Prelude

Now, before I start, I'd like to clarify that this is in no way proposing a rule for mods to enforce, it's just a call to action for something we as the e621 community can do to make searches easier.

The proposal

So, TWYS is under fire again. For the most part the discussion is going in the same direction it always does, with people yelling at the mods and other people yelling back. But I personally think we're overlooking a good solution. I'd like to propose to the e621 community that we start tagging lore tags in the description.

What would that mean?

'Lore tags' are tags that would not be tagged under TWYS but would be tagged under TWYK(tag what you know). For example, let's take a recent post featuring two canonically male characters, but is tagged male/female.

post #1546674

Whether or not you think this post should be tagged male/female is irrelevant. The point is that under e621 rules, it is tagged as male/female. But if one were to click on the post, you would notice the description has tags in it, specifically these ones:

Lore tags:
lore_male/male
lore_girly
lore_anal_penetration
lore_anal

So, what are these tags? These tags are tags that would be considered missing if we used a TWYK system, and my proposal is for users to start doing this every time they find a post where TWYS interferes with the lore of the characters.

Why would this be useful?

Currently, if you want to search for girly characters, characters that appear too feminine will be excluded from your search. However, e621's search engine is quite powerful, meaning if people tag descriptions properly, you can find these posts by searching ~girly ~desc:lore_girly, giving you any posts that either appear girly to TWYS or are canonically girly characters. Girly can be replaced with any tag you may wish.

How do I tag these?

Since standardization is the only way to make this type of thing would work, here are some baselines to follow:

• Start your lore tags with 'lore_'
• Currently, description searching has a bug that causes searching for multiple instances of words to act as if you were using ~, this is a good way to make sure people find posts that are tagged rather than descriptions that simply contain the word 'girly'.
• Only use tags already in the default tagging system.
• Inventing new tags would just make things even more complicated. If you want to suggest a new tag, make a forum post for it.
• Always_use_underscores_instead_of_spaces_for_tags
• The search engine will count multiple words as separate tags unless you use underscores, this goes for tags in descriptions too.

The issues

Now obviously, this is far from perfect. For starters, moderators don't actually monitor descriptions at the moment, so we would be on our own for this. Secondly, as mentioned above, searching for keywords in descriptions has an odd bug that only allows for one list of keywords at a time, so no searching for multiple tags. Thirdly, not everyone will know about this. However, tagging enough posts will get people curious about why those tags are there, and eventually more people will learn how to search for them.

The discussion

With the proposal out in the open, let's discuss it! Is there something I missed? Do you hate that I'm proposing an actual solution because it stops you from yelling at the mods? Do you think this won't help much? How much tagging should be done in the description? This is a place to have those conversations. All opinions are welcome. (just like, don't be a dick.)

Seems like an elegant enough solution

I've personally never had any stakes in this discussion, but it does get really annoying seeing threads about the issue popping up all the time (the amount of snark that both sides bring to them is also really bad) so this gets a +1 from me, I can't really think of a way to improve on the idea without making changes to the current systems

This again?

IMO a solution of this general nature is the only way we're likely to move forward WRT things that are too ambiguous to reliably handle with TWYS.

However, to my mind the most pressing problem is not the precise choice of protocol, but how to get people to adopt it. One idea on that front is for support to be incorporated into a userscript like E6Extend. Something like, when editing, 'Split the Description field on the string Lore_tags:\n, place the first result of this into the Description field. Place the second result of this into a new "Lore tags" field. When submitting, combine these two fields to reverse the process'

savageorange said:
IMO a solution of this general nature is the only way we're likely to move forward WRT things that are too ambiguous to reliably handle with TWYS.

However, to my mind the most pressing problem is not the precise choice of protocol, but how to get people to adopt it. One idea on that front is for support to be incorporated into a userscript like E6Extend. Something like, when editing, 'Split the Description field on the string Lore_tags:\n, place the first result of this into the Description field. Place the second result of this into a new "Lore tags" field. When submitting, combine these two fields to reverse the process'

The best way to get people to adopt something is awareness, and the best way to grow awareness in this case is just to use the method whenever possible. People will notice, especially since certain artists are basically magnets for this sort of controversy. As for your second part, it's a good proposal. I would submit that to the feature suggestions forum if I were you. But yeah, just use lore tags as often as possible and people will get curious.

Until a solution is in place, drama with artists is gonna keep repeating over and over.

Solution?
create lore versions of the tags, such as
male_(lore), female_(lore), etc
so an image can have both female and male_(lore) tags on them at the same time.

So when an artist starts crying again, just tell him to use the lore tags to express whatever they want.

^

Drama is a red herring, and we shouldn't allow the system to be held hostage by it. Many of the drama mongers appear to not only fail to understand TWYS, but have no interest in understanding TWYS, or worse, have a commitment to not doing so.

While there is often some ambiguity about TWYS as it applies to a particular image involved, their misunderstanding of TWYS seems to be largely their responsibility.

(conversely, I think e621 may have some responsibility to make clearer the related fact that 'e621 is an archive, not your personal gallery')

While you may not have intended to place lore tags on a level with normal tags, I think injecting lore tags into the normal tagging system has that effect.

Lore information is never going to be as reliable as TWYS tagging, just out of pure logistics. So I'm really against presenting it in any way that suggests otherwise.

Delian said:
create lore versions of the tags, such as
male_(lore), female_(lore), etc

No thanks. That'd completely mess up wildcard searches.

Delian said:
Solution?
create lore versions of the tags, such as
male_(lore), female_(lore), etc
so an image can have both female and male_(lore) tags on them at the same time.

This has been discussed so many times now and this particular solution has also been discussed in past as well and there are many reasons why this will not happen, starting from that because at that point they would be actual tags, meaning that staff would need to enforce them.

Meanwhile descriptions and sets are almost free game.

Also as mentioned, description nuking is far less severe action than actual tag nuking. If you want to make this system even more bulletproof, you could easily link the tags in description to dedicated set search, sets being for specific tags. This would also make it easy to cross-check if posts included in set contains tags in the description.

There are already several threads on this.

Furrin_Gok said:
There are already several threads on this.

Yes, but this one actually proposes a solution that I havn't seen before. :)

I like this idea, over all!

SnowWolf said:
Yes, but this one actually proposes a solution that I havn't seen before. :)

forum #210151, forum #205766. The idea of lore tagging as a separate thing has been suggested before, and denied due to the fact that it would bloat the tags list.

