Topic: Have {{herm}}, {{gynomorph}}, {{trans_woman_(lore)}} and {{female}} imply {{femme}}

Same goes for “masc” for andromorph, male, &c.

And making “non-binary” a non-“lore” tag for ambiguous_gender when (the now defunct tag) androgynous is intended.

Using myself as an example (e.g. I trust I am not the only one), though I am bi (as my faves show) I have a strong femme pref, so depending on my mood I often string a bunch of gender tags together with ~. It would be nice to have them categorized so I could use ~ on other sets of tags I’m searching for. Ideally there would be a grouping option for the or operator, but such consolidated tags for sides and the middle of the gender spectrum would still make for convenient shorthands even in that case.

I’m making this request in response to seeing some discussion on BlueSky that, for the record, I do not believe is a fair representation of TWYS. I’ll keep the quoted folks anonymous given I’ve heard (and even one of the quotes alleges) there are some rowdy people lurking here who I hope will not put the effort in to search.

i finally got art uploaded to e621 and i'm "non-binary (lore)" but also tagged as male
…

I can get the post taken down and ask them not to post my work, so clearly they *can* take requests from artists. but i can't request to not be misgendered on the site as far as i know.

e621’s “tag what you see” rule was made to ensure all the insecure cishet dudes who browse the site to jerk off that they won’t ever encounter any yucky queers like trans women or non binary characters because they are not gay whatsoever.
…

The worst part about this culture of e621? You have a bunch of users, not staff or admins, who are hawkish about enforcement of this.

They make it their job to keep an eye on people who keep removing male tags from trans women characters the most.

It’s pathetic.

tagging this picture "mods are bigots and cowards" and "blatant transphobia" and telling the mods "hey I'm just tagging what I see, you might think you defend yourself outside this photo but it literally doesn't matter"

then doing this for anything they say with any amount of context

As for why I don’t think that’s entirely fair, consider the young tag, as an example. It’s absolutely fair for those who find such stuff distasteful to blacklist anything that even seems like age-play. It’s not labeling artists of adult petite chars as purveyors of such material, it’s giving viewers options that best fit what they are or are not looking for or are or are not comfortable with seeing for personal reasons rather than (im)moral ones like what one of those quoted is claiming. Nevertheless I do agree there is something there there with respect to certain poorly behaved users aggressively policing sex presentation tags, and I hope having three broad categories for masc/femme/neither might help some with that.

If there was an umbrella term for this, I don't think femme would be appropriate. Many women [female, herm, gynomorph etc] are masculine [ie butch, tomboy etc] and femme is a term used almost exclusively to refer to feminine-presenting people, usually lesbians, and masc is also a term used - prominently - for masculine-presenting lesbians.

Also, re: topic #56644 - feminine and masculine were intended to be legitimized as tags and have certain gender presentations such as femboy or tomboy imply them, but they got lost in the cracks somewhere.

I do think an umbrella tag for "feminine" and "masculine" bodies [ones with breasts or not, with or without feminine features, etc] could be useful. What to call it, if not masculine or feminine, would be the hard part. That, plus the fact that "masculine" and "feminine" are presentations that people can't really agree on universally. Many people consider a woman with a pixie cut to be masculine or a slender man who shaves his legs to be feminine, and it very much shows in how people tag tomboy.

bigotedsjw said:
categorized so I could use ~ on other sets of tags [..]

Ideally there would be a grouping option for the or operator,

???
( ~feral ~taur ) ( ~herm ~gynomorph ~female )

Why does the or operator need dedicated grouping option? The generic grouping seems to work fine regardless of number of groups, as in the above example.

Maybe I misunderstood and by 'grouping option' you just meant this proposed umbrella tag, but AFAICS that would not change searchability, only add a bit of convenience.

... I agree with others that femme probably should be ruled out as a name due to its specific association with lesbian culture.

_{^{dude, I'm so frustrated that people will just say that kinda stuff on Twitter and BSky and the like (or heck, fukken-- in comments on the site), but then just entirely refuse to use the forums to voice their concerns. like, we're all right the fuck here, if you're gonna talk shit behind our backs at least make an effort to actually communicate first. golly.}}

I think we've actually discussed these a bit before. I personally don't think I'd have any objection to having grouping tags for the three fem gender categories and three masc ones.

that being said, we can't imply a lore tag to a general tag, it'd cause conflict since some tags that are supposed to be mutually exclusive (for a single character at a single moment), and you'd run into situations where a post depicts, say, a trans masc character who is presenting as female either intentionally (crossdressing, drag) or unintentionally/passively (breasts are visible) would be tagged as both masc, implied from trans_man_(lore) and femme implied from female.

also, androgynous is specifically something I've personally made mention of before. mainly because, while ambiguous_gender works fine for characters who present androgynous and don't have any visible genitals, we don't really have a way to refer to any identically androgynous characters who just so happen to have their junk visible.

(also, the tag name probably shouldn't be femme, since that is also a term used in lesbian culture to differentiate from "butch", but the tag's concept is still fine assuming we can figure a non-conflicting name)

although... honestly, that all being said, I'm not really sure a change like this would actually solve any of these individuals' issues. the issues that most seem to have is specifically with the words "male" or "female" being applied to their characters. the only solution for that would be to come up with more neologisms to use to refer to the same body type categories, like we did with gynomorph and andromorph.

and then they'd probably all call them slurs, anyway.

It sounds like this person is a common case of the terminally angry slacktivist, and doesn't actually know anything about the site, given their allegations (especially considering many of the mods are trans, which should prove they did little to no research about the staff). As such, their opinions on the matter (as well as many others) can be totally discarded. There are a bajillion problems with TWYS and just as many as per why it shouldn't exist but this whole "oh, it was made to keep queer people off the site" goes to show they know nothing about the site, its user base, nor the staff. People are frequently banned for making homophobic and transphobic remarks, and in my experience pretty swiftly upon being reported. This problem is merely a side effect of using TWYS as a primary tagging system and has nothing to do with transphobia; it's just a dumb system rather than some mass hatemongering attempt especially as this site is gay as hell. I've been saying TWYS sucks as a tagging system since I got to this site and that it would only cause problems, and here we are having it cause problems again.

I second not wanting tags that are predominantly slang (especially subcultural and in-group slang) unless there's really nothing else, as these all end up getting changed to something "more proper"/"less vulgar" anyways. Also pretty sure "herm" was superseded by "intersex" a while ago.

It would be helpful to also just allow an exception to TWYS for genders so it doesn't keep causing outrage, this is the second time a character's sex being tagged caused a nuclear meltdown. This is already the case for lore tags which are the Band-Aid solution. Also I don't know how sexes are supposed to be tagged to satisfy this kind of case.

mklxiv said:
I've been saying TWYS sucks as a tagging system since I got to this site and that it would only cause problems, and here we are having it cause problems again.

