The bulk update request #8309 is pending approval.

remove alias ghost_penis (0) -> translucent_penis (2859)
create alias floating_dick (12) -> disembodied_penis (58685)

Reason: For some reason ghost_hands is a valid tag, but not ghost_penis? That is currently aliased to translucent_penis, which is probably a bad idea considering that a number of the current results under translucent_penis are entirely opaque, likely added as a consequence of this alias. Furthermore, ghost penises in general are entirely distinct from translucent_penis and disembodied_penis on their own. They may or may not be translucent, they're often glowing, they may have their own ghost_tail, dripping ectoplasm, etc., while A: translucent penises may be none of those things, and may be attached to perfectly corporeal characters, such as goo_creatures or other normally translucent beings, and B: disembodied penises may not appear particularly ghost-like, and often simply belong to an offscreen character, which is entirely different than a penis floating around of its own accord. Therefore, I propose making ghost_penis its own tag which mirrors ghost_hands (which should probably be renamed to ghost_hand as there may be only one, but that is a matter for a different thread).

- floating_penis alias included for convenience, as I came across that while making this BUR.

next:
alias ghost_dick -> ghost_penis alias ghost_dicks -> ghost_penis alias ghost_cock -> ghost_penis alias ghost_cocks -> ghost_penis imply ghost_penis -> penis imply ghost_penis -> disembodied_penis

scaliespe said:
For some reason ghost_hands is a valid tag, but not ghost_penis?

Maybe it too should be aliased away. A quick glimpse at the results for ghost_hands has many posts that aren't. Just plain disembodied hands (all from the first 9 results as of making this comment). The term "ghost hands" is indicating it's the hands of ghosts, but how can you distinguish "ghost hands" from plain translucent or disembodied hands? e.g.
post #4791251 post #4782661
What makes some translucent hands "ghost hands", and others not? Can people reliably tag the difference correctly? It doesn't seem they can from the results I'm seeing, and as indicated by you finding translucent_penis tagged on fully opaque and non-ghostly penises, so it's probably best to have both ghost_hands and ghost_penis aliased away. Given how people seem to tag them on fully opaque non-ghost appendages, aliasing it to disembodied_hand and disembodied_penis may be better.

watsit said:
Maybe it too should be aliased away. A quick glimpse at the results for ghost_hands has many posts that aren't. Just plain disembodied hands (all from the first 9 results as of making this comment). The term "ghost hands" is indicating it's the hands of ghosts, but how can you distinguish "ghost hands" from plain translucent or disembodied hands? e.g.
post #4791251 post #4782661
What makes some translucent hands "ghost hands", and others not? Can people reliably tag the difference correctly?

I'd say that hands being both translucent and disembodied is good enough to call them ghost hands, regardless of whether or not that was the intent - I just wouldn't have ghost_hands imply translucent_hands simply because they might *not* be translucent, but might feature other traditionally "ghostly" traits like glowing, having a ghost tail, dripping ectoplasm, etc. Really, I'd say that any of these traits in combination with being disembodied puts it into ghost territory.

Some mistags are inevitable due to people not reading wikis, but actual floating ghost parts interacting with characters seems to be enough of a genre that I would hate for people to have no way to actually search for it, which is all you'd achieve by aliasing it. This is especially not helped by the fact that a disembodied_penis or other body part can simply belong to an offscreen character without it actually "floating" in a ghostly fashion, ie. post #4782047, which is most of what disembodied_penis currently consists of. If the mistags are truly bad enough, the better solution would be to pick a different name for the tag to reduce ambiguity, though I'm not sure we need to resort to that in this instance.

scaliespe said:
I'd say that hands being both translucent and disembodied is good enough to call them ghost hands, regardless of whether or not that was the intent - I just wouldn't have ghost_hands imply translucent_hands simply because they might *not* be translucent, but might feature other traditionally "ghostly" traits like glowing, having a ghost tail, dripping ectoplasm, etc. Really, I'd say that any of these traits in combination with being disembodied puts it into ghost territory.

This sounds pretty wishy-washy, putting it up to personal interpretation or opinion. "being both translucent and disembodied is good enough" and "they might *not* be translucent", making them just disembodied hands. The "might feature other traditionally "ghostly" traits like glowing, having a ghost tail, dripping ectoplasm" is somewhat better (I'm not sure I'd include glowing, since that can be indicative of other things like magic/psychic/aura power rather than ghosts), but looking at the available results, there are plenty, dare I say most, that don't have "a ghost tail, dripping ectoplasm". Nor does a ghost necessarily have those traits, so you'd end up with hands/penises of ghosts that aren't ghost_hands or ghost_penises.

