Now, I have not slept for a while, and my grammar is derp, but I'll try and explain my idea as simple as possible.

Right now the current tagging system works flawlessly.
A person who wants to see a fox and a horse having straight sex can simply just search for fox horse straight sex.

But - If that user wanted to specifically see a female fox having sex with a male horse, there is currently no way to specifically get those results.

What I am wondering is that if there is any possibility of making species specific tagging a thing. I'm not saying it should replace the current system, but more so build upon it.

Let's say that you have an image of a male fox, fucking a female horse. The user can then just add something to the end of said species tags, declaring their gender in the image.
So it would be something like fox=m horse=f straight sex
m obviously standing for male and f standing for female.

Now, if such a system was implemented, the amount of posts using this little system would grow exponentially over time, especially since we have quite a lot of good taggers, and taggers in general who would utilize such a thing. Plus, it'd be one heck of a tagging project. And other thing would be how unique such a function would be, no other site comes close to having such a system (afaik).

Maybe this is a dumb idea, maybe it'd be too complicated to even utilize properly without breaking the site, but I'd love to hear other opinions on this idea.

I like this idea. It would be a great way to help users find exactly what they're looking for easily.

It would also be the biggest tagging project ever, since every species will need two tags for it.

eg.
fox fox=male
or
fox fox=female

Why not just allow "fox / vixen", "dog / byotch bitch", "stallion / mare", " dragon / dragoness" and so on instead?

Xch3l said:
Why not just allow "fox / vixen", "dog / byotch bitch", "stallion / mare", " dragon / dragoness" and so on instead?

Sounds way, way more complicated.
And I don't think there'd be that many male/female pronouns for all species on the site.

Peekaboo said:
Sounds way, way more complicated.
And I don't think there'd be that many male/female pronouns for all species on the site.

Not to mention that there's no herm/dickgirl/etc terms for species.

I don't think the OP has a bad idea by itself. I'm just afraid that it will be hard to implement. All of these sex tags will need to be implicated in the species as well (fox=f -> canine=f ->mammal=f) and if there is a female fox with a male dog, the canine and the mammal tags should inherit both males and females "subtags".

Of course there will also be ambiguous_gender herm etc.

Following that logic it wall also be a good idea to have character-based tags, for example in post with size_difference stating who is the small one (fox=small), or even more specific descriptions (sonic_the_hedgehog=female=looking_at_viewer), you get the idea. It's a good concept but hard to apply.

Xch3l said:
Why not just allow "fox / vixen", "dog / byotch bitch", "stallion / mare", " dragon / dragoness" and so on instead?

This is probably the best way to do it: I will even suggest "fox_male /fox_female/fox_herm/fox_ambiguous_gender", "dog_male/dog_female/dog_herm/dog_ambiguous_gender", "mammal_male/mammal_female/mammal_herm/mammal_ambiguous_gender" etc and imply them all to their respective species eg, "dog_female -> dog", "dog_female" -> "canine_female". But this will require a LOT of work. At least this system won't mess up the tag search while we are implementing it.

Xch3l said:
Why not just allow "fox / vixen", "dog / byotch bitch", "stallion / mare", " dragon / dragoness" and so on instead?

Because etymology is weird and not always what you expect. There are also quite a lot of fictional species for which there is only one noun that covers both (eg. pokemon in general). Thirdly, herms, cuntboys, and dickgirls.

@DragonFox: It would surely be a huge tagging project, but you only need one tag; at least if you do tag-values the same way TMSU does: if a file is tagged fox=female, and another is tagged fox=herm, querying for 'fox' returns both of them, whereas querying for 'fox=herm' returns the second file only, and querying for 'fox=female' returns the first file only. This is accomplished by not jamming the tag-value into the name of the tag, but treating it as a separate property that any individual tagging may have.

blackest_vulture said:
All of these sex tags will need to be implicated in the species as well (fox=f -> canine=f ->mammal=f) and if there is a female fox with a male dog, the canine and the mammal tags should inherit both males and females "subtags".

I figured "general" tags like mammal and the likes shouldn't get affected. Only specific tags tied to the character would.

savageorange said:
@DragonFox: It would surely be a huge tagging project, but you only need one tag; at least if you do tag-values the same way TMSU does: if a file is tagged fox=female, and another is tagged fox=herm, querying for 'fox' returns both of them, whereas querying for 'fox=herm' returns the second file only, and querying for 'fox=female' returns the first file only. This is accomplished by not jamming the tag-value into the name of the tag, but treating it as a separate property that any individual tagging may have.