Yes, TWYS sucks. This is much like democracy is said to suck -- every other option sucks even more.

Like, look at historical TWYS vs TWYK arguments (there are many in the forums -- whole long threads, not just two-post 'TWYK! no, TWYS!' interaction). TWYK has.. appeals to offense, such as the above Bluesky clowns -- these are the kind of thing admins need to be very careful about even looking like they might be catering to, because offense-mongers WILL continue to push the envelope when they see an opportunity -- , and appeals to canon (ie. appeals to authority : the artist or writer in question). TWYS has .. 'this is what we need to do to keep tagging approachable and searching predictable: Treating outside sources as a basis for tagging leads to tagwarring, elitism or obscurantism, and confusion. Our experiences as admins and taggers show that.'

On a historical timeline, we have moved away from TWYK quite consistently and intentionally, partly because user reports reflect the reasons above: TWYK tagging showed me something I don't want to see / didn't show me something I did want to see / me and like 4 other guys are tagwarring over the interpretation of this poorly-conceived tag. We still have some problem tags eg. 'crossgender' that are still TWYK...

Personally, I don't want any more of that noise than we already have.

Of course, if someone wants to propose an alternative system that was better than TWYS, I'm sure the admins would be happy to hear it...

But like, it would have to be an actual alternative, rather than, say, just saying 'TWYK is better'.

I second not wanting tags that are predominantly slang (especially subcultural and in-group slang) unless there's really nothing else, as these all end up getting changed to something "more proper"/"less vulgar" anyways.
Also pretty sure "herm" was superseded by "intersex" a while ago.

Intersex is a umbrella tag that you shouldn't tag directly. Herm is implied to it (as is andromorph, maleherm, and gynomorph, off the top of my head).

Generally we are moving towards more technical/neutral language, but nobody's proposed a good alternative to herm/maleherm yet. It's a shortening of hermaphrodite, which *is* a technical term.

It would be helpful to also just allow an exception to TWYS for genders so it doesn't keep causing outrage,

I'll reiterate: outrage is exactly what an admin mustn't buckle to. Reasonable people will get over it and possibly may bother to learn about our system -- if they want to make a *reasonable* argument then, .. they are welcome to do so. Unreasonable people, well -- definitionally can't be negotiated with, and so you end up obliged to circumvent them instead of taking their demands at face value.

Certain kinds of social media actors are easy to understand in that way, because they quite frequently telegraph 'remarkably unreasonable person' by the time you get through one single sentence they wrote.

This is the second time a character's sex being tagged caused a nuclear meltdown.

What caused the meltdown was ignorant misinterpretations of the meanings of our tags; this should be very clear in the quotes OP gave.

We have certain difficult technical challenges -- consistent tagging and searching -- that have resulted in the formulation of TWYS and our tagging ontology. The gender tags in particular have been subject to a lot of discussion, so they're probably almost as good as they are ever gonna get. The cycles of renaming them to more neutral terms is as much as we can do toward 'less offensive to randos', IMO.

If people choose to misinterpret our system as referring to some fantastical 'general definition of male/female/etc that everyone knows and no-one disagrees on', rather than learning about what definitions we use and why, that is largely on them. If they then choose to make ignorant posts on social media, that is also on them.

I would add, it's important to keep perspective that loud opinionated jackasses do not represent 'the opinion of the people' -- if we're talking about the internet, the average person's opinion is unknown, because they say either nothing (Lurkers are the rule! People who say anything at all are the exception!), or avoid saying anything remotely controversial. If it's real life, we know even less (opinion polls arguably serve to confuse the issue rather than resolve anything, due to poor survey/metric design and self-selection issues)

You could remove gender tags entirely so that it's just gender identity lore tags and people would still bitch and moan about TWYS and the way gender is tagged on this site because they don't actually care about gender representation or queer people in general. They just like to be angry.

There is no need to appeal to people who don't understand how this site works and aren't interested in learning. They should issue takedowns if they don't like the way this site operates. That is the best thing you can do if you dislike e621 for any reason.

savageorange said:
-snip-

You make a number of fair points. I don't see issue with following canon but I can't argue with most of that.

Female implying femme is tomboy erasure...

Seconding what others have said that body type ≠ presentation, and that even then, the proposed implication wouldn't do anything to calm down the xitter outrage machine. Those types of people will draw a trans woman as a hulking manbeast with a she/her pronoun pin and then accuse anyone but themselves of transphobia. If they were to draw their trans characters actually looking like the genders they're supposed to be, there wouldn't be an issue. Even if the character is (realistically) clocky, that merely warrants visibly_trans.

savageorange said:
???
( ~feral ~taur ) ( ~herm ~gynomorph ~female )

Why does the or operator need dedicated grouping option? The generic grouping seems to work fine regardless of number of groups, as in the above example.

I’ve been on this site for over a decade and somehow I did not know that worked. I feel dumb.

mklxiv said:
It sounds like this person is a common case of the terminally angry slacktivist, and doesn't actually know anything about the site, given their allegations (especially considering many of the mods are trans, which should prove they did little to no research about the staff). As such, their opinions on the matter (as well as many others) can be totally discarded.

I’m not sure if it’s them or someone else in the thread but I do not believe that’s their understanding.** They see the queer staff as pick-mes and — I think class traitor is an applicable term of art?, ala Stella Goldschlag or Blaire White. Granted, I absolutely disagree that’s the case, but they made it clear they’re not open to discussion. To quote:

also don’t come babbling into my fucking mentions with a three comment chain justifying this bullshit. Fuck all the way off.

Then goes on to screencap reply without redacting a handle to accuse someone of using a burner account.

Which is in line with what savage orange has to say about their ilk

Certain kinds of social media actors are easy to understand in that way, because they quite frequently telegraph 'remarkably unreasonable person' by the time you get through one single sentence they wrote.

While that particular OP is not acting in particularly good faith (which I failed to recognize* - sorry), I suspect others I quoted are at least trying to.

Further edit: *going to lend myself some grace for failing to recognize as who I am quoting is not just some rando nobody. They have well over 2k followers which is sizable by BlueSky standards and is followed by at least 20 people I follow, including a number of artists.

Even further edit: **found the quote, it was someone else

e621 has never deserved the fame it commands tbh
the TWYS policy is fucking awful and administration is actively transphobic, even with trans people on staff (who have to actually defend that as well)

they also don't care that site moderators will forcefully pedo-jacket artists with locked tags about underage characters, so no one can contest it properly

but you look inside and they're all just adults, drawn by someone who only draws adults

To which I point back to my original post to firmly disagree with the pedojacketing accusation.

bigotedsjw said:
I’ve been on this site for over a decade and somehow I did not know that worked. I feel dumb.

it's a fairly recent addition, Aacafah added it 8 months ago.

bigotedsjw said:
I’ve been on this site for over a decade and somehow I did not know that worked. I feel dumb.

