I've been going through the equines to do bulk feral/anthro/human(oid) tagging and I've hit a bit of a wall. Even after checking the forum search, dusty wiki pages, gauging against similar posts... I just can't figure out what to do with the damn centaurs.

Some of them seem better off tagged as anthro:

post #289496

While some might fall under anthro or feral:

post #151892 post #496876

While others...I'm not really sure. Feral+humanoid maybe?

post #549829

I've been avoiding tagging them for the moment because they don't really fit well into any category, even when you take it on a case-by-case basis. I would think some of them might need to be tagged feral+anthro or feral+humanoid since they seem to fall into both.

If there isn't a consensus I'd like to gather some opinions on this and see if we can come up with a reasonable solution.

What about just the taur tag on its own? I feel like it would be the most fitting, at least better than combining feral+anthro which are kinda sorta mutually exclusive.

Yeah tagging feral+anthro would mess up the search, taur is the right tag.

Tokaido said:
What about just the taur tag on its own? I feel like it would be the most fitting, at least better than combining feral+anthro which are kinda sorta mutually exclusive.

I didn't think that combining them seemed like the right answer. It would be like tagging something male+female instead of [insert intersex term here].

But do you feel that centaur->taur+feral or taur+feral is ever warranted?

Either way, I'll put "lightly sort the centaurs from the taurs" on my list then, thanks.

parasprite said:
But do you feel that centaur->taur+feral or taur+feral is ever warranted?

I don't think so. ...maybe in some very rare cases, but I couldn't find any examples.

If the taur has hands, it's generally not feral enough. And if it doesn't have humanoid torso, it should usually be tagged as feral + multi_limb instead of taur.

I'd say taurs are in the gray area between ferals and anthros, because they have aspects of both. If they were gender tags, taurs would be intersex compared to males and females. I think it best to just tag them taur and not bother with feral and anthro tags unless there's a traditional feral or anthro in the picture with them.

semi-anthro

We decided against using that, since it'd mean we'd have to create tags such as anthro_on_semi-anthro, etc. Plus it's already hard enough to pigeonhole pics into anthro and feral, and adding a third one into the mix would only make it harder: where's the exact line between anthro and semi-anthro, or semi-anthro and feral?

Wait, wasn't anthro supposed to to only be used for certain situations anyway?

Pictures with both feral and anthros, if I remember right.

Random said:
Wait, wasn't anthro supposed to to only be used for certain situations anyway?

Pictures with both feral and anthros, if I remember right.

Hm. Well that would reduce the tagging backlog, but doesn't that make 'anthro -feral' a nonsensical search, while 'feral -anthro' would be a a sensible search? How do you make that intuitive?

Random said:
Wait, wasn't anthro supposed to to only be used for certain situations anyway?

That was years ago.
We started tagging them after noticing that there's too many categories (and too much non-furry content) for '-feral -human' to work for finding anthros.

Genjar said:
We decided against using that, since it'd mean we'd have to create tags such as anthro_on_semi-anthro, etc.

What's wrong with doing that?

Plus it's already hard enough to pigeonhole pics into anthro and feral, and adding a third one into the mix would only make it harder:

Harder for what/whom? Why is it harder? Who feels like that?

where's the exact line between anthro and semi-anthro, or semi-anthro and feral?

Who knows; not really relevant to having a tag for it in the first place, is it?

-
I've said it multiple times before, and I will say it again:
When people deliberately merge/remove tags with valid uses for reasons such as efficiency etc, and use multiple tags instead of creating new tags for them, things get harder for everybody involved (except maybe the taggers and such, since they have less things to populate), and everyone now has one way less to narrow their searches

Maybe we should alias all the tags to furry and not_furry? That would make things really simple and efficient

titanmelon said:
Who knows; not really relevant to having a tag for it in the first place, is it?

Of course it's relevant.
We shouldn't add tags that cannot be defined, searched for, or tagged consistently. The wiki definition of semi-anthro is extremely ambiguous, and many of the characters tagged as semi-anthro are obvious anthros or ferals.

If the tag can't even be properly defined, it's useless for searches. New tags should only be added if they're actually useful and don't break the existing tags.

Genjar said:
Of course it's relevant.
We shouldn't add tags that cannot be defined, searched for, or tagged consistently. The wiki definition of semi-anthro is extremely ambiguous, and many of the characters tagged as semi-anthro are obvious anthros or ferals.

If the tag can't even be properly defined, it's useless for searches. New tags should only be added if they're actually useful and don't break the existing tags.

