I noticed that some people use the tag muscular_male in conjunction with the male and muscular tags... It all seems like a waste of time to tag all three. Would aliasing muscular_male to muscular and male be a better option?

muscular_male implies muscular and male.

BlueDingo said:
muscular_male implies muscular and male.

I suppose I should have looked at that, but still. Why shouldn't we just alias muscular_male to muscular and male? The logic seems a bit flawed. I don't remember the last time I searched for muscular_male instead of muscular and male. Sounds like it shares the same logic as rule34.xxx for using the #girl/#boy system as opposed to group, solo and duo system that we have here.

I'm guessing it's to allow people to search/blacklist male muscular characters specifically. There is a muscular_female and muscular_intersex tag as well that work the same way.

So it's basically for people who don't know that they can use search modifiers (for example, male muscular instead of muscular_male) in their blacklist? That sounds like the website is trying to appeal to a very small group of people...

There's no guarantee that blacklisting "muscular male" will blacklist muscular males.

post #664530

This is tagged muscular and male but not muscular_male. Guess why.

Meh... The system surrounding this tag set seems flawed in some way, but I have no idea how to fix it... Oh well. Some things are best left alone.

The reason specific tags like "muscular female" and "muscular intersex" exist is because without them, finding pictures of certain subject would be aggravatingly tedious. For example, I enjoy pictures of muscular females, especially with non muscular men. However, if I just type muscular and female, I will get dozens of pictures of muscular men that happen to have women in them, since that is far more common. These specific tags make finding what you want much easier.

It also helps to cut down somewhat on tags used to search, allowing more tags to be used. It is more specific than muscular male while also implying that yes, there is a male in the image and a character is muscular. Makes life easier for those who know what they want to look for. We have similar things for overweight character tags, too.

I keep thinking about this and while I agree on the surface it sounds like an unnecessary tag, I couldn't come up with specific group of search terms that would find a pic with a muscular female and a smaller male. You couldn't do "muscular female -male" because then you'd only get lesbian/herm/etc and solo pics. So that kind of makes me lean towards maybe needing muscular_male and muscular_female tags. I don't think wanting to find a pic like that would be that rare compared to some of the far more esoteric suggested tags.

Unlike some other *_male tags that nobody seems interested in tagging, this one's actually tagged to a decent level: 20K posts. I see no reason to delete it.

BlueDingo said:
There's no guarantee that blacklisting "muscular male" will blacklist muscular males.

hsauq said:
Actually, it would. It'd also block everything else tagged with both "muscular" and "male" as well, including the example you linked to.

Problem is, hsauq, your way would not only exclude 'muscular males', but *all* males;
the point of how the tags and implications are now, is not to exclude all males, just the 'muscular' ones, you dig?

I probably should have clarified by saying not every image blocked by blacklisting "muscular male" would contain muscular males, which is what the example was for. My bad.

hsauq said:
Is lack of usage really a good reason to get rid of a tag?

It's one of many factors.

We can't have tags for everything. For example, it's not possible to specifically blacklist human males, or green-scaled reptiles. But that doesn't mean that we should add male_human or green_reptile tags.

It's always important to consider both searchability and the effort that it takes to populate and maintain the new tags.

Combo tag that's only been tagged for a fraction of posts is worthless for blacklisting, and nearly worthless for searching. There's always work to be done on the old tags, so spending time on new niche tags is a waste of time.

When someone proposes a new tag, it's generally their responsibility to get it tagged to usable level. Which, I'm glad to see, happened in case of muscular_*.