I’m not sure if it’s them or someone else in the thread but I do not believe that’s their understanding. They see the queer staff as pick-mes and — I think class traitor is an applicable term of art?, ala Stella Goldschlag or Blaire White. Granted, I absolutely disagree that’s the case, but they made it clear they’re not open to discussion. To quote:

Then goes on to screencap reply without redacting a handle to accuse someone of using a burner account.

Which is in line with what savage orange has to say about their ilk

While that particular OP is not acting in particularly good faith (which I failed to recognize* - sorry), I suspect others I quoted are at least trying to.

Further edit: *going to lend myself some grace for failing to recognize as who I am quoting is not just some rando nobody. They have well over 2k followers which is sizable by BlueSky standards and is followed by at least 20 people I follow, including a number of artists.

Sounds like this nutjob isn't worth catering to, purity contests are never welcome (not to mention unproductive, and "class traitor" shit is no exception). If they don't want to discuss, then it's settled- no action should be taken.

The people drinking the Kool-Aid on this also seem to be mad about people drawing "underage characters" indicating this is indeed a purity contest, so now I'm going to double-discard their opinions. It doesn't really matter if any of these people are arguing in good faith if what they're arguing is measurably incorrect and overall batshit insane.

bigotedsjw said:
Same goes for “masc” for andromorph, male, &c.

And making “non-binary” a non-“lore” tag for ambiguous_gender when (the now defunct tag) androgynous is intended.

Using myself as an example (e.g. I trust I am not the only one), though I am bi (as my faves show) I have a strong femme pref, so depending on my mood I often string a bunch of gender tags together with ~. It would be nice to have them categorized so I could use ~ on other sets of tags I’m searching for. Ideally there would be a grouping option for the or operator, but such consolidated tags for sides and the middle of the gender spectrum would still make for convenient shorthands even in that case.

I’m making this request in response to seeing some discussion on BlueSky that, for the record, I do not believe is a fair representation of TWYS. I’ll keep the quoted folks anonymous given I’ve heard (and even one of the quotes alleges) there are some rowdy people lurking here who I hope will not put the effort in to search.

As for why I don’t think that’s entirely fair, consider the young tag, as an example. It’s absolutely fair for those who find such stuff distasteful to blacklist anything that even seems like age-play. It’s not labeling artists of adult petite chars as purveyors of such material, it’s giving viewers options that best fit what they are or are not looking for or are or are not comfortable with seeing for personal reasons rather than (im)moral ones like what one of those quoted is claiming. Nevertheless I do agree there is something there there with respect to certain poorly behaved users aggressively policing sex presentation tags, and I hope having three broad categories for masc/femme/neither might help some with that.

Except it is entirely fair. TWYS opens the door for the worst kinds of r34 users to come and astroturf the tags, and they ARE extremely hawkish about it, despite not actually tagging what they see

cardin_drakerav said:
Except it is entirely fair. TWYS opens the door for the worst kinds of r34 users to come and astroturf the tags, and they ARE extremely hawkish about it, despite not actually tagging what they see

People being hawkish with the tags is probably the only correct thing they said, the rest is noise. People do this and it's hard to pin a specific rule against them that survives scrutiny, it's hard to distinguish it from legitimate tag changes. Maybe tagging history could be used?

i finally got art uploaded to e621 and i'm "non-binary (lore)" but also tagged as male

wait a second. I just checked out the person you're quoting, and what they're saying... isn't even true?

from what I can tell they've only one piece on here right now, I checked all variations of their username, also no deleted posts or anything. the one post is from over a year ago and it isn't even tagged how they're describing.

what is going on?

(also it's really cool that on one of their Tumblrs they reblogged a post that has screenshots with blips, one with my name seemingly intentionally visible. that's nice, that's great.)

EDIT: never mind, there it is. this person has so many different usernames, dude.

dba_afish said:
wait a second. I just checked out the person you're quoting, and what they're saying... isn't even true?

from what I can tell they've only one piece on here right now, I checked all variations of their username, also no deleted posts or anything. the one post is from over a year ago and it isn't even tagged how they're describing.

what is going on?

(also it's really cool that on one of their Tumblrs they reblogged a post that has screenshots with blips, one with my name seemingly intentionally visible. that's nice, that's great.)

EDIT: never mind, there it is. this person has so many different usernames, dude.

What part of any of this do you think helps/makes your case for you?

mklxiv said:
People being hawkish with the tags is probably the only correct thing they said, the rest is noise. People do this and it's hard to pin a specific rule against them that survives scrutiny, it's hard to distinguish it from legitimate tag changes. Maybe tagging history could be used?

As is the rest

cardin_drakerav said:
As is the rest

The rest of what is what?

Let me make this clear; TWYS is the simplest & most consistent way we can make community tagging work. We aren't getting rid of it. If that's unacceptable, the site is open source; fork it & make your own.

Obviously people's genders don't match their sexual organs. That's the point of gender; we'd call them sex tags instead of gender tags, but that might actually be more confusing in most contexts. We created a new category of tags largely to respect characters' gender identities. If "just ignore visual evidence" was a practical solution, it would've been a lot less work on our part.

cardin_drakerav said:
What part of any of this do you think helps/makes your case for you?

it-- dosn't. I left it up with the correction in case anyone had read the wrong thing I'd said it in the brief bit of time that it was up. I admitted I was wrong because I believe that it's the correct thing to do in this situation rather than just hide the message.

I still would argue that reblogging the thing that Kayceg/rocmkii posted that had usernames left visible was irresponsible, though, and I stand by that.

aacafah said:
Let me make this clear; TWYS is the simplest & most consistent way we can make community tagging work. We aren't getting rid of it. If that's unacceptable, the site is open source; fork it & make your own.

Obviously people's genders don't match their sexual organs. That's the point of gender; we'd call them sex tags instead of gender tags, but that might actually be more confusing in most contexts. We created a new category of tags largely to respect characters' gender identities. If "just ignore visual evidence" was a practical solution, it would've been a lot less work on our part.

I don't personally take issue with calling them "sex tags," given they'd probably show up under the simple uploader (which I'd think most people would be using) and the contents within there would give enough context not to cause confusion, though ambiguous_gender would need to be renamed to ambiguous_sex for consistency. I think it would be more precise wording too, given the direction the site is going is more towards precision terms rather than casual/colloquial ones.

dba_afish said:
it-- dosn't. I left it up with the correction in case anyone had read the wrong thing I'd said it in the brief bit of time that it was up. I admitted I was wrong because I believe that it's the correct thing to do in this situation rather than just hide the message.

