Recently, thanks to our very own Donovan_DMC (make sure to give him many pets), we've got a new tag category for contributors. So now it's time to discuss how to use this category, who goes in there, formatting, and all that fun stuff.

Who gets a contributor tag?

As of right now we're allowing these two types of contributors to be tagged (feel free to discuss more potential contributors to tag in this post):

• Voice actors
• Character modelers - only character modelers, do not tag the name of the character being modeled, just the modeler.

The primary artist(s) of a piece SHOULD NOT be tagged with any contributor tags.

Formatting

We'd like to have a standardized format for these tags to prevent issues of ambiguity in the future. So when making a contributor tag, please add the suffix that describes the tag:

• Voice actors - name_(va)
• Character modelers - name_(modeler) - Note the one l, to keep in line with the other American English in our tags, such as colored

The formatting of this category will be kept stricter than other categories, so please adhere to these guidelines.

Further discussion

We're currently open to discussion about this category. If you think that there should be more types of contributors tagged, please let us know, and give us a reason why they should be tagged.

Creating new contributor tags

Like other tags, you can create a new contributor tag by prefixing it with cont:, contrib:, or contributor: when adding it to its first post. For an already created tag, you can edit the tag type on the tag's wiki page using the secondary navbar's "Edit Tag Type" link.

For character modelers, does that include people who edit an existing model? Or is it solely for the original creator?

tarrgon said:

• Character modelers - only character modelers, do not tag the name of the character being modeled, just the modeler.

Confusing language, does that tell me to not tag a character, or to not create a separate tag specifically for a model? Or something else?

waydence said:
Confusing language, does that tell me to not tag a character, or to not create a separate tag specifically for a model? Or something else?

Tag the character the model portrays, like you normally would. Then add the name of the modeler themselves as a contributor.

So let's say person made a fnaf Roxy model, you would tag roxanne_wolf and person_(modeler), the two tags are separate.

tarrgon said:
Tag the character the model portrays, like you normally would. Then add the name of the modeler themselves as a contributor.

So let's say person made a fnaf Roxy model, you would tag roxanne_wolf and person_(modeler), the two tags are separate.

aka do not duplicate existing character tags for each person's model of that character

tarrgon said:
(feel free to discuss more potential contributors to tag in this post):

How about animators? People like jasonafex have been sitting comfortably in the artist category for years now despite the fact they're not doing any of the art, just making it wiggle about.

faucet said:
How about animators? People like jasonafex have been sitting comfortably in the artist category for years now despite the fact they're not doing any of the art, just making it wiggle about.

Might be the other way around actually.
If the creator of a 3d model counts as contributor, and the animator of a 3d model counts as artist.
Then, following that logic, the creator of original 2d drawing would become contributor, while the wiggle-abouter becomes the artist.
To be clear, I think this wouldn't make sense either way.

faucet said:
How about animators? People like jasonafex have been sitting comfortably in the artist category for years now despite the fact they're not doing any of the art, just making it wiggle about.

I don't think anything is changing in regards to how these are tagged. The intention of the category is to add new things we can tag, not change how things are currently tagged. I don't know enough about jasonafex to know if what they do is editing an original piece, or working with the original artist in collaboration, in which case, collaborators are tagged as artists, like they always have been.

One thing we're discussing right now, is writers. Does anyone here have any input on whether you'd find tagging writers to be useful to you? Do you have any writers in mind that you'd tag? Do you know any writers that work with multiple artists, or write for commission that other artists have used for their work? Would you search for writers if they were available? Leave us some thoughts.

What about music artists for background music in webms? Do they get tagged as Contributors now, or still remain untagged?

crocogator said:
What about music artists for background music in webms? Do they get tagged as Contributors now, or still remain untagged?

Untagged, nothing has changed there

tarrgon said:
One thing we're discussing right now, is writers. Does anyone here have any input on whether you'd find tagging writers to be useful to you? Do you have any writers in mind that you'd tag? Do you know any writers that work with multiple artists, or write for commission that other artists have used for their work? Would you search for writers if they were available? Leave us some thoughts.

This seems reasonable to me. One example I can think of is Fink, who has wrote comics with nowandlater (e.g. Afterparty and More than Curious) and pupspace (e.g. Playdate and Boy's Night. I also know there's a few writers out there that commission comics from numerous artists - though I can't remember any of their names for the life of me right now.

Should you tag contributor tags on posts whose artist is also the contributor? I can easily see why not, but I can't think of any other way to search for posts with self-voice acting alongside voice acting from others.

anicebee said:
Should you tag contributor tags on posts whose artist is also the contributor? I can easily see why not, but I can't think of any other way to search for posts with self-voice acting alongside voice acting from others.

That seems redundant.