Along with the penis example I gave (that isn't unique ), which was tagged translucent_penis likely as a result of the ghost_penis alias, it seems too ingrained that ghost_x = disembodied_x, and anything else is optional.

scaliespe said:
Some mistags are inevitable due to people not reading wikis, but actual floating ghost parts interacting with characters seems to be enough of a genre that I would hate for people to have no way to actually search for it, which is all you'd achieve by aliasing it.

From what I see with ghost_hands, it's much more than some mistags. Given the state of ghost_hands, I'm not sure even regular cleanup would be easy, especially if there's disagreement on what constitutes a ghost appendage beyond ghost+appendage. It might be better to have tags for the whispy ghost tail things and ectoplasm and other such ghostly things, and leave the rest to disembodied_x and translucent_x (and glowing_x) without explicitly stating ghost_x.

scaliespe said:
This is especially not helped by the fact that a disembodied_penis or other body part can simply belong to an offscreen character without it actually "floating" in a ghostly fashion, ie. post #4782047, which is most of what disembodied_penis currently consists of.

Ironically, floating_hands is also a valid tag, while floating_penis is aliased to disembodied_penis (from alias #3933 over 11 years ago). I could see maybe bringing that back to help.

watsit said:
This sounds pretty wishy-washy, putting it up to personal interpretation or opinion. "being both translucent and disembodied is good enough" and "they might *not* be translucent", making them just disembodied hands. The "might feature other traditionally "ghostly" traits like glowing, having a ghost tail, dripping ectoplasm" is somewhat better (I'm not sure I'd include glowing, since that can be indicative of other things like magic/psychic/aura power rather than ghosts), but looking at the available results, there are plenty, dare I say most, that don't have "a ghost tail, dripping ectoplasm". Nor does a ghost necessarily have those traits, so you'd end up with hands/penises of ghosts that aren't ghost_hands or ghost_penises.

Well it shouldn’t be up to personal interpretation or opinion - what I described are objective characteristics, with a combination of any of them (except disembodied which must always be present) being good enough to qualify. There’s nothing really subjective about that. Though, I wouldn’t be opposed to letting the ghost_* tags be for any independently free-floating body part regardless of ghostly appearance, since at least a few people use it that way.

Magic is an interesting point, but I would say that magic has its own visual identifiers to distinguish it from a ghost - mainly some kind of emanating substance, ie. what you’ll find in the magic tag itself.

Ironically, floating_hands is also a valid tag, while floating_penis is aliased to disembodied_penis (from alias #3933 over 11 years ago). I could see maybe bringing that back to help.

There is floating_dick, with a quarter of the current results being regular offscreen disembodied penises that are not visibly hovering independently, and none of the results are equivalent to the definition we use for floating hands. If that’s any indication of how that tag will go, it won’t be any better off than the ghost tags. At the very least, ghost_* doesn’t really seem to be used for parts attached to offscreen characters.

scaliespe said:
There is floating_dick, with a quarter of the current results being regular offscreen disembodied penises that are not visibly hovering independently, and none of the results are equivalent to the definition we use for floating hands.

By "a quarter of the current results", that means 3 of 12. And 2 of those 3 are a parent/child pair that were posted and tagged together 4 years ago, with the third one tagged over 3 years ago. I don't think that's a good enough sample size to say a full 1/4th of floating_penis will be mistags if brought back.

watsit said:
By "a quarter of the current results", that means 3 of 12. And 2 of those 3 are a parent/child pair that were posted and tagged together 4 years ago, with the third one tagged over 3 years ago. I don't think that's a good enough sample size to say a full 1/4th of floating_penis will be mistags if brought back.

That’s true, but I doubt there won’t be some mistags with a name like that. “Floating” doesn’t necessarily mean anything more specific than “Not visibly attached to anything” which is already what disembodied_penis is used for. The point is that there are likely going to be some errors no matter what the tag ends up being called.

scaliespe said:
The point is that there are likely going to be some errors no matter what the tag ends up being called.