I still would argue that reblogging the thing that Kayceg/rocmkii posted that had usernames left visible was irresponsible, though, and I stand by that.

Only saw your comment post-edit. Life outside of this and all

mklxiv said:
The rest of what is what?

The rest of everything the "anonymous" person we're not naming (boy howdy am i seeing the utility in names rn) was quoted as having said.

They're right to complain that they were misgendered in the tags and that the non-lore tags CONTRADICT the lore tags when this is done. They're right to complain that while a takedown will be honored TWYS will be enforced, saddling them with a misgendering tag
Their third point is a bit wordy but you honestly wouldn't like it if it was done to you, so the point stands.

The HUGE issue with misgendering in the tags is that there's something called a "fursona". We all know what that is so I won't condescend. That being said, this does mean that misgendering the fursona is the same as misgendering the person behind that fursona, not just some character

If the lore tags didn't contradict the non-lore tags there would be no point to their existence.

cardin_drakerav said:
That being said, this does mean that misgendering the fursona is the same as misgendering the person behind that fursona, not just some character

We changed the code of the site to properly gender them while still describing, as accurately as possible, their anatomy. Your problem is not with misgendering, it's with recognizing their physical appearance at all. You're welcome to have that contention, but this is not the site for you if you cannot put that aside.

aacafah said:
If the lore tags didn't contradict the non-lore tags there would be no point to their existence.

We changed the code of the site to properly gender them while still describing, as accurately as possible, their anatomy. Your problem is not with misgendering, it's with recognizing their physical appearance at all. You're welcome to have that contention, but this is not the site for you if you cannot put that aside.

My problem is as stated by me. Not your "interpretation" therein

cardin_drakerav said:
The rest of everything the "anonymous" person we're not naming (boy howdy am i seeing the utility in names rn) was quoted as having said.

They're right to complain that they were misgendered in the tags and that the non-lore tags CONTRADICT the lore tags when this is done. They're right to complain that while a takedown will be honored TWYS will be enforced, saddling them with a misgendering tag
Their third point is a bit wordy but you honestly wouldn't like it if it was done to you, so the point stands.

The HUGE issue with misgendering in the tags is that there's something called a "fursona". We all know what that is so I won't condescend. That being said, this does mean that misgendering the fursona is the same as misgendering the person behind that fursona, not just some character

Their claims about the motivations of mods (that they were somehow transphobic, bigoted, etc.) and the incentive behind TWYS (that it was to appeal to "cishet dudes," despite the fact it's been noted for years it was meant to prevent common tagging wars) were absolutely wrong though, and quite frankly, unacceptable and baseless accusations. In fact I'd go so far to call them slander. I can conceive their frustrations and I understand why they're upset, but making these kinds of accusations without doing any significant amount of research and then littering them all over social media isn't OK. For the record, I also dislike TWYS, but the motivation behind it wasn't bigotry.

mklxiv said:
You make a number of fair points. I don't see issue with following canon but I can't argue with most of that.

We follow canon in a few cases. But generally the issue with canon is that it's too open to interpretation -- often even after the artist takes pains to clarify. Something like crossgender is slightly better because the thing that crossgender refers to is not an 'artist statement' or 'prose', but an identification of consistent visual characteristics across a body of work.

( This is similar to the arguments people make about 'Regarding panels that TWYS says should be tagged ambiguous_gender within a comic, we can see the gender is, say, female, on many of the comic's other pages, and so we should be able to tag female on this page too!'.)

The other issue is that the artist is not obliged to post canon information where it is accessible to everyone, or to leave said information up after it's posted. That's why I mentioned elitism and obscurantism.

mklxiv said:
Their claims about the motivations of mods (that they were somehow transphobic, bigoted, etc.) and the incentive behind TWYS (that it was to appeal to "cishet dudes," despite the fact it's been noted for years it was meant to prevent common tagging wars) were absolutely wrong though, and quite frankly, unacceptable and baseless accusations. In fact I'd go so far to call them slander.

I suppose you could say that, in that compromising with the type of cishets mentioned isn't itself deliberately being transphobic.
You're also ignoring the deployment of TWYS to uphold misgendering in the tags
Also arguing the assertion that they accused e6 staff of being bigoted themselves is extremely bad faith. I know better, you know better, we know better. That's not what they actually said

cardin_drakerav said:
I suppose you could say that, in that compromising with the type of cishets mentioned isn't itself deliberately being transphobic.
You're also ignoring the deployment of TWYS to uphold misgendering in the tags
Also arguing the assertion that they accused e6 staff of being bigoted themselves is extremely bad faith. I know better, you know better, we know better. That's not what they actually said

They did, though:

tagging this picture "mods are bigots and cowards" and "blatant transphobia" and telling the mods "hey I'm just tagging what I see, you might think you defend yourself outside this photo but it literally doesn't matter"

(unless that was a different person, in which case I apologize, lack of names isn't helpful)

Also, the intent of deploying TWYS here was not misgendering, we don't exactly have a lot of words to describe the sexes (male, female, intersex, etc.) and 2 of them overlap with gender so I don't know how that's supposed to be a compromise. How is sex otherwise supposed to be tagged separate from gender, other than the lore tag system we have now?

As for the actual topic of this thread, I think that just keeping a few text snippets around with your preferred OR searches would suffice.

Now on to the drama bit:
If you ask me, tags are for searching.
The files on this site are visual in nature, so in order to facilitate searching them tags should be based on what is visible (or audible in the case of video).
Also, being a public site and not a personal archive, you have to satisfy as many people as possible with a single tagging system and making everyone happy is impossible.

This site works on the 'tag what you see' basis which does sort of fulfill that criteria of tags for searching but in my opinion goes beyond what is necessary at times. It leans more towards 'tags are for describing' which can end up in a lot of time spent tagging things that are never searched.
For example, tags like 'straight' or 'gay' are useful for people interested in that sort of thing. So are species tags, body type tags, copyright tags... They are also useful for people trying to blacklist those things. However, tags to describe can get so far into the weeds that it's a bit silly in my opinion. Who is making searches like buckteeth white_stockings double_claw pink_nose brown_background? Some tags are so specific or so generic that they have little function in actually searching unless you already know the exact image you want AND it was properly tagged.
I still try to tag my uploads as per site rules but TWYS can be a drag.

Anyway. I don't mean to stir the pot, just wanted to think out loud I guess.

mklxiv said:
They did, though:

(unless that was a different person, lack of names isn't helpful)

Ding ding ding!