Furrin_Gok said:
forum #210151, forum #205766. The idea of lore tagging as a separate thing has been suggested before, and denied due to the fact that it would bloat the tags list.

...Except OP's suggestion was to put the tags into the description field, not as part of the tag list.

SnowWolf said:
...Except OP's suggestion was to put the tags into the description field, not as part of the tag list.

I got the idea from ratte originally, he mentioned it offhand in the discord group and I thought it sounded like a good solution.

SnowWolf said:
...Except OP's suggestion was to put the tags into the description field, not as part of the tag list.

Oh. That's actually something I've used before. The big problem with it is that it doesn't support searching for multiple tags. For example, you can't search desc:male desc:solo.

Furrin_Gok said:
Oh. That's actually something I've used before. The big problem with it is that it doesn't support searching for multiple tags. For example, you can't search desc:male desc:solo.

I edited the post to mention that and edited the tags to fit a model that works under the limitation. You wouldn't need to search for tags like solo anyways, though the one tag limit is a problem. I still think this solution is better than the moping around everyone is currently doing.

Furrin_Gok said:
Oh. That's actually something I've used before. The big problem with it is that it doesn't support searching for multiple tags. For example, you can't search desc:male desc:solo.

TIL you can actually search by descriptions, and I've been on this site for years. In other words, these "tags" if implemented wouldn't be very useful considering only a handful of people would even know how to utilize them.

Furthermore...what is the use case? Why do we care what something was in lore if what we're actually SEEING is completely different. Wouldn't a "male_to_female" tag or something of that nature be better? That way you know what they were and what they ended up as.

Might wanna fix lore tags to lore_tags in the example post so that it's actually searchable.

Might wanna fix lore tags to lore_tags in the example post so that it's actually searchable.

Furrin_Gok said:
Oh. That's actually something I've used before. The big problem with it is that it doesn't support searching for multiple tags. For example, you can't search desc:male desc:solo.

desc:lore_male desc:lore_girly
What's the problem?

Dyrone said:
Furthermore...what is the use case? Why do we care what something was in lore if what we're actually SEEING is completely different. Wouldn't a "male_to_female" tag or something of that nature be better? That way you know what they were and what they ended up as.

Oh you sweet summer child.
The use cases are for tags like girly males or flat chested females that get tagged as something else under TWYS.

Dyrone said:

Furthermore...what is the use case? Why do we care what something was in lore if what we're actually SEEING is completely different.

Completely different?

Look at OP image. It's a good example of where TWYS gets tricky. There is no decisive information (vagina/penis? breasts?) about the sex of the mouse character within the picture. It has been tagged female because there is more evidence on the female side (facial features), but nobody would look at this and go 'that character is unquestionably female!'

(Just in case it gets brought up again, ambiguous_gender is not applicable; that is only used when there are no gender indicators at all.)

I do agree that people might come unstuck WRT effective use, because lore tags must, in effect, be defined individually by each artist, and can only be functional for searching if those definitions agree sufficiently. Still, these ambiguous cases exist, we might be able to deal more completely with them, and perhaps we should try to.

savageorange said:
Still, these ambiguous cases exist, we might be able to deal more completely with them, and perhaps we should try to.

I don't think I could ever have phrased it so elegantly.

MyNameIsOver20charac said:
desc:lore_male desc:lore_girly
What's the problem?

Metatags don't (currently) work like that. The search you give above is identical to a search for desc:lore_girly -- the last value given for a metatag is the one used.

This would be more obvious if there were other posts which had only lore_girly.

(this is also confusing, because it means that desc:foo desc:bar and desc:bar desc:foo are completely different searches.)

savageorange said:
Look at OP image. It's a good example of where TWYS gets tricky. There is no decisive information (vagina/penis? breasts?) about the sex of the mouse character within the picture.

I just don't see how it helps anyone in the end to know the exact canonical gender of a very gender-ambiguous character. To me that mouse character looks female, but if someone wanted it to be male then they could simply IMAGINE it as a male because there is no definitive visual evidence to the contrary.

Does getting told "hey, btw...that's OFFICIALLY a male" make it easier to fap to or something? Like "Oh thank god...now that I've been told by the artist that this is indeed 100% for sure a male character, the fapping can begin!" Just seems unnecessary. In the end it's a bunch of pixels with no gender, it's all how the viewer sees and interprets the image anyways.

savageorange said:
Metatags don't (currently) work like that. The search you give above is identical to a search for desc:lore_girly -- the last value given for a metatag is the one used.

This would be more obvious if there were other posts which had only lore_girly.

(this is also confusing, because it means that desc:foo desc:bar and desc:bar desc:foo are completely different searches.)

What about wildcards, do they work with desc? If they do we could solve it by alphabetically sorting the lore tags (went ahead and did this in the famous post)
Example search:
desc:lore_girly*lore_male/male
Alphabetic sorting is necessary to know the correct order.

What do ya think?

AFAIK wildcards don't currently work for metatags either.

If they did, and OP proposal was updated to specify that lore tags must be alphabetically ordered, then this might work.

savageorange said:
AFAIK wildcards don't currently work for metatags either.

If they did, and OP proposal was updated to specify that lore tags must be alphabetically ordered, then this might work.

desc:male, desc:sex, desc:male*sex, desc:sex*male

My mistake.

savageorange said:
My mistake.

Yay,I solve problem :D

Dyrone said:
I just don't see how it helps anyone in the end to know the exact canonical gender of a very gender-ambiguous character. To me that mouse character looks female, but if someone wanted it to be male then they could simply IMAGINE it as a male because there is no definitive visual evidence to the contrary.

Does getting told "hey, btw...that's OFFICIALLY a male" make it easier to fap to or something? Like "Oh thank god...now that I've been told by the artist that this is indeed 100% for sure a male character, the fapping can begin!" Just seems unnecessary. In the end it's a bunch of pixels with no gender, it's all how the viewer sees and interprets the image anyways.

Yes, it seems silly but people are like that. Look in the comments section of the linked post in the proposal, you'll see what I mean.

I'm gonna go a bit off topic but, I have a question about TWYS.

But first, I'm going to start with a controversial statement.
Every single tag on this website is already based on TWYK.

