunch of posts?
are these tags for blacklisting posts to avoid seeing them?

fit these tags into at least one of the three given criteria and explain how it would be the best solution in its niche.

---

from where I'm sitting I can't really imagine much of a use for these. I mean, these would ostensibly be searching tags but, like, who is going to be able to remember the exact count of a gender in a post?

the only ones of these I could see potentially being useful would be the 1_<gender> tags, mostly for harem/gangbang posts. but honestly, I feel like we could expaind harem out into a tag group and get the same utility and then some.

dba_afish said:
from where I'm sitting I can't really imagine much of a use for these. I mean, these would ostensibly be searching tags but, like, who is going to be able to remember the exact count of a gender in a post?

the only ones of these I could see potentially being useful would be the 1_<gender> tags, mostly for harem/gangbang posts. but honestly, I feel like we could expaind harem out into a tag group and get the same utility and then some.

Agreed, I think. Expand harem into a tag group for those situations, and approve topic #37644 (and add versions for the rest of the genders) and I think that just about covers all the use for this tag family. And it'd be much more manageable because those tags would only apply to the posts they are useful for, not literally every post on the site.

dba_afish said:
demand is not utility. demand on its own means nothing.

can anyone explain the actual use case of these tags? how do they serve one of the core functions of a valid tag?

are these tags for searching for a specific post?
are these tags for browsing a bunch of posts?
are these tags for blacklisting posts to avoid seeing them?

fit these tags into at least one of the three given criteria and explain how it would be the best solution in its niche.

---

from where I'm sitting I can't really imagine much of a use for these. I mean, these would ostensibly be searching tags but, like, who is going to be able to remember the exact count of a gender in a post?

the only ones of these I could see potentially being useful would be the 1_<gender> tags, mostly for harem/gangbang posts. but honestly, I feel like we could expaind harem out into a tag group and get the same utility and then some.

Hmm, instead of exact counts up to 10, we could have 1_[gender], 2_[gender], 3-5_[gender], then 6+_[gender] which definitely has uses for searching, since it mirrors how one would categorise a post in their head. One and two are countable, 3-5 is a few, and 6+ is many

donteven said:
voiced by people outside of this site

I've seen other sites' tags - I don't think their opinions on tagging matter all that much!

---

My main issue if this were to be implemented, is that this would touch every single post for what seems to me like very little benefit. What's the point of 1_male or 1_male 1_female when there's already solo male or duo male female? Or for the larger numbers, how often are people going to want posts with exactly 4 males?

How are background characters going to impact these tags? Someone searching for 6_males probably doesn't want an image focusing on a solo male, with 5 more males in the background. But if background characters are ignored - where is the line between a background and a normal character? And if they aren't tagged, what precedent will that set on tagging/not tagging background characters elsewhere?

Snake-Girl does raise a good use case - finding posts where one gender outnumbers another. But I don't think <x>_<gender> tags are a good solution. If you want 1 male and more gynomorphs, you'd have to search 1_male gynomorph -1_gynomorph. Which, while I think it's cumbersome, that does work. But if you want any more males, it's not possible to search for it without missing posts or finding unwanted ones. For example, if I want up to 2 males and more gynomorphs, the closest search I could do is ~1_male ~2_males gynomorph -1_gynomorph -2_gynomorphs - which will miss any posts with just 1 male and 2 gynomorphs. (And remember - most people aren't going to know search modifiers like ~ or - exist. How will these users search for those posts?) I think the <gender>_majority tags dba afish mentioned would be a much better solution than these tags.

(If this doesn't make much sense... It's 3am, woops!)

dba_afish said:
...

Nice operationalizing of 'utility'. This is exactly the kind of thing we need in discussions of what tags we will and won't have.

from where I'm sitting I can't really imagine much of a use for these. I mean, these would ostensibly be searching tags but, like, who is going to be able to remember the exact count of a gender in a post?

