Asphyxia said:
The uncolored_fur tag isn't being used in most pictures it should be used in.

Those came after a thread about how base tags were going to be handled in the future. So their limited use to date doesn't say much at all when the tag is related to a discussion not much more than a month old. Looking at the number of images under just line_art alone, I can see the need for tagging uncolored instances of fur is clearly there. The question is if we keep the mostly redundant fur tag or if we go completely over to [color] + [base tag] like we already have done for a growing number of tags like skin, eyes, all the color tags, etc? If we go to color + basetag completely then uncolored_fur would be the only way to tag it. It's about consistency and planning a good system for where the site is going.

Asphyxia said:
Most pictures have a male and/or female tag, so one could say it's too generic as well. Fur isn't too generic, it's not on every picture,

It's not how often a tag is used that makes it generic; it's whether it is already covered by other tags that makes it redundant or not. Don't confuse popularity with purpose. male and female are not directly tagged in any other way than by the male and female tags. Fur and skin however are also tagged as fur (or skin) + color. So that means keeping the base tag as separate makes those images get tagged as having fur twice. That's redundant, but can be fine if it still adds something else to the search system.

When one of those two ways it's tagged as having fur in the image is 1, giving less information to the searcher and, 2, it fails to add anything in addition, then it [the base tag] becomes generic and debatable of why it should be kept. So, fur doesn't say anything that [color]_fur wasn't already saying, however [color]_fur says more because it tells you what color that fur is. Of the two, fur is redundant and [color]_fur is more informative. Why should we keep a tag which says the same thing another tag says, only with less information? Use of wildcards for searching all [color]_fur with *_fur leaves the fur tag with no longer any purpose even for searching all fur together.

Asphyxia said:
(*_fur can be buggy, as goes for all wildcard conjugate tags). If someone wants to see all kinds of scalies, marine life and avians, same story. Hair is tagged too, but it's visible on nearly every picture as well.

The buggy issue is actually pretty small, most results return without incident. But all the same it just needs fixing. The more complex the site gets, the more unavoidable use of wildcards is. The moment we aliased away the base color tags in favor of more specific color + basetag combos, was the moment wildcards became necessary and not just useful. Now they're close to reaching the point where that glitch is a real issue, because we just have so many tags now that need a wildcard for searching. I think it's a good direction for the site to go in, but it also means that glitch just needs fixing so that searching as whole can be that much more reliable.

And scalie, marine and avian are species tags, not the same as body surface texture at all. Confusing them would be TWYK instead of TWYS since plenty of furries aren't depicted with typical-of-their-species body texture, and it can vary from picture to picture or artist to artist how their body texture is depicted in an image.

hair is also a base tag. So the same arguments apply to it that applied to skin, eyes, red, blue, etc and that are now being applied to fur.