I might have to rethink usage of that tag then (either in omitting it or attempting an update to the wiki). I've played with the tag a little but I'm not yet very committed one way or the other.

I really only have difficulties with established almost-but-not-quite feral characters (eg, cartoons, mlp), particularly when they are slightly more anthro than they are usually depicted. The following are good examples of this (admittedly, most I'd probably tag anthro anyways):

post #498986 Torso, shoulders, neck, and the bra too I suppose

post #549173 Neck, position of arms, pose

post #549109 Pose and torso (a solid 2 on the chart below)

And a chart that many of you have probably seen before (as a talking point):

post #319156 (The show tends to fall somewhere between 1 and 2)

Here, being mostly show-accurate is tagged as feral while the more traditional "furry-like" artwork (post #540563) is tagged anthro. Either way, this is obviously not how things are supposed to be tagged here. The downside is if most of these were retagged as anthro, we'd lose what became the "show-accurate" tag (disclaimer: I'm probably somewhat biased here since I don't care for most "furry-like" anthro).

It doesn't seem to apply much outside of mlp/cartoons even if it were clearly defined. Personally, I don't find it to be useful as outright replacing feral or anthro, but I don't think it helps much either.

Genjar said:
Of course it's relevant.

If the tag can't even be properly defined, it's useless for searches. New tags should only be added if they're actually useful and don't break the existing tags.

I definitely agree with you about that. Consistency and utility are very important

We shouldn't add tags that cannot be defined, searched for, or tagged consistently.

Then by that logic we should get rid of tags like cute, nightmare fuel, drama, and all the other tags that show even a hint of ambiguity

The wiki definition of semi-anthro is extremely ambiguous

I was under the impression that the wiki is not the final authority on anything, because it's based upon user input; not the other way around

and many of the characters tagged as semi-anthro are obvious anthros or ferals.

Why is it obvious? What criteria are you using for this obviousness? How many other people think it's obvious? Do they represent the site as a whole?

-

Ok

Will you slap a couple separate tags on these and say it's better and more efficient than have a separate tag altogether?

I really don't think it's very fair to other users to have to fight for being able to find searchable content more easily because a handful of users don't think it's relevant enough or offer no alternative that's not as accessible

Is this what it takes just to have a new tag in use that active users don't use?

Let's put it this way: trying to add an another tag between anthro and feral means that we'd have to check everything that's currently tagged with those and change those so that they don't overlap with the new tag.

And that's just about all images on the site. Nope, let's not do that.

Semi-anthro should be invalidated asap, as discussed in forum #138155.

Genjar said:
Let's put it this way: trying to add an another tag between anthro and feral means that we'd have to check everything that's currently tagged with those and change those so that they don't overlap with the new tag.

And that's just about all images on the site. Nope, let's not do that.

Semi-anthro should be invalidated asap, as discussed in forum #138155.

...Did you even read anything I just typed in those posts?

OK, it's aliased. What then? What will you use for the above examples?

Why are you so determined to polarize everything into neat categories? Because it's less work? Isn't that missing the entire point of having tags in the first place?

titanmelon said:
...Did you even read anything I just typed in those posts?

OK, it's aliased. What then? What will you use for the above examples?

Why are you so determined to polarize everything into neat categories? Because it's less work? Isn't that missing the entire point of having tags in the first place?

Here's what we have right now:

Anthro-------------------------X-------------------------Feral

The X is the part where we are trying to define with a tag. This is the vague part. The part that is hard to place either way.

And here's what happens when you add semi-anthro into the mix:

Anthro-----------------X--semi-anthro--X-----------------Feral

Now instead of one place of ambiguity, we now have two. Two ambiguous points that actually have more posts within it than the one ambiguous point we had before. Two points that will be even fuzzier to define than the semi-anthro tag itself.

Really what we need to ask is not "what is semi-anthro" but "what isn't semi-anthro". If you can define that in a way that the majority of the tags will end up in the right place we might have something, but until then this tag isn't clear enough to outright replace feral and anthro tags. For now it's a bit of a novelty.

Personally, I only find the tag useful for sequestering borderline cases until I can deal with them later, in which case a tag like ambiguous_furry would probably be more what we are looking for since it's defined at the onset as being ambiguous rather than being "halfway between hybrid and something else". Furthermore, it can remain that way without affecting the already well-established tags.

Also, fuck everything about tagging Pokemon. >.>

So, your reasoning for not having a middle tag between anthro and feral, is...because there could be more ambiguous points between the 3?