Threesomes and foursomes are the main cases where I think someone might legitimately remember the numbers to search by. But they also would be addressed better and more scalably by the ratio-based system you propose.

These tags are cumbersome and while i see the semi extant merit of this, why is this getting reinstated but the Armpit are actually banned for some reason.

Like, if your argument is utility then why are super specific tags that people want to explicitly look for blackballed?

This would be a unilaterally bad thing for the tagging system and would serve only to clutter the tag list with pointless numerators. Like, who does that actually benefit? Who is actually going to search 1_girl or 3_girl.

Whats the supposed use case?

There isnt one. Its just meaningless tagspam which is why these numerator tags were banned in the first place.

donteven said:
To add, probably the single most common complaint about e621 I see voiced by people outside of this site, is the lack of these tags.
"lol they tag everything under the sun but they don't even have 1guy." etc
There's clearly a demand.

Where do you go outside of e621? Because if that is the most common problem they have with e621, I'd love to be there. Usually, people complain about moderation decisions, some of the content we have, and if they complain about tags, it's most of the time about the TWYS.

dba_afish said:
from where I'm sitting I can't really imagine much of a use for these. I mean, these would ostensibly be searching tags but, like, who is going to be able to remember the exact count of a gender in a post?

There are times when people want to see specific scenarios that these tags would definitely help with. And obviously they'd have some false positives due to other reasons, but these provide an objectively correct way to search for those specific situations. Like a m/m/f threesome, which is aliased to male/female, which makes searching for that specific impossible, even though it's a thing that plenty of people would find useful to search and it would have a higher hit rate than other ways of searching it. Since one_female two_male threesome would have barely any false positives in what it gives...

I'm actually not sure how you fail to see how these tags would be useful in these situations?

definitelynotafurry4 said:
Since one_female two_male threesome would have barely any false positives in what it gives...

It would give barely any false positives, but depending on the actual user query it could give plenty of false negatives (I can imagine that, depending on the position, ambiguous characters/gynomorphs/andromorphs would be fine for the user as well). What would be more powerful would be tagging group sex positions properly (tag_group:sex_positions), which are already highly correlated with gender, and letting users specify from there.

This change seems like a substantial tagging workload for unclear benefit. I think the reason why other boorus have staples like 1girl is because their tagging system is weak in other regards.

xerxes_i said:
It would give barely any false positives, but depending on the actual user query it could give plenty of false negatives

Well as it currently stands there is no way to search for this scenario. So why would any amount of false negatives impact the search of the user when they can't search it at all right now? Being able to receive partial, but accurate, results is better, imo, than not being able to receive any results due to not being able to properly search it in the first place.

I don't think it's good to spend a lot of time and effort to implement and manage something that does not properly serve the kind of images that people want to find.

The average user would use gender combinations not to find every single image that have 2_female 1_male somewhere in the background, but really to find substantive things (interactions) that they think correlate with those gender combinations. And in this case, we have interaction tags that are more powerful.

The exception for this tagging use case is if the user is trying to remember an image. Normally, solo or duo would be sufficient. count_gender tags are only really useful when there are many characters, and that's when people are most likely to misremember those character genders anyway. In that case, e621 gender tagging is so specific that they probably won't actually find what they're looking for. So in the end, why do it?

I feel like I wouldn't be against solo_*, multiple_*, *_only (they'd be pretty useful compared to the other suggestions, especially if you made them apply over the entire post so there could be use-cases for solo_female not including any multiple_images solo male female posts) but yeah, I really think the specific count tags are excessive.

definitelynotafurry4 said:
Like a m/m/f threesome, which is aliased to male/female, which makes searching for that specific impossible, even though it's a thing that plenty of people would find useful to search and it would have a higher hit rate than other ways of searching it. Since one_female two_male threesome would have barely any false positives in what it gives...

mmf_threesome

nimphia said:
mmf_threesome

This tag is getting around an alias afaik. There's a reason that it has no implications and not really any usage.

definitelynotafurry4 said:
This tag is getting around an alias afaik. There's a reason that it has no implications and not really any usage.

