I've recently set out to try to standardize the older generations of MLP, and that's opened a big can of worms when it comes to dealing with character tags that's been left to fester for the past decade unaddressed, so it's time to finally talk about it.

While this issue doesn't affect my BUR to deal with copyright tags, it does cause some issues on how to go forward with handling characters.

For anyone unfamiliar, the MLP franchise loves to reuse characters - not as the same characters, but by making new iterations of them. Which would be all fine and dandy were it not for this site's big MLP suffix problem.

When this site was made, FIM was sort of treated as the default, and everything else was side-lined, as can be seen by the fossil that is the *_(pre-g4) suffix. But now we have a fifth generation of MLP that's popular on its own, and more people acknowledging that the older generations have always and will always have their fanbases as well. With the exception of G2, all generations of the franchise have hundreds of images on this site.

This has been brought up a good handful of times before, but no one's really sure what to do about this and no one wants to deal with the hundreds of tags.

I've seen it said that Rainbow Dash doesn't need a suffix because her name is unique, but that isn't true - she shares a name with a G3 character, and the current *_(mlp) suffix, while most people understand refers to the more popular FIM character, doesn't actually clear that up. It adds nothing, not actually serving the purpose of a disambiguation suffix.

It's not much of an issue for characters like RD, but then you get to minty_(mlp_g3) - the most popular Minty, yes, but the franchise has four Mintys, that were all sharing one tag until yesterday.

...So yeah, I think we need to figure something out when it comes to how to deal with those damn ponies.

Could we just change the suffixes for the FiM characters to *_(fim)?

wandering_spaniel said:
Could we just change the suffixes for the FiM characters to *_(fim)?

I think that would be a good idea, yeah, and maybe going forward suffix the character tags with the generation? I.E. *_(mlp_g3). With generations with multiple series we could do similar abbreviations, like *_(mlpnf) for the My Little Pony 'n Friends continuity and *_(mlpt) for My Little Pony Tales. (Even though those two don't overlap, I think it'd still be a good idea to suffix them separately and have *_(mlp_g1) left for the miscellaneous toy and book only characters.

I don't trust Hasbro to not reuse literally any name given some of the obscure names they've recycled, so I don't think getting rid of the suffixes altogether is a good option. But we can get rid of the utterly meaningless *_(mlp), I think.

It also makes it easier to tell what a character is from at a glance, which you really can't say about currently searching for *_(mlp). (Is this FIM? An OC? An obscure Gen 4 toy-only pony? A character from a Gen 1 cartoon? A pony only released as a mail-order in the 80's? Who knows!)

nimphia said:
It also makes it easier to tell what a character is from at a glance, which you really can't say about currently searching for *_(mlp). (Is this FIM? An OC? An obscure Gen 4 toy-only pony? A character from a Gen 1 cartoon? A pony only released as a mail-order in the 80's? Who knows!)

You might want to beebop over to Derpibooru and recruit some of the folks from there to help with this. I might have an extreme level of useless knowledge (Creator of The Punisher wrote for G1, Danny Devito is the Grundle King, Danny went on to be Robin and Stetmann, that sort of thing), but I can only do so much tagging when this gets reconjiggered.

IIRC, there's still a kerfluffle going on here with tagging for oc/fan character/so on?

votp said:
You might want to beebop over to Derpibooru and recruit some of the folks from there to help with this. I might have an extreme level of useless knowledge (Creator of The Punisher wrote for G1, Danny Devito is the Grundle King, Danny went on to be Robin and Stetmann, that sort of thing), but I can only do so much tagging when this gets reconjiggered.

IIRC, there's still a kerfluffle going on here with tagging for oc/fan character/so on?

I know way too much about MLP, so knowledge isn't really my concern here - I was moreso making an example of how the *_(mlp) suffix tells you very little.

The annoying thing is that for a lot of the FIM characters either we're going to have to do the alias requests one at a time or we're going to have to deal with a shit ton of transitives.