That one's on me. I'm referencing the bluesky thread directly and I should have caught that that was not one of their skeets

cardin_drakerav said:
Ding ding ding!

Oh, sorry then. I haven't seen the original threads or whatnot, just what's been shown here. I don't really use social media. Just art sites, Discord, and boorus. I have a Bluesky to be able to go and check, but I never use it, it's not suitable for uploading my drawings.

cardin_drakerav said:
My problem is as stated by me. Not your "interpretation" therein

You said:

They're right to complain that they were misgendered in the tags and that the non-lore tags CONTRADICT the lore tags when this is done. They're right to complain that while a takedown will be honored TWYS will be enforced, saddling them with a misgendering tag
Their third point is a bit wordy but you honestly wouldn't like it if it was done to you, so the point stands.

The HUGE issue with misgendering in the tags is that there's something called a "fursona". We all know what that is so I won't condescend. That being said, this does mean that misgendering the fursona is the same as misgendering the person behind that fursona, not just some character

You have also stated elsewhere:

TWYS has been deployed to defend misgendering

Taking for granted that there *are* some people who actively want to misgender..

I invite you to explain how they could possibly achieve that misgendering -- specifically misgendering, not mere generalized 'offense' -- (of person, or of fursona) by using the TWYS "gender" tags — which specifically are *not* gender tags.
(as opposed to gender lore-tags -- female_(lore) etc, which *are* gender tags.)

I acknowledge that our tag taxonomy can be confusing around this subject, and personally I would advocate for calling the relevant TWYS tags 'sex' tags. Nonetheless, my question stands.

braixenarchivist said:
As for the actual topic of this thread, I think that just keeping a few text snippets around with your preferred OR searches would suffice.

It does suffice, but shorthands would still be nice, even if they simply expand out to grouped OR searches on the client-end.

Now on to the drama bit:
If you ask me, tags are for searching.
The files on this site are visual in nature, so in order to facilitate searching them tags should be based on what is visible (or audible in the case of video).
Also, being a public site and not a personal archive, you have to satisfy as many people as possible with a single tagging system and making everyone happy is impossible.

This leads me to wish to quote another BlueSky thread by an artist quote-replying to one of the posts in my first post, and without comment beyond maybe author intent could be valued a little more, to the point it’s possible for certain character owners and artists to block specific users from editing tags on their works, despite this site not being a personal archive.

The thing that pisses me off so much a out this stupid policy and what clearly marks it as being entrenched in protecting the feelings of cis dudes is that tagging something as “penis” (which the site will force you to do if there is a penis) is ALREADY descriptive enough

They claim that it’s just straightforwardly tagging whatever is clearly visible and then heavily entrench themselves around protecting what is essentially a complete assumption and refuse to be corrected because they’re fragile little babies

Anyways this lack of control over what random cunts are allowed to call my characters is why I’m on the DNP list on purpose fuck e6

At least while I was on inkbunny if some loser tried to recommend a misgendering tag I could shadow realm their ass with one button. Losing to Inkbunny, the site with the functionally useless moderation, is a bad look lmao.

mklxiv said:
I don't personally take issue with calling them "sex tags," given they'd probably show up under the simple uploader (which I'd think most people would be using) and the contents within there would give enough context not to cause confusion, though ambiguous_gender would need to be renamed to ambiguous_sex for consistency. I think it would be more precise wording too, given the direction the site is going is more towards precision terms rather than casual/colloquial ones.

That does sounds like a step in the right direction to me

bigotedsjw said:
This leads me to wish to quote another BlueSky thread (snip)

Quite frankly, even just using "male" or "penis" isn't necessarily enough for me to find what I want, it will still give me characters with large breasts which I don't care about and don't usually care to see. XP Also as soon as you show off a character to the public you should expect to lose at least some degree of control over how people perceive them, I understand not wanting something tagged a certain way but the expectation of being able to generally control what people call things outside of that, justified or not, isn't really reasonable.

bigotedsjw said:
This leads me to wish to quote another BlueSky thread [snip]

I guess I will just have to disagree with them. Despite trying I have not been able to understand how people can care this much about how other people interpret their work, or want to limit the sharing of their art.

I respect DNP as I do TWYS but again it's a drag.

mklxiv said:
Quite frankly, even just using "male" or "penis" isn't necessarily enough for me to find what I want

Yeah, the 'decomposition of tag into individual anatomical features' argument has been raised several times on TWYS/TWYK discussion threads, and it just.. immediately gets ripped apart. Obviously does NOT achieve comparable searchability. Just thinking about the mechanics of searching for something other than solo posts is enough to see that.

bigotedsjw said:

The thing that pisses me off so much a out this stupid policy and what clearly marks it as being entrenched in protecting the feelings of cis dudes is that tagging something as “penis” (which the site will force you to do if there is a penis) is ALREADY descriptive enough

this is only true for solo posts with full-frontal nudity, the instant there's more than one character on screen the entire concept of "Get rid of the gender tags and just tag the body parts, dude" breaks down. also, it makes it totally impossible to tag androgynous characters since they're defined by a lack of distinctly gendered features, rather than the presence of them.

For the original discussion, I believe the opposition to that idea is quite clear-cut and the problems with them being obvious.
Using the femme and masc (essentially feminine and masculine) to automatically describe/be implied over certain sex/genders tags is not a good idea.
Characters may not have an outwardly femme or masc appearance (e.g., girly/tomboy, crossdressing, amorphous, disembodied_penis) and tagging them automatically on posts that do not show it would violate TWYS.

As for any arguments calling for the removal of TWYS, that is never going to happen.
TWYS is here to stay no matter what and removing it does more damage to us than it would fix people's perceived slights of being misgendered.
If they can't stand the idea of TWYS or can't even be bothered to personally engage in discussions such as this, then they shouldn't be concerned with using this site at all. That includes taking down their artworks as they see fit.

Now onto proper solutions, merging non-lore and lore tags together is an instant no-go for reasons already mentioned on topic #61592.
I do not believe rebranding "gender tags" as "sex tags" is a good fix because:

• (a) It can get easily confused with sex and other sex-related tags (e.g., ambiguous_sex sounds like it could be related to ambiguous_penetration) and;
• (b) It would still not address the problems people get for having the wrong sex/gender tagged on their posts.

That being said, I would welcome any credible solutions that does not add ambiguity to the existing tags and does not call for the removal of TWYS.

braixenarchivist said:
Who is making searches like buckteeth white_stockings double_claw pink_nose brown_background?