Ahh, cool. Thanks for the info. :)

Peekaboo said:
Sounds way, way more complicated.
And I don't think there'd be that many male/female pronouns for all species on the site.

Well... but you got the idea. For example, known pronouns should be used and for those genders that don't have specific pronouns (like Genjar, Blackest Vulture and Savageorange said), we should fall back to [gender]_[species]...

Obviously, this should apply for specific species (is "specieses" the plural for that? does a plural even exist?) and not include general species classification tags (mammal, avian, reptile, flora_fauna, etc)

For example, the tagging on a post with a specific species could be "fox female vixen ... " while a fictional-specific species could be "sergal female_sergal female ... " while at the same time not affecting classification, both being "fox female vixen canine mammal ... " and "sergal female_sergal fenale whatever_species_they_fall_into mammal ... "

Xch3l said:
stuff

Still think that sounds 10x more confused and difficult to do than the fox=m method. And I think savages' point is pretty good.

savageorange said:
Because etymology is weird and not always what you expect. There are also quite a lot of fictional species for which there is only one noun that covers both (eg. pokemon in general). Thirdly, herms, cuntboys, and dickgirls.

Before we get too deep into this discussion, hopefully someone with knowledge of the E6 system can weigh in on the discussion, would be nice to hear if this system could even be implemented.

Peekaboo said:
Still think that sounds 10x more confused and difficult to do than the fox=m method. And I think savages' point is pretty good.

I don't know if I explained it clearly but basically is what you mean (not disregarding Savage's points), just a teeny bit more worded and open to standarization while what you mean, as I see it, is more like meta-tagging...

Tag grouping is something that we've wanted to do for quite a while now, but there's just never been a high enough priority to actually implement (not to mention it is probably going to be fairly difficult to implement).

The basic idea is you can define a group of tags that are all related to each other, such as [furry_character_name fox female on_back raised_legs red_fur eyes_closed]. Then someone wanting to find posts that contain a specific type of character can look for something like "straight horse [fox female]" and find exactly what they want.

All I can say is that it's something that we definitely want to do one day, but I don't know when/if it's going to happen. It's just a matter of convincing the developers and management that it's something that will be worth the time and effort, that it would be manageable, and (most importantly) that it should take priority over other issues the site has.

Char said:
Tag grouping is something that we've wanted to do for quite a while now, but there's just never been a high enough priority to actually implement (not to mention it is probably going to be fairly difficult to implement).

All I can say is that it's something that we definitely want to do one day, but I don't know when/if it's going to happen. It's just a matter of convincing the developers and management that it's something that will be worth the time and effort, that it would be manageable, and (most importantly) that it should take priority over other issues the site has.

I'm glad to hear it's not just a dumb idea I had.
Let's just hope that they can be convinced.
The sooner such a system is implemented, the sooner we can start the biggest tagging project in E6 history, which will undoubtedly take quite some time to complete.

Peekaboo said:
I'm glad to hear it's not just a dumb idea I had.
Let's just hope that they can be convinced.
The sooner such a system is implemented, the sooner we can start the biggest tagging project in E6 history, which will undoubtedly take quite some time to complete.

Yep, posts are coming at a good pace! It will get harder to implement the longer we wait.

Mm. Many posts are missing even the basic tags, and this would definitely create a lot of extra work.

It does sound like an useful feature, but I'm just wondering... who's going to have time to actually tag them? When we can't seem to even keep up with the current tags.

Genjar said:
Mm. Many posts are missing even the basic tags, and this would definitely create a lot of extra work.

That's a bonus then, since it allows users to revisit old forgotten posts and add the missing basic tags needed.

Genjar said:
but I'm just wondering... who's going to have time to actually tag them? When we can't seem to even keep up with the current tags.

I'd say we manages to keep up with the current tags just fine, and there's loads of users tagging older posts as well. I don't have any doubt that it can just become another project that all us taggers can eat away at together.

Genjar said:
Many posts are missing even the basic tags

Tell me about it, a little while ago I started working my way through posts using the search order:tagcount_asc but it became too overwhelming for me, I'll go back to it once I've finished a couple of other projects I've strated just to break the monotany.

I don't much want to see gender specific species tags, but the tag grouping thing sounds good.

Char said:
Tag grouping is something that we've wanted to do for quite a while now, but there's just never been a high enough priority to actually implement (not to mention it is probably going to be fairly difficult to implement).

The basic idea is you can define a group of tags that are all related to each other, such as [furry_character_name fox female on_back raised_legs red_fur eyes_closed]. Then someone wanting to find posts that contain a specific type of character can look for something like "straight horse [fox female]" and find exactly what they want.