It's quite simple.
How do you know which character that is? You learned it somewhere. Outside knowledge.
How do you know which species that character is? What is a bird? You learned it somewhere. Outside knowledge.
How do you know what a herm is? What a male is? Your mommy told you. Outside knowledge.
How do you know what is hair? Yep, outside knowledge.
You don't know what something is? You click on the tag wiki. You just expanded your "outside knowledge".

You make a post, but you don't recognize the character. You can't tag it because you don't have the outside knowledge. Then another person comes along who does recognize the character. He has the outside knowledge, so he's able to add the tag. Yay, outside knowledge to the rescue!

Well, you get the idea.

So the question is, what is TWYS then? I mean, it certainly seems to have very little to do with "not using outside knowledge".

And when an artist comes along and tags something that doesn't quite look like it would fit, the only thing they're doing is providing outside knowledge which other people don't have.

Can someone point out the flaws in my logic?

I reject your attempt to derail via reducing the definition of TWYS to the extravagantly absurd.

Delian said:
Pointless philosophical stuff

While theoretically correct your argument is silly and pointless in practice. B+ in philosophy, F in helpfullness.

Delian said:
How do you know what a herm is? What a male is? Your mommy told you.

"Well Delian, when a herm and a cuntboy love each other very, very much~"

Delian said:
So the question is, what is TWYS then? I mean, it certainly seems to have very little to do with "not using outside knowledge".

TWYS is the tagging philosophy that the visual contents of an image should either corroborate, or supercede any of your external knowledge of the characters in it. There's a great deal of argument about how strictly e6 should adhere to this philosophy, and much of it arises from the admins' stance that tags should reflect EXCLUSIVELY what can be gleaned from an image, despite this generally not being the case. Your post manages to miss the point entirely, spouting pseudo-intellectual non-sense about the constructed nature of language in a way that is neither constructive nor especially relevant.

The "answer" to your "question" goes like this: look at the image. If you see hair, you tag hair. If you see a bird, you tag bird. These examples work because unless you're being willfully ignorant, most people have a fairly good grasp on what is and isn't a bird. Everyone understands this, and has absolutely no problem with it. Issues only arise if the author draws a dog but vehemently insists that it's a bird (more realistically a dog-bird hybrid), or when you see an image of a traditionally female character drawn as a male. According to TWYS, if it looks like a dog, tag dog, and if it looks like a male, tag male. A person looking at an image of Krystal probably doesn't care that she's usually female; if she's got a dick, they expect that image to show up under male. TWYS falters when people disagree about what constitutes a male or a female, and rightfully so because gender is fairly complicated and messy, especially in such a diverse and fluid community. Under the strictest interpretation of TWYS, there is absolutely no way to tell unless genitals are visible, but of course that leads to a million ambiguous_gender tags on SFW images, so the tagger must make some educated assumptions, based on their ideas of what a male or female body looks like. That's okay, because mentally associating wide_hips and breasts with female can still count as "seeing", as long as there isn't any hard evidence to contradict you. This is good enough in most cases, but if you really cannot tell, should you use the character's canonical gender? That's where the issue of TWYS vs TWYK lies, the rest is more of a very abstract discussion of what gender even constitutes.

Delian said:
How do you know which character that is?

e6's tag rules DO grant an exception to this particular case: copyright and character tags are objectively TWYK. I'd argue that a few more, like crossgender and incest should be added to this list, as many of their examples require outside knowledge of the characters (i.e. canonical gender, who their family members are), and the tags would otherwise not be very useful. I digress, but the point is, your logic is flawed because it is not useful or intelligent. What exactly do you want to change? "Everything is technically TWYK, so we should stop caring about TWYS and just use TWYK whole hog" is definitely a fallacy of some sort. This post is the equivalent of helpfully pointing out "Oh yeah? Well life is meaningless!" in a high-level discussion of the morality of certain actions.

Going back to the top, an alternative implementation would be the use of a preceding character, formatting them sorta like hashtags.

Some sorta description

Lore Tags

&male
&crossgender
&femboy
&what_the_fuck_is_this_shit

This reduces possible errors and misdetections in a plaintext list of "lore_tags:" and you'd probably want some sort of "Hey here's some TWYK tags" preceding it, but then you could search for ~male ~desc:&male without needing a third tag. Obviously the main issue would be usability without implementing them ubiquitously, and the stigma that would surround just spontaneously injecting hashtags onto posts.

anonymousanalogue said:

Going back to the top, an alternative implementation would be the use of a preceding character, formatting them sorta like hashtags.

Using & rather than lore_ seems like it could be better, I agree. In practice, given that the scope of the search is only the Description field, I'm not sure how much difference there would be.

Obviously the main issue would be usability without implementing them ubiquitously

~ alternation seems like it would often be desirable (eg ~male ~desc:&male), but I think it doesn't currently work for metatags.

savageorange said:
I reject your attempt to derail via reducing the definition of TWYS to the extravagantly absurd.

I've made no logical conclusions about TWYS, thus your notion that I've made a "reductio ad absurdum" is incorrect.

MyNameIsOver20charac said:
F in helpfulness.

It's true. What I wrote does nothing to resolve the issue at hand. Sorry!
The only thing that I can say is that putting stuff in the description is an OK temporary measure, where an optimal solution would involve using actual tags.

anonymousanalogue said:
your logic is flawed because it is not useful or intelligent

Damn. You got me now.

Anyway, I'll make a separate thread about this later.

Delian said:
I've made no logical conclusions about TWYS, thus your notion that I've made a "reductio ad absurdum" is incorrect.

Defining up TWYK to the point there is no space left for TWYS, is functionally equivalent to defining down TWYS; the assertion may be different but the result is the same.

Delian said:
I'm gonna go a bit off topic but, I have a question about TWYS.

But first, I'm going to start with a controversial statement.
Every single tag on this website is already based on TWYK.
...
How do you know which species that character is? What is a bird? You learned it somewhere. Outside knowledge.

See... yes, but no.

This is a Rottweiler.
This is a doberman pinscher.

I learned this when I was a kid. I had a Doberman, one of my mom's 'friends' had a Rottweiler.

I understand these two dogs, generally: They both may have long ears or short. Or a long tail or short.
Rotties are more commonly left with natural floppy ears, and may or may not have a docked tail.
Dobbies very commonly have cropped ears and a docked tail.

Both are usually black and tan. with similar markings.

Rotties are heavily built. They're muscular thicc doggos.
Dobbies are generally lighter, taller, and are compact and thin.

post #917806

This is not a Rottweiler, yet it is tagged as one.