Me. This website is incredibly useful for hyper-specific shitposting purposes.

cardin_drakerav said:
clipped

Honest question. You seem very concerned with bad actors intentionally using "TWYS" as an excuse to misgender characters. But do you not see how TWYK can be worse? If it's only what's "canon" that counts, what's stopping anyone from making and uploading art of, for example, a character who's supposedly a trans woman but literally just looks like the man-in-a-dress stereotype, and forcing you to tag it as if it's a perfectly representative depiction? (Edit: Or another mistake that's also common and more likely done out of ignorance than hate; what do you do about a character that's clearly supposed to be a trans woman, but the artist insists that she's a "transgendered man"?) You might say that we could ban artists for acting in bad faith like that, but how would you know it's in bad faith? Personally, I see a lot of art of supposedly trans and intersex characters that makes me cringe from how unrealistic it is, but at least with TWYS the artists making that stuff can't shit up my searches by circumventing my blacklist.

bigotedsjw said:
It does suffice, but shorthands would still be nice, even if they simply expand out to grouped OR searches on the client-end.

I've thought about this a bit and concluded:

• Something like shell formatting might be ok, eg $femme in your example.
• These expansions should be included in autocompletion listings (that is, it should offer $femme when the user types $f) . I'm not sure whether that requires server-side changes or not.
• After the query is sent to the server, the editable text returned in the query box of the new page should be the NON-expanded text (eg $femme [..] rather than female gynomorph herm [..]). So a distinction between 'actual query' and 'displayed query' would be needed (obviously, this *would* require server-side changes)
• Constructs such as ~$femme should be explicitly forbidden/invalid. Not much actual utility, and introduces confusion about semantics. Expansions should be strictly an isolated word - matching the regexp (?:$| )(\$[a-zA-Z0-9_]+)\b, I think - that expand completely literally.

thegreatwolfgang said:

I do not believe rebranding "gender tags" as "sex tags" is a good fix because:

• (a) It can get easily confused with sex and other sex-related tags (e.g., ambiguous_sex sounds like it could be related to ambiguous_penetration) and;
• (b) It would still not address the problems people get for having the wrong sex/gender tagged on their posts.

I agree with b) (and would further say 'there is probably no fix possible, in that sense'). I'm aware a) is often raised, but I think the question there is whether the exchange of confusions is net-positive (ie. you end up with less confusion about the tagging system overall, or not).

The only thing it would be fixing is the terminological confusion of our gender lore tags being actual gender tags and our TWYS "gender" tags not being gender tags.

EDIT: I agree with dba_afish's case below. 'gender presentation' is a reasonably clear phrase. But it may be too long a phrase to enter general usage.

thegreatwolfgang said:
I do not believe rebranding "gender tags" as "sex tags" is a good fix because:

• (a) It can get easily confused with sex and other sex-related tags (e.g., ambiguous_sex sounds like it could be related to ambiguous_penetration) and;
• (b) It would still not address the problems people get for having the wrong sex/gender tagged on their posts.

That being said, I would welcome any credible solutions that does not add ambiguity to the existing tags and does not call for the removal of TWYS.

I don't think "sex" is a perfect description of the tags function either, they're closest to broad categorizations of a combination gender presentation and physical sex. with gender presentation being any one of:

• "mostly masculine"
• "mostly feminine"
• androgynous/unknown

and physical sex being:

• has penis
• has vulva
• has both
• has none/unknown

and the combinations of one of each of those results one of the seven standard categories.

savageorange said:
I invite you to explain how they could possibly achieve that misgendering -- specifically misgendering, not mere generalized 'offense' -- (of person, or of fursona) by using the TWYS "gender" tags — which specifically are *not* gender tags.

I decline as this thread begins with elaboration, and your own comment is in response to elaboration I have already done.
If you are confused, try reading (for the first time) the comment to which you have made your reply

kyuuuuu said:
Me. This website is incredibly useful for hyper-specific shitposting purposes.

Honest question. You seem very concerned with bad actors intentionally using "TWYS" as an excuse to misgender characters. But do you not see how TWYK can be worse?

No and you haven't made a compelling case for it either

cardin_drakerav said:
I decline as this thread begins with elaboration, and your own comment is in response to elaboration I have already done.
If you are confused, try reading (for the first time) the comment to which you have made your reply

I think reading properly is first incumbent upon you, rather than repeating linguistically ignorant arguments on the basis of speculative offenses by speculative actors on the basis of speculative mechanisms. If you think I have misread you, then explain what exactly it is that I have misread.

There is a difference between explaining yourself and simply repeating your premises. You have not displayed any understanding of how TWYS tagging -- the thing you are supposedly criticising -- works, and in fact, have said things that show either a misunderstanding or a willful refusal to understand TWYS.

savageorange said:
I think reading properly is first encumbent upon you, rather than repeating linguistically ignorant arguments on the basis of speculative offenses by speculative actors on the basis of speculative mechanisms.

There is a difference between explaining yourself and simply repeating your premises.

You presume too much. Your speculations are incorrect. I speak from experiences, wherein TWYS has been leveraged to transphobic, as opposed to the hypotheticals where TWYK might become an inconvenience

You attempt to discredit me with conjecture. Unfortunately, one such conjecture is that I am speculating. In this you are very wrong

cardin_drakerav said:
Your speculations are incorrect.

That may be...

I speak from experiences, wherein TWYS has been leveraged to transphobic, as opposed to the hypotheticals where TWYK might become an inconvenience

Yet you can't explain one instance of how that could actually happen?

Be serious.

savageorange said:
That may be...

Yet you can't explain one instance of how that could actually happen?

Be serious.

I already have. My bad. I treated your queries like they were made in good faith.
Or do you actually think I refer to instances of tags misgendering, TWYS hawks and r34 types abusing the very same system out of pure conjecture?

cardin_drakerav said:
Or do you actually think I refer to instances of tags misgendering, TWYS hawks and r34 types abusing the very same system out of pure conjecture?

I believe you think you witnessed misgendering.

But if your understanding of TWYS is not established, why should anyone trust any such testimony? Why should anyone whatsoever consider you competent to judge that?

(testimony that you have not supplied,... in other words, you have behaved in a way to demonstrate that you are not trustworthy.)

savageorange said:
That may be...

Yet you can't explain one instance of how that could actually happen?

Be serious.

This thread begins with quotes from someone to whom this has already happened. Stop being deliberately obtuse

TWYS is the only possible system that properly satisfies the main criterias that a user needs when using an art archive: browsing, blacklisting, searching. getting rid of TWYS would likely break all of these, and make the tagging system as functionally worthless as those on every other website that uses tags.

if you've gone to IB, or FA, or even a lot of other boorus and try to find an individual work that you know exists you're, nine times outta ten, not gonna find it. if an image isn't on e6, and you're trying to find it with just visual memory alone, you're fucked, and a world in which e6 lacked TWYS, you'd be fucked even if it was on here.

savageorange said:
I believe you think you witnessed misgendering.