The bulk update request #8365 is active.

Reason: Actually I think dealing with some of these fan characters would be the best place to start. I don't think any fan characters should imply copyrights for the same reason most of them had the fan_character implication removed a while back - people can depict them in different ways and the owners can make them no longer a FC if they want.

Followup to remove the *_(mlp) suffix from these:

alias backy_(mlp) -> backy_(ask-backy)
alias nyx_(mlp) -> nyx_(pen_stroke)
alias belle_eve_(mlp) -> belle_eve
alias button's_mom_(mlp) -> cream_heart
alias cream_heart_(mlp) -> cream_heart
alias button's_mom -> cream_heart
alias buttons_mom_(mlp) -> cream_heart
alias reppy_(mlp) -> reppy_(replica)

EDIT: The bulk update request #8365 (forum #407023) has been approved by @scaliespe.

nimphia said:
The bulk update request #8365 is active.

remove implication backy_(mlp) (227) -> my_little_pony (321266)
remove alias backy (0) -> backy_(mlp) (227)
remove implication nyx_(mlp) (108) -> my_little_pony (321266)
remove implication honey_dip (49) -> my_little_pony (321266)
remove alias belle_eve (0) -> belle_eve_(mlp) (34)
remove implication belle_eve_(mlp) (34) -> my_little_pony (321266)
remove implication moonbrush_(phathusa) (142) -> my_little_pony (321266)
remove implication cream_heart_(mlp) (1320) -> my_little_pony (321266)
remove alias button's_mom_(mlp) (0) -> cream_heart_(mlp) (1320)
remove alias cream_heart (0) -> cream_heart_(mlp) (1320)
remove alias button's_mom (0) -> cream_heart_(mlp) (1320)
remove alias buttons_mom_(mlp) (0) -> cream_heart_(mlp) (1320)
remove implication fluffle_puff (400) -> my_little_pony (321266)
remove implication fluffle_puff (400) -> fan_character (139542)
remove implication reppy_(mlp) (577) -> my_little_pony (321266)
remove implication midnight_blossom (34) -> my_little_pony (321266)
remove implication aryanne_(character) (326) -> my_little_pony (321266)
remove implication delta_vee (139) -> my_little_pony (321266)
remove implication golden_brooch (235) -> my_little_pony (321266)
remove implication golden_brooch (235) -> fan_character (139542)
remove implication silver_draw (77) -> my_little_pony (321266)
remove implication silver_draw (77) -> fan_character (139542)

wait, Cream Heart's a fan character?

from an outside perspective, it's fucking wild to me that a fan character has so much, like, ubiquity.

dba_afish said:
wait, Cream Heart's a fan character?

from an outside perspective, it's fucking wild to me that a fan character has so much, like, ubiquity.

Yeah, she's from the Button's Adventures fan series, a lot of people assume she's official so I don't blame you haha

I'm listening

The bulk update request #8365 (forum #407023) has been approved by @scaliespe.

I think the next step would probably be to handle the FIM tags that aren't already implied to FIM since there's no transitives to deal with?

The bulk update request #8381 is pending approval.

create alias backy_(mlp) (227) -> backy_(ask-backy) (0)
create alias nyx_(mlp) (108) -> nyx_(pen_stroke) (0)
create alias belle_eve_(mlp) (34) -> belle_eve (0)
create alias button's_mom_(mlp) (0) -> cream_heart (0)
create alias cream_heart_(mlp) (1320) -> cream_heart (0) # has blocking transitive relationships, cannot be applied through BUR
create alias button's_mom (0) -> cream_heart (0)
create alias buttons_mom_(mlp) (0) -> cream_heart (0)
create alias reppy_(mlp) (577) -> reppy_(replica) (0)

Reason: Followup

The bulk update request #8382 is pending approval.

remove alias buttons_mom (0) -> cream_heart_(mlp) (1320)

Reason: Transitive I missed, accept this first, woops