The artist says "I would call this dog a Rottweiler if it weren't for his strange long ears... I'm not quite sure why I gave him this rabbit-ears. It was late, I was tired xD"

This dog, however, looks a lot more like a doberman. The artist says it's a rottweiler, but it doesn't look like one.

It doesn't look like one!

What if the artist said that it was a coyote? ... well, by tag what you know... then that boy should be tagged coyote. but tag what you see says that he's a doby.

This gets more complicated, because I've never seen an anthro anything. So I have to use my knowledge to INFER that post #1411328 is a dobie and post #1554644 is a rottie

But I SEE an animal that is shaped like a doberman or like a rottweiler. It's a guess.

But tag what you SEE means that when people post post #1501316 it should not be tagged doberman or rottweiler because there is no indication that she is either of these. she has some markings on her forelimbs that are a bit lighter, some sports are a bit darker, she COULD be a red doberman or a fawn doberman but her colors do not match up with those and her fur shade variations look like shading rather than markings.

There are other images of the character, some are more clearly one species, but they don't matter. only this picture does.

Now you might think that this means that all dobies and rotties must be black and tan with those markings but that's not true. They can be different colors. But they need to have the right traits to still LOOK like a rottie or dobbie.

Case in point: this pupper still looks kind of like a doberman: lean, pointed ears, docked tail.
This pack of pups are all dobermen (dobermans?)... yet the white one looks a bit odd. and thesolid black one looks like like someone's feralization of Anubis.
this doggo Looks less like a dobbie because it's ears are floppy, and it's an unusual color with none of the usual markings.
This boy looks almost more like a sheep than a dog
A melanistic Dobie -- outside of the docked tail, he could be any random black mutt

Anyway, I"m rambling quite a bit. Bottom line: I was not TAUGHT what a doberman looks like, I LEARNED what traits define a doberman and I use my knowledge to SEE and ID animals that match those traits. it's the same sorts of instincts that let us see a profile and guess what it belongs to. We're using out knowledge and applying it to reach a conclusion.

You make a post, but you don't recognize the character. You can't tag it because you don't have the outside knowledge. Then another person comes along who does recognize the character. He has the outside knowledge, so he's able to add the tag. Yay, outside knowledge to the rescue!

Well this certainly is true. There have been several times I've asked "does anyone know who these characters are?" (post #1443247 post #1445530 ) or "what species of bird is this?" (post #1525459 post #1518012 )

But in these cases, I'm asking someone else to use their knowledge to identify what they SEE.

the artist can help, by sharing what they KNOW--but if it doesn't watch up with what people who have knowledge SEE... then it conflicts.

Here, have some nice other pictures for getting through all this: X X X X

SnowWolf said:
See... yes, but no.

This is a Rottweiler.
This is a doberman pinscher.

I learned this when I was a kid. I had a Doberman, one of my mom's 'friends' had a Rottweiler.

I understand these two dogs, generally: They both may have long ears or short. Or a long tail or short.
Rotties are more commonly left with natural floppy ears, and may or may not have a docked tail.
Dobbies very commonly have cropped ears and a docked tail.

Both are usually black and tan. with similar markings.

Rotties are heavily built. They're muscular thicc doggos.
Dobbies are generally lighter, taller, and are compact and thin.

post #917806

This is not a Rottweiler, yet it is tagged as one.

The artist says "I would call this dog a Rottweiler if it weren't for his strange long ears... I'm not quite sure why I gave him this rabbit-ears. It was late, I was tired xD"

This dog, however, looks a lot more like a doberman. The artist says it's a rottweiler, but it doesn't look like one.

It doesn't look like one!

What if the artist said that it was a coyote? ... well, by tag what you know... then that boy should be tagged coyote. but tag what you see says that he's a doby.

This gets more complicated, because I've never seen an anthro anything. So I have to use my knowledge to INFER that post #1411328 is a dobie and post #1554644 is a rottie

But I SEE an animal that is shaped like a doberman or like a rottweiler. It's a guess.

But tag what you SEE means that when people post post #1501316 it should not be tagged doberman or rottweiler because there is no indication that she is either of these. she has some markings on her forelimbs that are a bit lighter, some sports are a bit darker, she COULD be a red doberman or a fawn doberman but her colors do not match up with those and her fur shade variations look like shading rather than markings.

There are other images of the character, some are more clearly one species, but they don't matter. only this picture does.

Now you might think that this means that all dobies and rotties must be black and tan with those markings but that's not true. They can be different colors. But they need to have the right traits to still LOOK like a rottie or dobbie.

Case in point: this pupper still looks kind of like a doberman: lean, pointed ears, docked tail.
This pack of pups are all dobermen (dobermans?)... yet the white one looks a bit odd. and thesolid black one looks like like someone's feralization of Anubis.
this doggo Looks less like a dobbie because it's ears are floppy, and it's an unusual color with none of the usual markings.
This boy looks almost more like a sheep than a dog
A melanistic Dobie -- outside of the docked tail, he could be any random black mutt

Anyway, I"m rambling quite a bit. Bottom line: I was not TAUGHT what a doberman looks like, I LEARNED what traits define a doberman and I use my knowledge to SEE and ID animals that match those traits. it's the same sorts of instincts that let us see a profile and guess what it belongs to. We're using out knowledge and applying it to reach a conclusion.

Well this certainly is true. There have been several times I've asked "does anyone know who these characters are?" (post #1443247 post #1445530 ) or "what species of bird is this?" (post #1525459 post #1518012 )

But in these cases, I'm asking someone else to use their knowledge to identify what they SEE.

the artist can help, by sharing what they KNOW--but if it doesn't watch up with what people who have knowledge SEE... then it conflicts.

Here, have some nice other pictures for getting through all this: X X X X

Species is a great example of TWYK's weirdness. Let's take a popular character, Rikki from Marblesoda, as an example. Here are a few pictures of the character.

post #1334778 post #1496693 post #849945

Now, all of these posts are tagged as a wolf raccoon hybrid, and while the raccoon i can maybe see from the markings, the character has a short nose, an extremely fluffy tail, and no real other features that really point to them being a wolf. The important question here is: "If we didn't know from the artist that rikki is, in lore (get the hint?) a wolf, would these pictures be tagged as such?" Because in my personal opinion, they would be tagged as dog and *maybe* raccoon.