Wasn't aware, I just see it around sometimes.

Those 1girl 2girl etc tags is probably the one and only thing I like more about hentai boorus vs e621. As an enjoyer of NSFWs with the group-type tags applied, the current approach on e6 is a slog and borderline useless to work with to find what you're looking for (and btw the stuff that gets mirrored over to r34 gets these tags applied, so you've got some working examples to look at).

These are such good tags on other boorus, it would be immensely helpful if we had them too.

People coming out the woodwork who have never posted on the forum before to voice their opinion yet there's "no demand for this" 🤔

The only problem with this is we've got millions of posts to add the tags to - which wouldn't have ever been a problem if the old management didn't make this mistake to nuke this tags a decade ago. Let's not keep the status quo because it's "effort" and actually reverse this like the majority of their other bad decisions.

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of hours have already been invested by users in making e621 one of the best boorus for tagging out there - we shouldn't be lacking something that everybody would expect from a booru.

Stop making arbitrary excuses.

"People will tag 1_male instead of male solo" Guess what, there's already hundreds of thousands of results for -solo -duo -group -zero_pictured.

Bad tagging is never a reason not to create a tag, otherwise we may as well just delete everything we've got already.

"It has no utility". It has utility because there is literally no other way to search with this precision using existing tags. Not being able to easily search for a mmf or ffm threesome (or any combination of genders) is something people would obviously want to do, and the tagging system we're currently using makes it harder to find than drawing blood from a stone. The ffm_threesome tag currently exists, but is an even worse solution than gender counts, and is also currently proposed to be aliased away (topic #43888)

"It's a slippery slope, how long until people start trying to make 2_clothed_female_anthros" We don't allow that, and we won't be allowing that. These arguments are just plain stupid - it's been longstanding policy that only one modifier tag is allowed. There's no young_female_anthro, there's no anthro_male_penetrating_nude_young_female_taur. Nothing is changing.

"What about lore tags?" Irrelevant, nobody is going to get any more upset by having a post tagged as 2_males on a post but only trans_woman_(lore) tagged once than they would be in the first place.

faucet said:
People coming out the woodwork who have never posted on the forum before to voice their opinion yet there's "no demand for this" 🤔

No one's saying there isn't demand, but having demand doesn't mean there's much utility. As was said earlier, "demand is not utility".

faucet said:
"People will tag 1_male instead of male solo" Guess what, there's already hundreds of thousands of results for -solo -duo -group -zero_pictured.

No reason to make the problem worse. People will ignore some characters when tagging counts already, which is up to us to fix. And it will make fixing things like that, including gender tagging which is often a significant point of mistags and tag wars, much more tedious, along with a high risk of the tags getting out of sync so that it ends up inaccurate. Any use they may have will be further reduced if they're often incorrect.

faucet said:
"It has no utility". It has utility because there is literally no other way to search with this precision using existing tags.

How often will it be useful to search with such precision, and is it often enough to warrant the headaches it will cause for it to be well-tagged enough for such a search to be functional? If you're trying to find a particular image, are you going to remember precisely how many males, females, etc it had (and whether they ended up tagged differently due to TWYS)? If you're off by one with your search, it will fail. Or if you're searching correctly but a tag war caused them to end up counted incorrectly, it will fail. Trying to search a range with these tags to deal with imprecise memory will be difficult to impossible. There's a reason the total character count was limited to two, only relatively recently upped to three (which has been of questionable value). The more precise options you have, the more likely your search will be ineffective if you don't already know exactly what you're looking for.

faucet said:
"It's a slippery slope, how long until people start trying to make 2_clothed_female_anthros" We don't allow that, and we won't be allowing that.

We can not allow something all we want, that won't stop people from trying to tag it regardless. Until we make the requisite BURs to alias them away, people have free reign to add those kinds of tags (at which point it'll start a debate where they'll make the same arguments, that there's demand and it's the only way to search with such precision).