So there is no civility with or from you I see

cardin_drakerav said:
This thread begins with quotes from someone to whom this has already happened.

So, should I take that to mean that if they looked at a tag name and took offense, you take that as an adequate basis to call it misgendering?

I understand some people do use that kind of thing as a criteria.

Personally I find that pathetic and intellectually contemptible, much like implying that someone who is trying to encourage you to behave reasonably and have some caution about the reliability of your conclusions is thereby uncivil.

It's a popular rhetorical move to make this kind of inference, even in areas that purport to have some professional self-respect , but still..

I affirm explicitly that these quotes demonstrate nothing in particular other that someone is offended and they CONSTRUE IT AS about their gender. You have done nothing to demonstrate otherwise. All the factual claims they make are questionable, and given the tone and the fact it's posted on social media, certainly should be questioned. Even if we accept their factual claims as accurate, they still fail to establish misgendering (eg. because it's not at all clear that they understand the meaning that TWYS tags are intended to convey -- the thing they purport to be objecting to!).

As far as I'm concerned, if you can't define your terms ('misgendering' is a really obvious one here, 'TWYS gender tag' would be another) and *show* how they lead to your conclusion, you have made no argument. If you refuse repeatedly, you show you are unreasonable.

Acting like the definition of a term is obvious and you don't need to explain yourself is at best a rhetorical deflection. It's actually normal and common to struggle with definitions, but avoiding them entirely is something that people will notice and interpret in .. certain ways.

If people aren't going to stop attacking TWYS, this thread will be locked soon enough as with many other threads before it.

Nobody is going to take your arguments seriously if you begin calling the site "transphobic" for following TWYS.
Either come up with a viable solution that people can agree on or stop your arguments altogether.

cardin_drakerav said:
No and you haven't made a compelling case for it either

I don't know how you expect anyone to work with you when your responses to even the mildest criticisms in this thread have all boiled down to "nuh uh". Are you even old enough to be on this site?

kyuuuuu said:
I don't know how you expect anyone to work with you when your responses to even the mildest criticisms in this thread have all boiled down to "nuh uh". Are you even old enough to be on this site?

Your case for TWYS and against TWYK is entirely speculative

savageorange said:
So, should I take that to mean that if they looked at a tag name and took offense, you take that as an adequate basis to call it misgendering?

I understand some people do use that kind of thing as a criteria.

Personally I find that pathetic and intellectually contemptible

The feeling is mutual, as that would be interpreted as misgendering by any reasonable person
I've already told you how contradicting ones gender in tags is indeed a form of misgendering, even with the lore tags (due to the fact that the tags now contradict each other), but now you're asking for that definition again. You're asking (in extremely bad faith) for examples, despite the fact that this thread starts WITH AN EXAMPLE! You've conjectured (wrongly) that I'm somehow arguing from a point of speculation
You've asserted (without backing up) that TWYS SOMEHOW averts tag wars when I've seen them happen despite/BECAUSE of the policy

You are infuriatingly obtuse and condescending, and you're clearly this way on purpose

cardin_drakerav said:
The feeling is mutual, as that would be interpreted as misgendering by any reasonable person.

In general I will look at unqualified claims like "that would be interpreted as misgendering by any reasonable person." with extreme doubt.
But perhaps we can agree that I do not fit your definition of "reasonable person", as I don't believe pre-committing to any specific definition for a politically-hot term is likely to lead to clear understanding. That's fine.

Suppose that TWYS tags attempt to describe, as dba_afish suggests, 'gender presentation'. Is this reasonable?
Then suppose that a TWYS 'gender' tag were used to accurately describe the gender presentation of a character shown in the image.
Under your interpretation, if someone looks at this and (regardless of their understanding of what the tag is actually intended to communicate) is offended, this is misgendering. Yes?

The logical consequence of that definition, under TWYS, would be the positive requirement to misgender every character whose presentation differs from their stated gender.

You might say "That's my point! That's what I mean by 'deployment of TWYS to enforce misgendering'"

But that doesn't remove the question of whether it is even sensible to use that definition of misgendering.
If you think that the relative merits of TWYS and TWYK should be judged primarily on a moral basis, perhaps that settles it for you. But doesn't the evidence in this thread show the admins' position on the relative merits of TWYS and TWYK to be based mainly on practical considerations?

In my opinion, if someone can add TWYS tags with no intent to offend the character creator or artist, based strictly on the visual characteristics seen in the image, and, as a consequence, fall into the category of 'misgendering', then the definition of 'misgendering' in question is one I'll gladly reject as unfit. My position is that definitions of a word which display the practical consequence of degrading discourse (eg. facilitating abuse by bad actors) should be consistently marginalized. I consider that a necessary social hygiene practice.

Hence I look at your talk of 'TWYS hawks' and think : yes, it's theoretically POSSIBLE to intentionally fuck with people using TWYS tags, and it's probably even been pulled off on occasion; but I suspect that what you call 'fucking with people' could be what I call 'using the system in the way it's intended, attempting to further searchability of everything indexed by e621'.

You've asserted (without backing up) that TWYS SOMEHOW averts tag wars

This is extensively documented. Moving away from TWYK is the history of the site. The evidence is available in any of the many TWYS vs TWYK threads in the forum.

But it's also readily summarized:

Everybody appealing to 'what is seen in the image, per the definitions given in the wiki' creates a shared basis for discussion. 'What is in the image' may be difficult to interpret in some cases, sure, but if there seems to be some serious ambiguity, that's what we have admin tag-locks for (we would need them regardless of whether we were using TWYS or TWYK). For the rest, the matter of dispute is right here on the site easily accessible for anyone who wants it. That's a standardized means of conflict-resolution.

The major point of contrast with TWYK is that TWYK sources may not be readily accessible (require an account, a subscription, or even refer to a page that has been removed from the internet); ie. there's a speed/convenience tax on just verifying that a single tag is correct/plausible. The same level of trust is hard to justify in these circumstances; clearly not just anyone can easily verify that someone's assertion isn't full of shit.
Besides that, there is also the matter of artist vagueness leading to tag wars; disputes on canon commonly arise[1] because people simply do not agree that what the artist said has a single obvious interpretation. This is not a problem TWYS suffers from. Of course since lore tags remain TWYK, it *is* a problem we have WRT lore tags.

[1] in general; not only within the furry community, but within all fictional media.

when I've seen them happen despite/BECAUSE of the policy

I could believe that; it's not like TWYS is without its pain points.
To be more precise, I'll assert that TWYS prevents more tag wars than TWYK, and causes less. The logic behind that assertion has been covered in this post, in this thread, and in previous TWYS vs TWYK threads.