All I can say is that it's something that we definitely want to do one day, but I don't know when/if it's going to happen. It's just a matter of convincing the developers and management that it's something that will be worth the time and effort, that it would be manageable, and (most importantly) that it should take priority over other issues the site has.

The tag group system sounds amazing. It's a constant challenge with searching that you can find an object/quality/character/item/etc anywhere-in-the-image but you can't always find it where you want it. Some of our tag systems try and bridge that gap with varying success. Tag grouping would be a much needed improvement. Tags like female_domination could actually be done away with because [ female + domination ] grouped together would already handle it without the separate tag. I think it could be amazing, assuming I'm understanding it well enough. Is there any way to help it get higher up on the list of things to do?

Peekaboo said:
...Let's say that you have an image of a male fox, fucking a female horse. The user can then just add something to the end of said species tags, declaring their gender in the image.
So it would be something like fox=m horse=f straight sex
m obviously standing for male and f standing for female.

This is interesting, and could potentially work if we have to stay without tag grouping. But idk, seems like it might be beyond practical to try and implement it. It's a massive amount of tags to add and would effect every single image on the site. It might not be possible to actually pull it off.

Xch3l said:
Why not just allow "fox / vixen", "dog / byotch bitch", "stallion / mare", " dragon / dragoness" and so on instead?

I'm not fan of using those terms for several reasons:
1, It's a lot of terms most people don't always know the names of. Peekaboo's version is at least a lot easier to remember which to use for what because almost no memorization is needed for new vocabulary, it's just syntax.

2, most of those terms are reused for several different (not always related) species. Take a look. Sow/boar, well that's pigs right? Yes, but it's also aardvark, anteater, armadillo, badger, bear, panda, guinea pig, jellyfish, mink, mole, otter, pig, porcupine, raccoon, salamander, shrew, skunk, etc. And all of the animal gendered terms have this problem. Should female or males of all of those really be sharing the same tag? And how many people would even know that's the tag to use? This usually isn't common knowledge to have these terms in your vocabulary unless it's one of the more common ones like "mare" for female horse.

3, Some species gendered terms associations will be hard to break. People see "cow" and they think bovine. How many people would leave that tag on an image or let alone even use "cow" to search for a female alligator, camel, dinosaur, dolphin, elephant, elk, giraffe, hippo, rhino, seal, termite, etc? At least dolphin=f would be fairly straight forward and hard to mistake if it fits the image or not. Less likely to get confused for something else and removed. You can't stop people searching "cow" and expected spotted bovines with udders.

4, Not all species have gendered terms for them. Some species only have one gendered term, and the other gender is just referred to by species name. How would we handle that? How about species for which no gendered terms exist? Also how do we handle non-binary genders, because scientists and people in animal husbandry usually haven't bothered to come up with species specific terms for various kinds of intersex. We'd have to be making up names for a bunch of names for things because they don't already have one. It also wouldn't reinforce the gender tagging system we already have. Do we really want to play with starting over from scratch? *not excited that idea, to be honest*

5, A lot of gendered species terms are also used for other things. Joey, Jill, ,Tom, Tod, Jack, Molly, John, Billy, Jimmy, etc are all common names. Cob, Pen, Dam, Hob, Ruff, Nanny, Flyer, Stud, Drone, Velvet, Empress, Queen etc can all mean other things and would get confused. Cock means the sexual equipment; Pussy has the same problem. Bitch can mean catty gay males, anyone of either gender who's acting submissive, and/or females who are being assholes. Vixen has also crossed over into broader usage for decades and can mean any female who's sexy, or any female who's spiteful/quarrelsome, or simply any woman who is somehow enchanting in a mysterious/mischievous way.

Mainly, I think using the terms would be kind of fun in concept, but in practice I think it'd be more trouble than it's worth. So, there's that.

furrypickle said:
This is interesting, and could potentially work if we have to stay without tag grouping. But idk, seems like it might be beyond practical to try and implement it. It's a massive amount of tags to add and would effect every single image on the site. It might not be possible to actually pull it off.

I'm not sure why you believe peekaboo's suggestion is functionally different from Char's. Tag groups are a glorious idea, but whether you implement it via tag groups, tag values (my idea) or 'faked' tag values (peekaboo's idea, I think), the amount of data you have to add to make the system effective remains the same: the logical connection between eg. 'fox' and 'female', for every species+sex pair that is apparent, for every picture in the database which contains distinguishing sexual characteristics. And the amount of data you have to add to make the system function at all is similar -- practically zero.

