Topic: (BUR) Reinstate gender count tags (1_male, 2_females, etc.) More groundbreaking changes to the tag system! Wheeeee

Posted under Tag Alias and Implication Suggestions

Aacafah

Moderator

Please don't revive 2 month old threads by saying ''I agree'' & adding nothing of value to the discussion. All of those points have already been raised on this thread.

k01 said:
...just "multiple_females" and "multiple_males". Or allow for a "solo_female" and "solo_male" tags to exist so they can be used together with "group".

Here.

k01 said:
It's currently completely impossible (as far as I know) to specify when you want a specific kind of group based on genders like that.

See also: The entire thread.

1056t

Member

Disliked these aliases since they were added, finally so fed up with it I'm posting in the forums for the first time.

All this does is remove specificity that can not be added back in with another tag. Using something like 'duo female' would only include a fraction of the results of 2_girls. Where 2_girls is any post containing 2 women regardless of other participants, with 'duo female' you get only results with 2 subjects where at least 1 is a girl.

to quote the help page for tag aliases "When a tag is aliased to another tag, that means that the two tags are equivalent."
This does not align with that idea, its partial equivalence that is being treated as whole.

It would be like if you were to forget some water in a quartz glass on your granite countertop and then say"wheres my oxygen glass of oxygen? Did I leave it on the oxygen counter?" since they all contain oxygen.

All that to say not only does this alias suck, it also goes against the intended use of an alias.

kyureki

Member

1056t said:
Disliked these aliases since they were added, finally so fed up with it I'm posting in the forums for the first time.

All this does is remove specificity that can not be added back in with another tag. Using something like 'duo female' would only include a fraction of the results of 2_girls. Where 2_girls is any post containing 2 women regardless of other participants, with 'duo female' you get only results with 2 subjects where at least 1 is a girl.

to quote the help page for tag aliases "When a tag is aliased to another tag, that means that the two tags are equivalent."
This does not align with that idea, its partial equivalence that is being treated as whole.

It would be like if you were to forget some water in a quartz glass on your granite countertop and then say"wheres my oxygen glass of oxygen? Did I leave it on the oxygen counter?" since they all contain oxygen.

All that to say not only does this alias suck, it also goes against the intended use of an alias.

Maybe I am misunderstanding what you're arguing for, but I don't think they should work like you're describing, because it could quickly lead to tag bloat. As an example, say there were 9 subjects in an image, 4 female, 3 male, 2 herm. Should this be tagged with all combinatorics of counts? So, 4_females, 3_females, 2_females, 3_males, 2_males, 2_intersex, 2_herms? That feels like it'd get excessive as the number of subjects increased, and especially if we need to include intersex in the mix.

Aacafah

Moderator

I broke down why we're so fundamentally opposed to this here, but here it is again:

[...W]e try to minimize redundant tags to prevent bloat (among other things). Gendered species tags are a better example.

Say you have a dragoness/female_dragon tag. Some users will only tag dragoness, & not tag female & dragon separately, which screws up results for people who are searching for female in general.

So, to fix this, you can create 2 implications; dragoness -> female & dragoness -> dragon. Problem solved? For this tag, yes. However, now people will come to rely on that expectation, & apply it elsewhere.

Well, we can add this to tigress, lioness, etc., right? Ok; what about horses? We're gonna need stallion & mare to maintain consistency. Plus, now other popular species without gender-specific names & people with a hankering for male tigers and herm dragons want in, and they're adding male_tiger, herm_dragon, etc.

You could either nip this in the bud, or repeat this process as needed; I mean, we'll only do it for a few popular species, right? So we decide to alias dragoness -> female_dragon, imply female_dragon -> female, & imply female_dragon -> dragon after first unimply dragoness -> female & unimply dragoness -> dragon, which needs to be a separate BUR, and repeat this for every gender & the most popular species. We've now gone from 2 tags & no implications to 7 (8 w/ intersex) combined tags, with each requiring 2 implications to their separated forms to maintain searchability, times however many species we decided. But hey, at least we're done, right?

Wrong; the more the popular species follow this trend, the more people will apply it to less popular species. So now, people are adding stuff like andromorph_klefki & expecting that to somehow automatically add andromorph & klefki; now no one's getting what they want, as people searching gender tags like maleherm are missing posts solely tagged with combined tags that don't have implications yet like maleherm_lobster, and vice versa for people searching species tags. Also, remember that species have a lot of chained implications; there's at least going to be stuff like male_feline or female_canine when it's ambiguous.

So now, we need to make proper implications for every single species & every single gender to make sure the vast majority of posts are actually consistently tagged for gender and species, the 2 biggest things people are searching for. Also, remember that some specifically formatted/commonly misspelled tags are already aliased, so we now need extra implications for those.

But once we do that, that should be the end of it, right??? No.

Because, now that the 2 most well-tagged types of tags (gender & species) behave like this, people will naturally assume most other tags work like this (hi again cub), and start combining random tags together at random. At this point, we have completely lost control of this circus; the server has to decompose a tangled rat's nest of aliases & implications for every upload & every search (hurting performance), some posts become bloated with tags, yet despite that people can't search consistently w/o having to add the separated & combined forms of some tags (which was, you know, the whole point of this exercise), new users just follow what they see & exacerbate the issue, and some of these new combination tags aren't ordered or labelled consistently (e.g. elder_dragon vs dragon_elder vs elderly_dragon vs old_dragon), so even the combination tags themselves are too inconsistent to be used when searching. Tagging across the entire site completely falls into chaos, and there's simply no way to fix it, since even the well-intentioned users are completely lost on what's proper tagging etiquette & convention anymore (and their efforts & numbers will dwindle as the site becomes unusable), & staff can't make AIBURs fast enough to keep up.

And all for want of a nail.

Or... you could just type dragon female & be reasonably confident you'll get every post with both a dragon & a female, & be done with it.

Hell, we have grouped tag searches now; you could do ~( dragon female -male ) ~( dragon female solo ) , and get specific with other search terms, etc. It's a worthy trade-off to have many consistent general tags over fewer specific tags; the only way to have both is to have half the community racing the other half to clean up their mess before they make another one.

1056t said:
to quote the help page for tag aliases "When a tag is aliased to another tag, that means that the two tags are equivalent."
This does not align with that idea, its partial equivalence that is being treated as whole.
[...]
All that to say not only does this alias suck, it also goes against the intended use of an alias.

While that's the primary usage of aliases, they are also used to convert problem tags (most notably combination tags) into valid tags. Even if we didn't use the alias system to convert combination tags to the most important applicable sub-tag, we'd just alias them to invalid_tag anyways.

If your position is that aliasing can only be used for synonyms because of the help page, then I'd remind you that you'd be saying one of 2 things:

Either that it's ok to have

sitting at the top of the tag list, because without aliasing them to invalid_tag, they would just sit there & for some probably still get used...
...or that invalid tags that people still like should just be made invalid, which means they both wouldn't get consistent tagged & wouldn't get properly implied or aliased to one another, meaning that the problems I described above would be even worse.

I'll see about changing the help page to acknowledge this other use case, but we're not gonna stop doing this.

Watsit

Privileged

1056t said:
Where 2_girls is any post containing 2 women regardless of other participants

Incorrect. 2_females would give you posts that contain exactly 2 female characters; other participants must be regarded as they must not be female. So if a post is focusing on two female characters and you try to search for it with a 2_females tag, you can still miss it because one or more easily overlooked background character is also female. Unless you're suggesting something like 3_females implies 2_females implies 1_female.