Maybe partially off-topic but post #1540893 has tags locked to female.
The character's shirt rather unambiguously indicates he's male and the 'how to tag gender' page explicitly includes "Other: Clothing choices, pose, dialogue, elaborate transformations." as deciding factors for how a character's gender is tagged.

Shouldn't this particular image be tagged girly and male?

Any clarification would be appreciated.

Brian_O'Blivion said:
Maybe partially off-topic but post #1540893 has tags locked to female.
The character's shirt rather unambiguously indicates he's male and the 'how to tag gender' page explicitly includes "Other: Clothing choices, pose, dialogue, elaborate transformations." as deciding factors for how a character's gender is tagged.

Shouldn't this particular image be tagged girly and male?

Any clarification would be appreciated.

The character is also wearing tight-fitting panties that show no hint of a bulge. The fact that they have a feminine physique and evidence against a penis is more than enough to classify them as female according to TWYS.

Honestly this is a pretty clear case. The text on a shirt can't even begin to override the evidence we can see by looking betwixt the character's legs.

In that case what kind of image would employ use of in-image context to determine gender? Is that only for images that would otherwise be tagged ambiguous_gender?

Brian_O'Blivion said:
Maybe partially off-topic but post #1540893 has tags locked to female.
The character's shirt rather unambiguously indicates he's male and the 'how to tag gender' page explicitly includes "Other: Clothing choices, pose, dialogue, elaborate transformations." as deciding factors for how a character's gender is tagged.

Shouldn't this particular image be tagged girly and male?

Any clarification would be appreciated.

I propose a different scenario: The shirt is actually a warning for straight people that the girl is such a bitch she'll turn them entirely off of woman. Discuss.

The other thing is that I doubt shirts have magical gender restrictions placed on them, so that is a moot point as well.

NotMeNotYou said:
I propose a different scenario: The shirt is actually a warning for straight people that the girl is such a bitch she'll turn them entirely off of woman. Discuss.

The other thing is that I doubt shirts have magical gender restrictions placed on them, so that is a moot point as well.

The above is a hypothetical what-if scenario and not intended to make any statements about the character's personality.

Or! She could be wearing her boyfriend's shirt! PLOT TWIST!

After all, the shirt says nothing about being gay, straight or bisexual!

NotMeNotYou said:
The shirt is actually a warning for straight people that the girl is such a bitch she'll turn them entirely off of woman.

This requires some serious willful ignorance. The entire basis for "Reggie is a girl because he looks like a girl" is that from a purely visual standpoint, most reasonable people would view his figure as female rather than ambiguous. Occam's razor, I get it. By the exact same reasoning then, the line "I Turn Straight Guys Gay" can be interpreted by any vaguely sane person as dialogue to the extent of "The person wearing this shirt is an attractive man," and the fact that he's wearing it on a shirt (at a focal point of the image) makes a clear artistic statement: he's a trap, plain and simple.

At the very least, shouldn't this constitute "mixed signs as to whether the character is male or female"?

Nothing's stopping anyone from wearing a t-shirt that doesn't apply to them, so why is it impossible for a character to wear a shirt that might not apply to them at all? Clothing can be worn by anyone.

anonymousanalogue said:
This requires an almost unbelievable amount of willful ignorance, it borders on malicious intent.

Actually, the general rule is that text in images isn't tagged, in most circumstances.

If they characters are in a BURGER KING, it'll be tagged off of what you can see-- it's a restaurant, there are burgers. it doesn't need to be tagged burger_king. There are a couple of exceptions like, I dunno.. post #377806 being tagged metallica.

But the over all point is, what the shirt says doesn't matter.

post #1381167

There's little argument that that is a male. But, by your argument, if his shirt said "girly" or "daddy's girl" or "Princess" or "Queen" ... we would HAVE to drop everything and tag him female.

Or any number of these guys:

post #1527452 post #1499069 post #1474718 post #1372183

even though... they look pretty clearly male... if the first says otherwise...?

On another note: Calm the heck down. Go talk a walk. Deep breaths. This isn't worth getting that upset about.

If you're getting upset enough that you're willing to personally attack people... then you need to chill out a bit. Deep breaths!

SnowWolf said:

There's little argument that that is a male. But, by your argument, if his shirt said "girly" or "daddy's girl" or "Princess" or "Queen" ... we would HAVE to drop everything and tag him female.

You're absolutely right, that post was definitely overly antagonistic. I guess my point is just that the shirt functions more as dialogue on the character's part than a mere fashion accessory. It's the distinction between "JUICY" and "I Fuck Dudes." It's designed like a safety-disclaimer on the author's part. But you're right, it's more ambiguous than that.

anonymousanalogue said:
You're absolutely right, that post was definitely overly antagonistic. I guess my point is just that the shirt functions more as dialogue on the character's part than a mere fashion accessory. It's the distinction between "JUICY" and "I Fuck Dudes." It's designed like a safety-disclaimer on the author's part. But you're right, it's more ambiguous than that.

The problem I see with the character in that particular image is that he has literally zero evidence of male genitalia. No tuck job would be able to get a crotch of an adult male that flat, unless the panties are actually a bag of holding.

So, in my eyes, we have a flat chested feminine character with a crotch that's impossible to hide a penis, which in turn means occam's razor says female has less assumptions. The text on the shirt itself doesn't even come into play here, but it's still just as likely that it's a tongue-in-cheek joke at the stereotype that all woman are psychopaths as it is that Reggie is a perfect trap.

Delian said:
I'm gonna go a bit off topic but, I have a question about TWYS.

But first, I'm going to start with a controversial statement.
Every single tag on this website is already based on TWYK.

It's quite simple.
How do you know which character that is? You learned it somewhere. Outside knowledge.
How do you know which species that character is? What is a bird? You learned it somewhere. Outside knowledge.
How do you know what a herm is? What a male is? Your mommy told you. Outside knowledge.
How do you know what is hair? Yep, outside knowledge.
You don't know what something is? You click on the tag wiki. You just expanded your "outside knowledge".

You make a post, but you don't recognize the character. You can't tag it because you don't have the outside knowledge. Then another person comes along who does recognize the character. He has the outside knowledge, so he's able to add the tag. Yay, outside knowledge to the rescue!

Well, you get the idea.

So the question is, what is TWYS then? I mean, it certainly seems to have very little to do with "not using outside knowledge".

And when an artist comes along and tags something that doesn't quite look like it would fit, the only thing they're doing is providing outside knowledge which other people don't have.

Can someone point out the flaws in my logic?