I think bringing back floating_penis, with other tags for whispy ghost effects and stuff, would be better than having ghost_penis (and ghost_hands should be aliased away). Especially if the only required characteristic of the latter is being a disembodied_x and anything else (like translucency, whispy tails, etc) is optional, which puts it up to personal interpretation if the given features on display are enough to call it ghost_x. Simply tagging what's there would be less prone to disagreement, rather than making a judgment call of if what's there indicates a separate property of a thing.

watsit said:
I think bringing back floating_penis, with other tags for whispy ghost effects and stuff, would be better than having ghost_penis (and ghost_hands should be aliased away). Especially if the only required characteristic of the latter is being a disembodied_x and anything else (like translucency, whispy tails, etc) is optional, which puts it up to personal interpretation if the given features on display are enough to call it ghost_x. Simply tagging what's there would be less prone to disagreement, rather than making a judgment call of if what's there indicates a separate property of a thing.

The issue with that is still making it difficult to search for this “theme” - while there are different ways to depict ghost parts, not all of them always overlap outside of being disembodied, but it is still a specific niche that gets overshadowed by the much larger disembodied tag group. Splitting it up into individual elements would require one to search disembodied_penis ~translucent_penis ~glowing_penis ~penis_with_wispy_tail ~penis_dripping_ectoplasm or whatever the tags are, which will turn up a number of false results due to some of these being ambiguous with non-ghost penises (the translucent penis may belong to a translucent character separate from the disembodied penis, the penis may be glowing for other reasons like the aforementioned magic, etc). Then, say you want to find a post with both ghost hands and ghost penises… you can’t, because the or modifier only works on one set of tags. It’s not really a functional solution, all things considered.

But back to the main issue: can the mistags be cleaned up enough to make these tags worthwhile? I don’t know, have we tried?

scaliespe said:
The issue with that is still making it difficult to search for this “theme” - while there are different ways to depict ghost parts, not all of them always overlap outside of being disembodied, but it is still a specific niche that gets overshadowed by the much larger disembodied tag group.

"Themes" are difficult to tag as they rarely play nice with TWYS. It ends up coming down to personal taste and interpretation, if the image triggers a user's response for the themes with nothing specific being the cause. See the number of posts that keep getting tagged foot_fetish for simply having a foot_focus (sometimes not even a focus), because someone thinks it fits the theme of foot fetishism despite nothing visibly fetishy happening with the feet. Same for vore regularly tagged on detailed mouths with no indication of vore or imminent_vore. I see it as similar for ghost parts, where someone with an interest in that will tag it on images that play with their enjoyment of the concept, even if there's nothing specific that makes it stand out from other disembodied appendages, and someone else with a like for the theme can come along and say it doesn't fit since it doesn't play with their enjoyment of the theme.

scaliespe said:
Splitting it up into individual elements would require one to search disembodied_penis ~translucent_penis ~glowing_penis ~penis_with_wispy_tail ~penis_dripping_ectoplasm or whatever the tags are, which will turn up a number of false results due to some of these being ambiguous with non-ghost penises (the translucent penis may belong to a translucent character separate from the disembodied penis, the penis may be glowing for other reasons like the aforementioned magic, etc). Then, say you want to find a post with both ghost hands and ghost penises… you can’t, because the or modifier only works on one set of tags. It’s not really a functional solution, all things considered.

At least when you search penis_with_wispy_tail, you can be relatively assured you'll get results for precisely that. But if ghost_penis is essentially defined as disembodied_penis + optional extras, the only common denominator with the results will be disembodied_penis, making it little better than a random subset of disembodied_penis results. But also slightly worse, since some people may not-unfairly think ghost_penis would apply to a ghost with a penis without being disembodied, or they may also bring lore into it, where there's two otherwise identical translucent disembodied penises, with one being tagged ghost_penis because they know it belongs to a character that is a ghost, where the other is translucent to be able to see what's behind the penis. For example, whether or not something like post #4676004 gets tagged ghost_penis will be personal interpretation -- it can be inferred to be the penis of a ghost and technically fits the disembodied+translucent criteria, but it's no different than any other disembodied+translucent penis.

scaliespe said:
But back to the main issue: can the mistags be cleaned up enough to make these tags worthwhile? I don’t know, have we tried?

We have to be able to clearly define what constitutes ghost_hands before trying to work through the 39 pages of results, and to see how often it gets mistagged on images without meeting the proper TWYS criteria. I don't think the disembodied_hands + optional extras idea can really work, as that would mean disembodied hands can never be mistagged with ghost_hands since it will always fit the bare minimum, despite disembodied_hands not always being ghost_hands.