I'm not fan of using those terms for several reasons:
1..5

You make a lot of good points here, and I thought of another one that is IMO fairly serious: using the specific terms for 'female of X species' etc is pretty definitely unfriendly to people who don't have English as their first language. That stuff is esoteric knowledge, not basic stuff you need to know to communicate about everyday events.

savageorange said:
I'm not sure why you believe peekaboo's suggestion is functionally different from Char's. Tag groups are a glorious idea, but whether you implement it via tag groups, tag values or 'faked' tag values, the amount of data you have to add remains the same: the logical connection between eg. 'fox' and 'female'.

Not so much that it would be different in scale, but in trade-off. Either way, it's a massive project. But Peekaboo's is more of a short-term patch until something like tag grouping is an option. But tag grouping has more utility than just this one use, plus it is the more long term solution, so investing the time and effort to add tag grouping to every image's tags would have more value. Between those reasons, I think tag grouping would make more sense for the amount of effort it would take to do. And I really don't think it's practical to want to do both, it's just too big to want to do this twice. So that's why I favor tag grouping if we can get it.

furrypickle said:
Not so much that it would be different in scale, but in trade-off. Either way, it's a massive project. But Peekaboo's is more of a short-term patch until something like tag grouping is an option. But tag grouping has more utility than just this one use, plus it is the more long term solution, so investing the time and effort to add tag grouping to every image's tags would have more value. Between those reasons, I think tag grouping would make more sense for the amount of effort it would take to do. And I really don't think it's practical to want to do both, it's just too big to want to do this twice. So that's why I favor tag grouping if we can get it.

Personally, I don't think it's practical to want to do any of them, because of combinatoric explosion -- "Your post has [equine female] and [female domination]? Oh, but it seems to be missing [equine domination]. And [trixie domination]. And [twilight_sparkle_(mlp) bondage]. And [twilight_sparkle_(mlp) lesbian] and [trixie lesbian], and [twilight_sparkle_(mlp) presenting], and and and." I wasn't even trying for anything remotely esoteric there, just searched 'equine female domination', picked an image, and started listing combinations that I thought people would want to search, that were not currently distinguishable.

The combinatoric calculations just for Peekaboo's suggestion are NSPECIES(3000+) times NSEXES(7 by my reckoning) times however many posts contain characters with apparent sexual characteristics (I'm going with 90% here, which is about 434000 per the current front page) --> about 9,228,794,400 taggings that need checking for/possibly adding.

I am glad to talk about these ideas because I find the systems interesting. But the suggestions so far do nothing to mitigate this complexity, which IMO is the most substantial barrier to adoption.

Sounds like a good idea.

savageorange said:
Personally, I don't think it's practical to want to do any of them, because of combinatoric explosion -- "Your post has [equine female] and [female domination]? Oh, but it seems to be missing [equine domination]. And [trixie domination]. And [twilight_sparkle_(mlp) bondage]. And [twilight_sparkle_(mlp) lesbian] and [trixie lesbian], and [twilight_sparkle_(mlp) presenting], and and and." I wasn't even trying for anything remotely esoteric there, just searched 'equine female domination', picked an image, and started listing combinations that I thought people would want to search, that were not currently distinguishable.

The combinatoric calculations just for Peekaboo's suggestion are NSPECIES(3000+) times NSEXES(7 by my reckoning) times however many posts contain characters with apparent sexual characteristics (I'm going with 90% here, which is about 434000 per the current front page) --> about 9,228,794,400 taggings that need checking for/possibly adding.

I am glad to talk about these ideas because I find the systems interesting. But the suggestions so far do nothing to mitigate this complexity, which IMO is the most substantial barrier to adoption.

Tag grouping applying to gender and species first and foremost. After that more complex concepts can be considered. How does that address the complexity in your opinion?

Sorry if someone said this already but, what about sub tags? Type in the species then gender like "Feline:Herm". You could also have gender use its own section in tags for clarity.

Hiatuss said:
what about sub tags? Type in the species then gender like "Feline:Herm"

This is basically a minor mutation of what the OP said. Not really much to prefer one way or the other.

You could also have gender use its own section in tags for clarity.

I am very much in favor of more tag grouping (in the sense 'these are body tags, these are hair tags, these are breast tags, etc'), personally. But I think it's a little OT for this thread.

123easy said:
Tag grouping applying to gender and species first and foremost. After that more complex concepts can be considered. How does that address the complexity in your opinion?