I like how others try to insult you for daring to say anything against the stupidity of the TWYS rule.

Delian said:
I'm gonna go a bit off topic but, I have a question about TWYS.

But first, I'm going to start with a controversial statement.
Every single tag on this website is already based on TWYK.

It's quite simple.
How do you know which character that is? You learned it somewhere. Outside knowledge.
How do you know which species that character is? What is a bird? You learned it somewhere. Outside knowledge.
How do you know what a herm is? What a male is? Your mommy told you. Outside knowledge.
How do you know what is hair? Yep, outside knowledge.
You don't know what something is? You click on the tag wiki. You just expanded your "outside knowledge".

You make a post, but you don't recognize the character. You can't tag it because you don't have the outside knowledge. Then another person comes along who does recognize the character. He has the outside knowledge, so he's able to add the tag. Yay, outside knowledge to the rescue!

Well, you get the idea.

So the question is, what is TWYS then? I mean, it certainly seems to have very little to do with "not using outside knowledge".

And when an artist comes along and tags something that doesn't quite look like it would fit, the only thing they're doing is providing outside knowledge which other people don't have.

Can someone point out the flaws in my logic?

Finally someone said it. Why are we so bent on upholding this rule when it's so strict when it was supposed to help? Honestly it feels like this rule would work the most if no one could find any source to said art thus tagging what they got. Also does it hurt to use outside information? Kinda ruins the purpose of trying to tag properly if we're supposed to ignore it. Do we need to have authority over one's work this bad?

In other words, give some exceptions to this rule otherwise we'll be having the same thread over and over.

ComboBreaking said:
I like how others try to insult you for daring to say anything against the stupidity of the TWYS rule.

Hi. I see you're not especially active here, so let me explain:

TWYS has some very clearly stated rules and exceptions. TWYS is in place for a reason and is generally the product of nearly a decade of discussion, contemplation and consideration.

Literally 30 days cannot go by without someone saying "TWYS is dumb! I have a better idea!" and generally speaking, it's the exact same argument that was brought up 30 days before: "This character who has big eyelashes and a curvy figure and no masculine traits at all is really a boy" or "this character who is fully dressed and looks like a boy is actually a girl" or "This character looks like an infant, but they're REALLY a 3000 year old dragon and shouldn't be tagged as a cub!"

and it's not that we're unwilling to discuss this.

It's that we're very very tired of having the same argument every few weeks, because someone who doesn't participate in the forum can't be bothered to look back for the last time we've had this discussion, and comes in and initiates a conversation about TWYS that is not politely asking for information, or even politely offering ideas, but is, instead, rudely suggesting at we're all idiots who don't understand basic logic.

Seriously, look at that post again. It's stated as a "question" but it's not. This is all about telling us that they think the rules are dumb and that their logic, conceived of in a vacuum, is superior to the hundreds of minds over the last decade that have put this rule together.

We'd be a lot more polite if they were polite in the first place.

SnowWolf said:
Hi. I see you're not especially active here, so let me explain:

TWYS has some very clearly stated rules and exceptions. TWYS is in place for a reason and is generally the product of nearly a decade of discussion, contemplation and consideration.

Literally 30 days cannot go by without someone saying "TWYS is dumb! I have a better idea!" and generally speaking, it's the exact same argument that was brought up 30 days before: "This character who has big eyelashes and a curvy figure and no masculine traits at all is really a boy" or "this character who is fully dressed and looks like a boy is actually a girl" or "This character looks like an infant, but they're REALLY a 3000 year old dragon and shouldn't be tagged as a cub!"

and it's not that we're unwilling to discuss this.

It's that we're very very tired of having the same argument every few weeks, because someone who doesn't participate in the forum can't be bothered to look back for the last time we've had this discussion, and comes in and initiates a conversation about TWYS that is not politely asking for information, or even politely offering ideas, but is, instead, rudely suggesting at we're all idiots who don't understand basic logic.

Seriously, look at that post again. It's stated as a "question" but it's not. This is all about telling us that they think the rules are dumb and that their logic, conceived of in a vacuum, is superior to the hundreds of minds over the last decade that have put this rule together.

We'd be a lot more polite if they were polite in the first place.

Wow, I'm exhausted from reading through just this last page, and this has been going on for a decade? Jeez louise...

I don't really have a dog in this race myself thankfully. TWYS isn't perfect (just like everything else in this world), but it works well enough imo. I think lore tags in the description would be a nice way to provide clarification to some of the more ambiguous posts. I doubt it'll make everyone happy, but I think it's a step in the right direction.

Syuun said:
Wow, I'm exhausted from reading through just this last page, and this has been going on for a decade? Jeez louise...

Tell me about it! Sometimes it's over shadowed by other complaints for a while: I remember when the big complaint was "Ban MLP" because people were posting it too much. This was when we started getting really focused on people using their blacklist. :)

Syuun said:
I don't really have a dog in this race myself thankfully. TWYS isn't perfect (just like everything else in this world), but it works well enough imo. I think lore tags in the description would be a nice way to provide clarification to some of the more ambiguous posts. I doubt it'll make everyone happy, but I think it's a step in the right direction.

It isn't perfect and I think every last one of us here agrees that that's true :)

The biggest and hugest problem is that most solutions involve a tremendous amount of retagging and editing. If a tag is used in only 10% of the places it applies, it's doing a poor job.)

I sometimes dream about the site being rebuilt and having fancy features like "character 1's tags" so that if you wanted to look for a male tiger in shorts getting anally penetrated by a muscular blue wolf, while in a forest, you could... but that would involve such a tremendously large amount of work to transfer all of the images we have right now over, I'm not sure it's worth it. Especially when we have over 1.5 million posts... and right now? (at least for the last month) 2 users do 24.5% of the tag edits. the next 25-ish percent comes from 10 users.

We got lots of people who are happy and willing to add things like "male" or "penis" or what have you, and that's great. But... 50% of edits come from 12 users.

Any big sweeping changes would take a HUGE amount of work.

But I dream about it still XD

SnowWolf said:
Hi. I see you're not especially active here, so let me explain:

TWYS has some very clearly stated rules and exceptions. TWYS is in place for a reason and is generally the product of nearly a decade of discussion, contemplation and consideration.