When it comes to stuff like this I'm personally a bit more on the side of "what is more useful" than "what is best aligned with twys." This is a not uncommon kink. Tags about junk like glowing, translucency, color, and texture are undertagged making them unreliable- and making MORE of these rarely used types of tags and telling people to throw a big huge string of ~tags to maybe get what they're looking for in order to strictly observe 'tag what you see' is NOT user friendly. A decent analogy for these ghost_* tags is tentacles.
post #4806303 post #4808243 post #4805198
These could be tentacles, ropes, vines, coils of metal, or a number of other things. Their source is offscreen and all we know about them is that they're tubes wrapped around body parts. We don't go "Well then they should be tagged tubes+other tags describing the tubes" because that's not helpful to anybody.
Species is a known area where twys gets iffy. However, replacing species tags with a collection of description tags- e.g. 'prick_ears whiskers short_snout fur' instead of 'domestic_cat'- accomplishes nothing and helps nobody.

regsmutt said:
When it comes to stuff like this I'm personally a bit more on the side of "what is more useful" than "what is best aligned with twys." This is a not uncommon kink. Tags about junk like glowing, translucency, color, and texture are undertagged making them unreliable- and making MORE of these rarely used types of tags and telling people to throw a big huge string of ~tags to maybe get what they're looking for in order to strictly observe 'tag what you see' is NOT user friendly.

When faced with the issue of underused tags, adding another tag that will be underused will rarely help. But especially in this case, outside of TWYS how would you tag ghost appendages separate from general disembodied appendages or 'the appendage of a ghost'? Adding an ambiguous tag that ends up as a random assortment of disembodied penises won't fix the issue with underused tags.

regsmutt said:
A decent analogy for these ghost_* tags is tentacles.
post #4806303 post #4808243 post #4805198
These could be tentacles, ropes, vines, coils of metal, or a number of other things.

That first one I'm not sure I would tag as tentacles, they do look like ropes that he's getting tied up by, and I would've tagged them as such. The second two look like they're moving under their own power, so couldn't be ropes or metal coils or such things (maybe vines, but if we're talking living vines, is that not a form of tentacles?).

regsmutt said:
Their source is offscreen and all we know about them is that they're tubes wrapped around body parts.

We go by what we can see. Like disembodied_penis itself, what it's attached to is offscreen and isn't considered. A character with a penis only is tagged male, so the rest of what it might be attached to is ignored, even if it could be a gynomorph or herm or maleherm. Similarly, a disembodied penis is just that. To assume it's a ghost is an assumption, but basing it on agreeably ghost-like attributes (ectoplasm, whispy tails) would cut out a number of types of ghosts, undermining it's own purpose and be prone to mistags.

watsit said:
That first one I'm not sure I would tag as tentacles, they do look like ropes that he's getting tied up by, and I would've tagged them as such. The second two look like they're moving under their own power, so couldn't be ropes or metal coils or such things (maybe vines, but if we're talking living vines, is that not a form of tentacles?).

We go by what we can see. Like disembodied_penis itself, what it's attached to is offscreen and isn't considered. A character with a penis only is tagged male, so the rest of what it might be attached to is ignored, even if it could be a gynomorph or herm or maleherm. Similarly, a disembodied penis is just that. To assume it's a ghost is an assumption, but basing it on agreeably ghost-like attributes (ectoplasm, whispy tails) would cut out a number of types of ghosts, undermining it's own purpose and be prone to mistags.

How is "they look like they're moving under their own power" NOT an assumption? They are still images with no typical shorthand indications of any sort of movement. The silver ones even match the color and texture of the (I assume) non-moving cock ring the character is wearing. As for vines, the wiki implies they aren't the same.

Many tags have built-in assumptions and most have a blurry zone of "feels close enough." I do not see ghost_hand/penis as especially egregious in either case.

regsmutt said:
How is "they look like they're moving under their own power" NOT an assumption? They are still images with no typical shorthand indications of any sort of movement.

Because they're not lying flat by gravity (the second one), and are spreading the butt/pussy of a character (the third).

regsmutt said:
As for vines, the wiki implies they aren't the same.

There seems to be a good bit of overlap with them. Creature like tangela are described as being covered in "thick blue vines", but is also tagged with tentacle_sex when those vines are penetrating another.

regsmutt said:
Many tags have built-in assumptions and most have a blurry zone of "feels close enough." I do not see ghost_hand/penis as especially egregious in either case.

I disagree somewhat. For something being tagged because it "feels close enough", it's because it's visibly similar or likely to be the case. But ghost appendages are more vague since ghosts are so varied to begin with, making it too subjective IMO. Short of a small set of stereotypical features (that don't apply to all ghosts), there's not much that makes something likely to be ghost appendages vs non-ghost disembodied ones.