That's like saying we shouldn't have questionable ratings because there could be something between safe and questionable, and questionable and explicit

(which is true to a point, but that's a discussion for a different topic)

titanmelon said:
...Did you even read anything I just typed in those posts?

OK, it's aliased. What then? What will you use for the above examples?

Why are you so determined to polarize everything into neat categories? Because it's less work? Isn't that missing the entire point of having tags in the first place?

I think that part of the point genjar is trying to make is that adding stages between tags like this isn't going to work out very well. Semi-anthro is a hard tag to properly use, and though it does have some cases where it would work well, like your example images, most cases are fairly cut and dry anthro or feral. And then some cases are very subjective and hard to figure out. YOU may feel like its obvious when and when not to use a tag like that, but not everyone else does, including genjar and myself at the least. If two forum users don't think the tag makes sense, how many casual users will? Furthermore, if we implement something like semi anthro, where do we draw the line? Should we have more tags like 75%_anthro_25%_feral and 25%_anthro_75%_feral as well? Maybe feral_with_human_expression or anthro_but_walking_on_all_fours? It just seems like unnecessary and useless granularity to me.

If we introduce a confusing tag like that, it will require a lot of work to change, then maintain, because it's GOING to be tagged improperly and often. Unlike what you said, I don't think that the main purpose of tags is to add extra busy work for taggers, I think that its to provide concise search options, and I don't think semi-anthro is concise enough to be useful.

If some of the admins or a large number of people agreed with a tag change that I initially disagreed with them I would be willing to change my mind, seriously reconsider my opinion, and at the very least bite my tongue. But that doesn't seen to be the case, and I am still against using semi-anthro

Tokaido said:
If some of the admins or a large number of people agreed with a tag change that I initially disagreed with them I would be willing to change my mind, seriously reconsider my opinion, and at the very least bite my tongue. But that doesn't seen to be the case, and I am still against using semi-anthro

Of course it's not the case, because it's not a popular tag option, and that's exactly why it should be used instead of getting lost in the countless posts of anthro and feral

titanmelon said:
Of course it's not the case, because it's not a popular tag option, and that's exactly why it should be used instead of getting lost in the countless posts of anthro and feral

That's a fair point, having a slightly more niche tag could be OK. I wouldn't necessarily be against it. But I'm still not sold on the term semi-anthro, it doesn't make sense to me. I don't have a counter suggestion though :/

How about making semi-anthro additional, instead of exclusive?
That way we effectively remove the X, and even add a way to steer in what direction the character leans.

But we should totally try to find a better name, the definition of anthro already says that they are semi-human, making the tag semi-semi-human is strange at the very least.

NotMeNotYou said:
How about making semi-anthro additional, instead of exclusive?

As long as it doesn't mess up the current tags, sure.
I've been thinking for months that we probably should have some tag for images such as this:

post #332156

Almost hundred percent feral, but with a single feature that's 'out of place', so to speak. I haven't been able to come up with a good collective name for those, though.

Another possibility would be to add a new subtag for feral. Something like fully_feral (but with a better name), implicated to feral and only tagged for creatures that are clearly feral animals with absolutely no degree of anthrofication. For example, MLP characters would never get that tag. That would help the users narrow down their searches.

NotMeNotYou said:
How about making semi-anthro additional, instead of exclusive?
That way we effectively remove the X, and even add a way to steer in what direction the character leans.

But we should totally try to find a better name, the definition of anthro already says that they are semi-human, making the tag semi-semi-human is strange at the very least.

ones whose nonhuman-to-human appearance ratio rates about 45% to 75%.

I don't mean any offense to the person who wrote that, but wow is that ridiculously unhelpful for tagging.

I'm going to poke at it a bit sometime tomorrow (don't worry, I'm not going to try to redefine it or edit the text that is already there without a serious discussion and approval. This is too important of a tag to screw around with).

Genjar said:
As long as it doesn't mess up the current tags, sure.
I've been thinking for months that we probably should have some tag for images such as this:

post #332156

Almost hundred percent feral, but with a single feature that's 'out of place', so to speak. I haven't been able to come up with a good collective name for those, though.

Another possibility would be to add a new subtag for feral. Something like fully_feral (but with a better name), implicated to feral and only tagged for creatures that are clearly feral animals with absolutely no degree of anthrofication. For example, MLP characters would never get that tag. That would help the users narrow down their searches.

Man I keep getting ideas at that and then going "No that's stupid." A lot of them involve Mini- or Micro- as a suffix, though.
What about out-of-place-anatomy, or OOPAnat? Then again that could cover just about everything.