Literally 30 days cannot go by without someone saying "TWYS is dumb! I have a better idea!" and generally speaking, it's the exact same argument that was brought up 30 days before: "This character who has big eyelashes and a curvy figure and no masculine traits at all is really a boy" or "this character who is fully dressed and looks like a boy is actually a girl" or "This character looks like an infant, but they're REALLY a 3000 year old dragon and shouldn't be tagged as a cub!"

and it's not that we're unwilling to discuss this.

It's that we're very very tired of having the same argument every few weeks, because someone who doesn't participate in the forum can't be bothered to look back for the last time we've had this discussion, and comes in and initiates a conversation about TWYS that is not politely asking for information, or even politely offering ideas, but is, instead, rudely suggesting at we're all idiots who don't understand basic logic.

Seriously, look at that post again. It's stated as a "question" but it's not. This is all about telling us that they think the rules are dumb and that their logic, conceived of in a vacuum, is superior to the hundreds of minds over the last decade that have put this rule together.

We'd be a lot more polite if they were polite in the first place.

Is dfficult to be polite when you treat everyone who doesn't wholefully agrees with the TWYS rule as idiots. This part of your comment exactly highlights the problem:
"Literally 30 days cannot go by without someone saying "TWYS is dumb!"
If this issue comes so often, then why do you think that is? Either there's something wrong with the rule, which you (staff) don't believe, so the alternative is that we (users) are idiots, so much that you LOCK otherwise incorrect tags.
This right here is why TWYS pisses me off so much: Disregards artist intentions and lore, disregards users by outright lying to them (especially when it comes to blacklists), and makes the mods here look like douches who can't admit being wrong about anything (and despite everything, I do think you are better than that).

ComboBreaking said:
Is dfficult to be polite when you treat everyone who doesn't wholefully agrees with the TWYS rule as idiots. This part of your comment exactly highlights the problem:
"Literally 30 days cannot go by without someone saying "TWYS is dumb!"
If this issue comes so often, then why do you think that is? Either there's something wrong with the rule, which you (staff) don't believe, so the alternative is that we (users) are idiots, so much that you LOCK otherwise incorrect tags.
This right here is why TWYS pisses me off so much: Disregards artist intentions and lore, disregards users by outright lying to them (especially when it comes to blacklists), and makes the mods here look like douches who can't admit being wrong about anything (and despite everything, I do think you are better than that).

It's better than the alternatives.

And, from what I've been able to tell grand majority of the users are 100% fine with the rule.

SnowWolf said:
I sometimes dream about the site being rebuilt and having fancy features like "character 1's tags" so that if you wanted to look for a male tiger in shorts getting anally penetrated by a muscular blue wolf, while in a forest, you could...

Same here! Maybe someday.

ComboBreaking said:
This right here is why TWYS pisses me off so much: Disregards artist intentions and lore, disregards users by outright lying to them (especially when it comes to blacklists)

If you want the artist's intentions and lore go to their gallery. This is an archive and it has a different set of rules.

Blacklists are actually one of the reasons TWYS is important! For example many users blacklist cub. If a character looks like a cub that's how we tag it. If the artist said the character is actually 20, and we didn't use TWYS, then users wouldn't be able to blacklist that post. Another example, characters sometimes look human which we don't accept. Even if the author says it's actually an exotic alien we tag it as whatever it looks like.

ComboBreaking said:
Is dfficult to be polite when you treat everyone who doesn't wholefully agrees with the TWYS rule as idiots.

IME there are a lot more people who think they disagree with TWYS than who actually do disagree with TWYS. Almost all objections to TWYS are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what TWYS is; this misunderstanding often seems wilful in nature.

Your claim that it 'outright lies' to users is an example of this -- exactly opposite of what TWYS really does (make it so that when a user searches X, the posts returned unambiguously contain X, no matter what the user knows or doesn't know about the depicted characters).

If you think "well, it lies about whether a given character is male or female", you only have to consider rule 63 to see how silly that objection is. We don't tag what characters "are", that's entirely outside the scope of TWYS . It's dishonest to object to TWYS on that basis, because it is pretending that TWYS is a broken TWYK (ie. it WANTS to say what characters are, but says the wrong thing about what characters are.)

TL;DR:
Personally I don't think in terms of "idiots", but the typical objector to TWYS is, AFAICS, ignorant and often wilfully so. If you make the same broken "points" that many others have made before you, there is no particular reason to believe you will say anything insightful about TWYS, because you have provided positive proof that you don't understand what TWYS is.

The most charitable response is, IMO, to treat you as if you're confused. I don't think you can hope for any better than that.

ComboBreaking said:
Is dfficult to be polite when you treat everyone who doesn't wholefully agrees with the TWYS rule as idiots. This part of your comment exactly highlights the problem:
"Literally 30 days cannot go by without someone saying "TWYS is dumb!"

I will redirect you to the end of my statement again

We do not get paid for the time and effort we put into this website. We are not customer service. We are people. Doing this in our free time.

When I have a problem--say, a few months ago, I couldn't get my doctor's office to refill a medication I require. They said they would, then didn't, several times. I went from having plenty of pills left to "I ran out 3 days ago."

I was very upset. I was spending a lot of time on the phone between the doctor's office and the pharmacy, for what should have been a very simple refill for a medication I've been taking for well over a year.

I did not, though, yell at anyone. I put on my sweet voice, I said please, I said thank you, I told them that I hated to bother them, I kept my phone calls as short as possible, I tried to call during slow hours so I wouldn't bother them.

All while being denied a medication that the doctor told me was pretty dang important for me to be taking.

And they're paid to do this. I pay them money.

You guys aren't paying us anything.

Which, y'know, in my book means that you guys should be putting on the sweet voice, saying please and thank you, and explaining your thoughts in a well spoken and polite manner, rather than seething at the gills at us as if have, personally, come to your house and kicked your puppy.

I mean, it's common human decency, man. :( Do unto others and all that.

If this issue comes so often, then why do you think that is?

Because, as has been stated, it's not perfect. Because, as has been stated, we have a focus on searchability.

Your local library has books. Your books have titles, authors, subjects. Some even belong to the dewey decimal system. There's no less than 3 ways to put these books onto shelves--even more if you sub categorize, and no one will ever be happy with the way that things are organized. I put all of an author's books together, regardless of subject, and some people are very happy. I alphabetize by title, some people are delighted. Others hate it. All of these are legitimate ways of sorting books, but everyone has a different opinion of what is best.

I mean, if I want to find all the books on werewolves, sorting by subject seems very nice. But If I want all of Bruce Coville's books, then having to go to a dozen different shelves would be annoying.