You are infuriatingly obtuse and condescending, and you're clearly this way on purpose

You're welcome to point out how I'm being obtuse, but so far your points on that subject have uh.. the opposite of impressed me. In general my position is that very little is obvious, every significant element must be precisely defined in order to make a good argument; that tends to require a lot more words. So I genuinely do find your appeal to these quotes completely underwhelming. The best of them is still highly ambiguous about matters that IMO are central, like 'Does this person understand what TWYS tags are attempting to communicate? Do they care what TWYS tags are trying to communicate?'.

Now if those behaviours and standards undertaken in pursuit of clarity are what you find obtuse, I would just find that deeply ironic and honestly pretty funny.

I acknowledge that people sometimes find this stance (commonly attributed to programmers and engineers) infuriating, most commonly for the skepticism about obviousness. I could probably express it more tactfully. But I sincerely believe it is good and helpful to discourse as a whole, partly because I believe that humanity exists generally in a state of at-least-mildly-self-destructive vagueness.

I'm not sure what to say about 'condescending'. It seems to me to be one of the words that people use in contradictory ways, and so I'm not sure what behaviour this is supposed to describe. But I probably have been at least a little mocking, despite my efforts to rein it in. That might be related.

cardin_drakerav said:
The feeling is mutual, as that would be interpreted as misgendering by any reasonable person
I've already told you how contradicting ones gender in tags is indeed a form of misgendering, even with the lore tags (due to the fact that the tags now contradict each other), but now you're asking for that definition again. You're asking (in extremely bad faith) for examples, despite the fact that this thread starts WITH AN EXAMPLE! You've conjectured (wrongly) that I'm somehow arguing from a point of speculation
You've asserted (without backing up) that TWYS SOMEHOW averts tag wars when I've seen them happen despite/BECAUSE of the policy

a character who presents as entirely masculine and has male genitalia being tagged with the tag defined as "presents masculine, has male genitalia" is not invalidating their gender identity. it's merely a result of said character being perceived.

if someone doesn't want their character to be labled as they are perceived, then their stance is fundamentally incompatible with the functions of a site like this.

if we want to try to discuss renaming the lables we might be able to do that, but I don't think we're ever going to find any which are more satisfactory to literally anyone than what we already have.
if we want to try to discuss the merits of tagging these categories at all we can, but as with the previous topic, I don't think we'll find a solution more satisfactory for anyone than what we already have.

but TWYS itself is just not on the table and never will be.

eightoflakes said:
You could remove gender tags entirely so that it's just gender identity lore tags and people would still bitch and moan about TWYS and the way gender is tagged on this site because they don't actually care about gender representation or queer people in general. They just like to be angry.

There is no need to appeal to people who don't understand how this site works and aren't interested in learning. They should issue takedowns if they don't like the way this site operates. That is the best thing you can do if you dislike e621 for any reason.

Those who seek to please everybody please nobody.

Considering that e621 is meant to be an archive, and not a personal gallery, some people (like the previously mentioned "slacktivists") will always be upset when it doesn't cater to exactly their needs.

It's a shame that most of the discussion in this topic has nothing to do with OP's concrete proposal stated right in the title.

My 2 cents regarding that proposal is that there is a lot of potential for confusion since those terms already have uses in the LGBT community, which this site is objectively receptive towards.

My 2 cents regarding the cookie cutter drama is that no group of people is a hivemind, including trans people, and the definition of a concept as sensitive and personal as misgendering is not exactly the same for everyone. Even if the current system is not perfect, we can all acknowledge that it is at least an attempted improvement over the past one, and that many users are grateful for it.

cardin_drakerav said:

kyuuuuu said:
I don't know how you expect anyone to work with you when your responses to even the mildest criticisms in this thread have all boiled down to "nuh uh". Are you even old enough to be on this site?

Your case for TWYS and against TWYK is entirely speculative

You typically refute an argument by offering alternative perspectives/evidence; proving them right certainly is... creative? Btw, yes, I can see your edit history. I'm still not particularly impressed.

Ok, this has long since devolved into a broken record punctuated by non-productive snipes; that's enough of this.

cardin_drakerav said:
You've asserted (without backing up) that TWYS SOMEHOW averts tag wars when I've seen them happen despite/BECAUSE of the policy

This might be a difficult concept to comprehend, but there's a difference between reducing tag wars & eliminating them. It does reduce tag conflicts, because - as difficult to grasp as this might be - the vast majority of users have zero context for a post when viewing it.

They don't know Legoshi is a quarter Komodo Dragon, so they will remove it if there isn't another Komodo, along with hybrid.

They don't know that a 1000-year old loli is 1000 years old, so they will remove it & replace it with young.

They don't know that a character that identifies as non-binary identifies as non-binary, so they will replace it with their best guess based on their physical appearance, specifically, their primary & secondary sex characteristics.

They don't know that those 2 male characters that aren't looking at each other, aren't talking to each other, aren't blushing, & aren't being physically intimate are actually in a romantic relationship; they will just remove all tags saying otherwise.

Do you get the picture?

You're welcome to feel that we're exacerbating how often this would happen, but we didn't pull this rule out of thin air. As someone who actually handles mistagging incidents when they occur, I know that they're pretty cleanly broken down into:

1. Someone not reading what the tag is for (or intentionally disregarding it)
2. Someone using TWYK instead of TWYS
3. The occasional disagreement about what's actually shown in an image for ambiguous edge cases

The first 2 are solved by simply informing the user about what they're unaware of (& if they repeatedly refuse to follow our rules, banning them), & the second is resolved by voting & locking the tag. If we switched to the above system, there'd be utter chaos.

Even if we did use TWYK, you'd still have the same problems because lore is not a monolith; they will fight over respecting the original material or artist interpretation, AU or non-AU, the first in the series or a later retcon, so on and so forth. So now we have the few in the know, fighting those who know a little less, fighting with the vast majority who don't know or don't care. If you think that's a recipe for fewer tag wars, then by all means, go ahead & follow it; just be sure to keep a fire extinguisher handy.

You have been told that removing TWYS isn't happening, & that your disagreements are valid, but simply are not deemed feasible on this site.

You have been told that you can literally go copy the site's code & make your own e621 with blackjack & hookers, with whatever rules & moderation you want.

If you want to use this site, then these are the rules you need to play by. Speaking of, respectful & constructive debate is encouraged; picking fights is not, & at this point, I wouldn't describe your conduct as the former.

cardin_drakerav said:
You are infuriatingly obtuse and condescending, and you're clearly this way on purpose

Hello, Mr Pot; I've believe you've made your opinion of Mr. Kettle very clear. If you've nothing more of value left to share, & you simply seek to repeat the same points without responding to criticism of them as a vehicle for insulting others, let's just go ahead & move on with our lives, ok?