The contributor category was added to credit people who participated in the creation of the artwork in one way or another, but weren't one of the primary artists.
The primary artist is already credited via the artist tag.

anicebee said:
Should you tag contributor tags on posts whose artist is also the contributor?

tarrgon said:
The primary artist(s) of a piece SHOULD NOT be tagged with any contributor tags.

if someone is both an artist and a contributor, should they have two separate tags?

e.g., ruaidri made the public model for my post, but I animated it and made the rest of the scene.

edit: nvm, didn't read the error message right and was trying to change the type of the artist tag on accident.

If someone (not a third party) contributes to a post by coloring/shading (see link provided) should they be tagged as artist, contributor, or nothing.

Also what about third party edits? They aren't taggable as artists, but what about contributors

Would sound designers be credited as well? And how would you tag someone who did both sound and VA?

sgtabbeyrubber said:
Would sound designers be credited as well? And how would you tag someone who did both sound and VA?

Presumably, if sound designers were to get tagged, they'd get a separate suffix. Just like if someone is both a modeler and a voice actor, and they voice the model they made in an animation that someone else made, they'd be tagged both <name>_(modeler) and <name>_(va).

The only comment I have is that a tag format like joe_(voice) might be more widely understood than joe_(va). But if that ship has sailed, so be it.

snpthecat said:
If someone (not a third party) contributes to a post by coloring/shading (see link provided) should they be tagged as artist, contributor, or nothing.

Also what about third party edits? They aren't taggable as artists, but what about contributors

If a colorist works with another artist to create the finished product, that’s a collaboration and they are still tagged as artists like they usually are.

I personally think third-party editors should be tagged as contributors, but I don’t think that’s been discussed yet. We’ve often debated the problem of whether or not to tag editors, or how much of an edit is significant enough to qualify for an artist tag, so this would be an easy solution to all of that. Collaborators are artists and editors are contributors, no matter how big or small the contribution to the finished artwork is. That’s what I’d like to do.

kora_viridian said:
The only comment I have is that a tag format like joe_(voice) might be more widely understood than joe_(va). But if that ship has sailed, so be it.

I honestly would've preferred this, but I imagine it's non-negotiable at this point. Personally it also just bothers me a little when "VA" is already included in the username, resulting in a tag like gosigmus_va_(va) or lecheryamoreva_(va) which just feels redundant. On the plus side (va) keeps the tags short, but even (voice) would still be shorter than (modeler).

Following the same scheme of describing the product rather than the occupation we'd end up with joe_(model), which sounds a little weird. I'm not sure I'd like that.

At least it might prevent the modeler/modeller spelling variant issue? It's sure to become a problem at some point. It's not as simple as "this is the American way, and the other is the British way" like the OP suggests - both spellings are used in the US, modeler just happens to be the most widely used. Merriam-Webster states "or less commonly modeller", where for color it states "or chiefly British colour".

Considering that, there should probably be an automatic *_(modeller) -> *_(modeler) replacement to save the work fixing it or creating tonnes of aliases? I can't see how it would cause any harm if no tag should ever be ending with (modeller).

cinder said:
That seems redundant.

The contributor category was added to credit people who participated in the creation of the artwork in one way or another, but weren't one of the primary artists.
The primary artist is already credited via the artist tag.

Actually, I think this could be positive redundancy here.

For an example, anybody searching dogzeela_(modeler) loona_(helluva_boss)^* is likely wanting to see any post that contains DogZeela's Loona model. In reality, they won't see them all because the official renders by the modeller won't be included in the results:
post #4804845 post #4858097 post #5049223

You could, of course, search for ~dogzeela_(modeler) ~dogzeela loona_(helluva_boss) - but isn't this starting to get a little unintuitive? An average user would just expect the results to come up.

I think it also removes any ambiguity. If somebody has the artist tag we know they made the render, but that doesn't tell us who made the models. We can't just assume "no contributor tags = the artist made everything" because the modeller is frequently unidentified or otherwise untagged. It also creates ambiguity in post #4912883, which has ludexus as the artist and carbiid3_(modeler) as a contributor tag. Without the context of the description (which wasn't there until I added it right now) you would immediately assume that all three models were made by carbiid3, but two of them are actually by ludexus themselves.

So far for pros I'm seeing improved searchability and less ambiguity from the data, while for the cons it's that the sidebar would look ugly with repeated tags.