Not particularly. I already described that case in my post, where I pointed out that just doing species=sex tagging would involve 9.2 billion checks + possible taggings, assuming that 90% of posts have identifiable species and sexes. This would be a job larger than all current tagging projects combined.

Sex != Gender , which TWYS mostly cannot cover.

My comments on complexity were mainly addressed at the 'manpower complexity' -- how difficult it would be to get that tagging done with the people available in any kind of reasonable time.

Computational and storage complexity of storing and querying groups would be unaffected by group complexity AFAICS.

I have thought a bit about more complex groupings and concluded, if tag groups are implemented:

• groups should be unordered (that is, [A B] is the same group as [B A]) and unnestable ([A B [C D]] is invalid, [A B] [C D] is valid and so is [A B C D])
• groups should include exactly one participant; if there is a tag for the specific character, it should be included in the group, along with any adjectives that describe them and verbs that describe their actions. And possibly their clothing, but probably not any other objects they are interacting directly with (examples: book, table, dildo).
• other uses of grouping are possible, but I believe the association of a character (or identifying characteristics, like species) with all its characteristics in this picture and the actions it is taking, covers 95% of use that tag grouping would see, so it would be a reasonable principle to start with.

I'm still at a loss WRT determining a database schema that would allow groups to be space efficient and fast to query.
Possibly if 'groups' is an independent table that holds all group definitions, and posts may refer to one or more group definitions by id... Then the query could initially pick out the ids of those groups which matched the query, and select posts that refer to one of those ids, leaving the remaining operation : selecting those items which do not match the ordinary tags, as the current query does.

This is based on the assumption that we will have many less groups than we have tags (based on my 'character/species-centric' analysis of what people seem to want to query). It is still weak in that checking for membership in a relatively large set is slow in most SQL implementations I know of -- and more general queries, like [equine lesbian], would generate large sets of group ids to check against.

Hiatuss said:
Sorry if someone said this already but, what about sub tags? Type in the species then gender like "Feline:Herm". You could also have gender use its own section in tags for clarity.

That's an interesting idea
Assuming we're referencing the same idea, I think that's because a single tag (eg 'herm') can only be assigned to one meta-type

-
All of that aside, being able to search for gender-specific tags would definitely add more versatility and customization

If we could decide on what system to use

I've discussed the implementation of tag grouping / 'object identity' in TMSU over here .
Much of the talk is specific to creating a good commandline interface (something that is relevant to the e621 api), but some issues that e621 would have to deal with also come up : database schema, querying quickly, "what is a group anyway"..
For example the author of TMSU seems to view groups as like character tags, which could be an interesting simplification of e6's tagging system. Though not a complete one -- obviously a single picture can contain eg different sex versions of the same character, and it would be wrong to amalgamate those >1 groups into one 'identity'.

Peekaboo said:
Now, I have not slept for a while, and my grammar is derp, but I'll try and explain my idea as simple as possible.Right now the current tagging system works flawlessly.
A person who wants to see a fox and a horse having straight sex can simply just search for fox horse straight sex.But - If that user wanted to specifically see a female fox having sex with a male horse, there is currently no way to specifically get those results.What I am wondering is that if there is any possibility of making species specific tagging a thing. I'm not saying it should replace the current system, but more so build upon it.Let's say that you have an image of a male fox, fucking a female horse. The user can then just add something to the end of said species tags, declaring their gender in the image.
So it would be something like fox=m horse=f straight sex
m obviously standing for male and f standing for female.Now, if such a system was implemented, the amount of posts using this little system would grow exponentially over time, especially since we have quite a lot of good taggers, and taggers in general who would utilize such a thing. Plus, it'd be one heck of a tagging project. And other thing would be how unique such a function would be, no other site comes close to having such a system (afaik).Maybe this is a dumb idea, maybe it'd be too complicated to even utilize properly without breaking the site, but I'd love to hear other opinions on this idea.

Well, I had a tagging system in mind:

The system would work in groups of tags, with little note-like objects over certain areas of the picture, like the symbols on a map:----------------------------
|..........................|
|..........................|
|...............A..........|
|..........................|
|..........................|
|......B...................|
|..........................|
|..........................|
|..........................|
----------------------------Forgive me for the crappy ASCII artA
Tag 1
Tag 2
Tag 3
Tag NB
Tag 1
Tag 2
Tag 3
Tag NHow one would search using this system would be like using Google, in that you put tags that have to be belonging to the same tag group inside quote marks."fox male" would only display results that have at least one tag group that contains both the fox tag and the male tag.

EDIT: Been suggested, nevermind.