Tag what you see is the solution we've chosen for e621. Again, over many years of discussion.

As I said, It is not perfect. Which means some people will be unhappy. and that is why this issue comes up so often. However, we have over 300,000 users-with-accounts, and I imagine many more who've never made an account. We've had 4 new accounts in the last hour, and it's the middle of the night in the US. 160 new users in the last 24 hours.

That's about 5000 in a 30 day period, by the way.

Seems pretyt clear to me why it keeps coming up, just like we have to tell people to use the 'find the artist' thread, just like we have to tell people to try and make only one thread when they have a dozen related aliases. Because people.

Either there's something wrong with the rule, which you (staff) don't believe,

No, I"m pretty sure I've stated it very clearly, repeatedly, that it's not perfect.

Also, if you go back to page one of this thread, we discuss this very nicely, and talk about some ideas that will help solve this problem, as well as what the problem with it was. We're open to discussing it. We know it's not perfect.

so the alternative is that we (users) are idiots, so much that you LOCK otherwise incorrect tags.

We lock things like gender tags when people start fighting over it. WE don't just randomly giggle and lock posts because we feel like it.

The post mentioned in the original post was tagged as follows:

Also, most of that? Happened in a 48 hour period.

As you can see, people rather strongly disagreed about what the 'correct' tag was.

This right here is why TWYS pisses me off so much: Disregards artist intentions and lore, disregards users by outright lying to them (especially when it comes to blacklists),

See. No.

Let's say you don't like pictures of males. like, you want to blacklist them. Lesbian or solo girl action only.

You search for 'tiger' because that is your jam. Stripey girls!

your search shows you this:

post #1623777 - Jazz is really concerned about those holiday pounds! She knew she shouldn't have had that slice of cheese cake!

Maybe foxes are better?

post #1622395 - She knew she'd been a bad bad girl, and the only answer was to get a the spanking she deserves!
post #1610154 - Amy was so excited to be at the beach! The warm sun felt so good!

These are not what you wanted when you searched female.

We allow for descriptions to give ALL SORTS of information about the characters-- including "this character is a girl!" and what not. WE allow for the artists to start whatever they want in the description and highly encourage people to use descriptions properly.

But when you blacklist 'male' you shouldn't still get Jazz and Amy from up there. If you search female, you should get things that look like females. To offer a masculine-looking figure to a user seeking female images is also LYING.

and makes the mods here look like douches who can't admit being wrong about anything (and despite everything, I do think you are better than that).

As I've said, it's not perfect. But our job is to try and settle bickering down by making final calls on these sorts of things. We're not perfect. Far from it. and we're not making decisions in a vacuum either. There's a lot of talk and communication going on to say "hey! what do you think, fellow moderators?" and any person is more than welcome to say "hey, I think I disagree with this. This is why!" and we're welcome to *talk* about it, assuming we're approached politely, and not... well, some people get incredibly aggressive for literally no reason. (literally! I've seen people get pissy about having their negative records deleted or neutralized...)

I also want to add that the topic was already somewhat heated prior to this thread's inception; we had this 130 post long shitshow thread that was locked sixteen days prior to this thread's start because the OP was intentionally arguing in bad faith: forum #256201, in addition there were the however many comments that were on the post mentioned in the OP and related posts. So a lot of what could be seen as dismissal of a user could be more attributed to frustration related to a topic that had just recently been (to an extent) concluded.

CCoyote said:
You know what feature I'd like to see? Something that automatically locks and closes literally every single thread pertaining to "I have a better idea than TWYS" the second it's posted.

OMG this again. -.-

While a part of me agrees, it's not generally our rule to silence people who generally want to make the site a better place-- as, that *is* ultimately their goal here, y'know?

We shouldn't censor civil polite discussion...

Now if only peopel could keep it civil....

edit: I borked my words :(

Sorry to necro a month-old thread, but I've never really chimed in on this topic, and I've always been one of the people who wants the system to change. My argument is also one from searchability, and I want to offer this example.

post #1308139

Now, let's say someone searches female and finds this picture. They think, "Oh, she's cute! Lemme click on this character tag and see some more of... oh. She has a dick in most of these pictures. Because 'she' is a crossdresser." I don't think that's an ideal result. Meanwhile, if I search crossdressing male, this is exactly the kind of thing I'd be happy to see.

Obviously, SnowWolf's examples are good too. I don't think people should be allowed to add tags that are obviously contradicted by what's seen in the picture. But I think some middle ground could work. If you could look at the tag, and then look at the picture, and say "Okay, that makes sense," I don't see the problem with adding tags based on artist intent. For gender at least.

#mikhailaisagirlsname

If you can't handle the occasional stray dick in your search when not currently looking for wieners you should definitely not search e621 in the first place. Trouser snakes in places where there should not be any are going to be the tamest things sneaking up on you here.

Del_Coocnat said:
Sorry to necro a month-old thread, but I've never really chimed in on this topic, and I've always been one of the people who wants the system to change. My argument is also one from searchability, and I want to offer this example.

post #1308139

Now, let's say someone searches female and finds this picture. They think, "Oh, she's cute! Lemme click on this character tag and see some more of... oh. She has a dick in most of these pictures. Because 'she' is a crossdresser." I don't think that's an ideal result. Meanwhile, if I search crossdressing male, this is exactly the kind of thing I'd be happy to see.

This is of course, a very good point!

But let me offer the counter.

If I search for males, jsut males, nothing in particular, and find that image, then the reaction is "What? what's this? This is a female. This is clearly mistagged..." and maybe I get angry, or maybe I just decide that e621 is not good at tags, or maybe I retag it and cause a quiet tag war, because this character is a BOY not a GIRL, despite how it looks.

There's not really a good middle ground shy of tagging with out existing tag structure. we could probably stir up some solutions, but they'd involve re-tagging the entire site, etc etc etc.

Obviously, SnowWolf's examples are good too. I don't think people should be allowed to add tags that are obviously contradicted by what's seen in the picture. But I think some middle ground could work. If you could look at the tag, and then look at the picture, and say "Okay, that makes sense," I don't see the problem with adding tags based on artist intent. For gender at least.

I mean, the picture you shared, to me, even with the knowledge that there is a penis installed, does not look masculine in the slightest. I'd never see this picture and say "okay that makes sense"...

This is basically just... an alternative solution that has different problems. It's not perfect, but nothing is.