_{* Pretend this tag query has lots of results, which it will after population.}

+1 for the modeler redundancy. If an artist makes a video and voices one of the characters, they should be tagged as va even if they're already tagged as the artist, right? So the same should go for modelers.

snpthecat said:
they should be tagged as va even if they're already tagged as the artist, right?

tarrgon said:
The primary artist(s) of a piece SHOULD NOT be tagged with any contributor tags.

tarrgon said:
The primary artist(s) of a piece SHOULD NOT be tagged with any contributor tags.

but why, though?
if this is supposed to be a better way of having stuff credited why wouldn't you want to also include "redundant" voice/modeler/whatever credits for the primary artist?

dba_afish said:
but why, though?
if this is supposed to be a better way of having stuff credited why wouldn't you want to also include "redundant" voice/modeler/whatever credits for the primary artist?

The intent of the tags are to credit people who are significant contributors would otherwise not be credited normally. The artist is credited normally.

tarrgon said:
The intent of the tags are to credit people who are significant contributors would otherwise not be credited normally. The artist is credited normally.

I mean, we had the description for that already. and it'd arguably do a better job at giving credits since the deacription dosn't restrict whose credits got enumerated like this.

maybe if we're talking about cases where there's only one person who worked on something I could get it. but in cases when the primary artist is doing voices along with others or their models are included with other modelers, at the very least then it starts to feel like including them as contrib would make sense.

faucet said:
Actually, I think this could be positive redundancy here.
(examples)

I agree a lot with this. a bit of redundant, sure, but it's also just clearer and more consistent. if I see a good post with a model I like that I wanna see more of, but only artist is tagged, there will be a lot of cases where the artist is actually not the modeller and the modeller just remained untagged especially in this early phase where most posts don't have the tag yet - it causes confusion and requires extra digging to find who made a model in all the many cases it's ambiguous. we dont need to keep quoting the rule of how it's "supposed to be done" as if this 1 day old feature is already set in stone with its ruling without any possible improvement.

Shouldn't this be a put in a newspost? It's not a small potatoes change.

dba_afish said:
I mean, we had the description for that already. and it'd arguably do a better job at giving credits since the deacription dosn't restrict whose credits got enumerated like this.

That had been the way we used to do things, but quite a lot of people who contributed to artwork in that way were really unhappy about not being credited in the tags.
Now, they can have it both ways. A simple credits list in the tags, and a more detailed one in the description.

cinder said:
That had been the way we used to do things, but quite a lot of people who contributed to artwork in that way were really unhappy about not being credited in the tags.
Now, they can have it both ways. A simple credits list in the tags, and a more detailed one in the description.

I still think the tags would have more functional utility if they were applied regardless of who the primary artist is. at the very least I feel like if there's at least reason to apply the primary artist's contrib tags when their contribution to the piece might otherwise be unclear.

Maybe this goes in the bug-report thread, but I note that the "Contributor tag count" is not populating correctly on the stats page - it just has the string contributor_tags where the numeric count of such tags should be (at least as of the date of this forum post).

It could be that contributor tags are so new that it hasn't filled in yet at all, and after the next daily update of the stats page, then it will work.

kora_viridian said:
Maybe this goes in the bug-report thread, but I note that the "Contributor tag count" is not populating correctly on the stats page - it just has the string contributor_tags where the numeric count of such tags should be (at least as of the date of this forum post).

It could be that contributor tags are so new that it hasn't filled in yet at all, and after the next daily update of the stats page, then it will work.

That could also be related to all the other bugs with contributor tags rn which i'm sure the staff are already aware of

kora_viridian said:
Maybe this goes in the bug-report thread, but I note that the "Contributor tag count" is not populating correctly on the stats page - it just has the string contributor_tags where the numeric count of such tags should be (at least as of the date of this forum post).

It could be that contributor tags are so new that it hasn't filled in yet at all, and after the next daily update of the stats page, then it will work.

It's actually caused by an unrelated bug that broke the stats updating job.
Will be fixed in the next patch.

faucet said:
Actually, I think this could be positive redundancy here.

For an example, anybody searching dogzeela_(modeler) loona_(helluva_boss)^* is likely wanting to see any post that contains DogZeela's Loona model. In reality, they won't see them all because the official renders by the modeller won't be included in the results ...

You could, of course, search for ~dogzeela_(modeler) ~dogzeela loona_(helluva_boss) - but isn't this starting to get a little unintuitive? An average user would just expect the results to come up.

So far for pros I'm seeing improved searchability and less ambiguity from the data, while for the cons it's that the sidebar would look ugly with repeated tags.

The root issue is that we sorta have to decide if these are more for just attribution, or for actual functional tagging. This site has a really powerful tagging system and its not at all weird to expect users to actually use the tags, especially if this is such a prominently displayed tag just below artist. Unlike with lore tags which are at the bottom since they are special and aren't meant to be consistent. The idea is to treat these tags like how artists are treated, and people search for artists all the time.

I don't know if something like a search alias/implication could be made. Maybe a special supertype tag, which artist and contributor tags implicate?