You guys know there is a difference between having a male in an artwork alongside other people and having the artwork only containing a solo male, right?

Why has this changed?

The solo_male tag was aliased to male in 2015. The reason is because there's very little benefit in having a solo_male tag when you can just tag solo male.

See also forum #82389 and forum #147608.

leomole said:
The solo_male tag was aliased to male in 2015. The reason is because there's very little benefit in having a solo_male tag when you can just tag solo male.

See also forum #82389 and forum #147608.

Understood, but from someone outside of site management or of the tagging expertise, I still think having a single tag that tells you as much as two tags separately, seems simpler.

ragnarokstravius said:
Understood, but from someone outside of site management or of the tagging expertise, I still think having a single tag that tells you as much as two tags separately, seems simpler.

The problem is that the philosophy can be applied to almost any combination of tags on this site. If it's OK to make combination tags for groupings & genders, "solo_male", then why shouldn't the others tags get such privileges? This would cause a significant tag bloat, especially per-post where their tags could be multiplied by introducing those tags. Just go to a post and see how many combinations that can be made with one tag, since it's not just "solo_*gender*" that can be made into a single tag.

Your suggested tag is literally just the solo male tag combination, why should "solo_male" be introduced when there is no (or negligible) difference?

Combining tags like that may seem simpler but it actually creates a lot of tag bloat. Because you can have 1, 2, 3 or more of males, females, gynomorphs or andromorphs. That's 16 new tags that add no additional information or functionality to the site. That's why we got rid of tags like "female_fox," because you can have males and females of every species. Hundreds of new tags, inconsistently applied and a nightmare to manage.

leomole said:
Combining tags like that may seem simpler but it actually creates a lot of tag bloat. Because you can have 1, 2, 3 or more of males, females, gynomorphs or andromorphs. That's 16 new tags that add no additional information or functionality to the site. That's why we got rid of tags like "female_fox," because you can have males and females of every species. Hundreds of new tags, inconsistently applied and a nightmare to manage.

The lack of tag grouping is a pain sometimes though. You could search for female and fox together, and end up with a picture that has a female human and a male fox. Sadly, there might not be any good way to group things without exponential bloat.

Was talking in E-hentai's IRC channel about same problem. That site only has a very narrow set of possibilities and has far fewer tags, and it's still a nightmare. Stuff like cat girl and male:furry and so on have to have namespaces. Like, same thing here would be something like female:feline female:anthro implication equivalent.

A workaround for special cases is something like pools/sets? Meh, nothing stops someone from cloning a Booru, too.

I think the problem lies not in the fact that one can simply search for solo males by combining the tags, well, "solo" and "male", but in the fact that one cannot filter out such results. So, if for example I wanted to see any and all content depicting a male with anything else other than another male, then whilst the "-male/male" tag excludes all male on male action, there's no way for me to further filter out solo male action. I can't simply use the "-male" tag, because this then excludes male/female, male/intersex, male/[liteally anything else]. Thus, instead of filtering out solo_males, I instead have to include everything else under the sun other than solo males via the use of the OR operator. So, for example, my result may end up looking like this:

-male/male ~male/female ~male/intersex ~male/gynomorph ~male/andromorph ~male/ambiguous

Even if this got me the exact results I was looking for, this would be at a sacrifice of the one and only OR operator, since it is now essentionally bound by gender.

Having a solo_male (and solo_female for the female counterpart) would greatly simplify this process, since then all you'd have to do is this:

-solo_male -male/male

I would keep it simple: just include the solo_male and solo_female tags, given that sex is the primary characteristic that influences peoples search results. These two tags alone would be of great utility by allowing people to easily filter out content exclusively depicting males or females. To put it another way, this would be the equivolant of allowing someone to provide one answer to the question "what is your favourite color", rather than having to say "well, not red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, or violet" when all they really mean is "blue".

ketchupee1 said:
I think the problem lies not in the fact that one can simply search for solo males by combining the tags, well, "solo" and "male", but in the fact that one cannot filter out such results. So, if for example I wanted to see any and all content depicting a male with anything else other than another male, then whilst the "-male/male" tag excludes all male on male action, there's no way for me to further filter out solo male action. I can't simply use the "-male" tag, because this then excludes male/female, male/intersex, male/[liteally anything else]. Thus, instead of filtering out solo_males, I instead have to include everything else under the sun other than solo males via the use of the OR operator. So, for example, my result may end up looking like this:

-male/male ~male/female ~male/intersex ~male/gynomorph ~male/andromorph ~male/ambiguous

Even if this got me the exact results I was looking for, this would be at a sacrifice of the one and only OR operator, since it is now essentionally bound by gender.

Having a solo_male (and solo_female for the female counterpart) would greatly simplify this process, since then all you'd have to do is this:

-solo_male -male/male

I would keep it simple: just include the solo_male and solo_female tags, given that sex is the primary characteristic that influences peoples search results. These two tags alone would be of great utility by allowing people to easily filter out content exclusively depicting males or females. To put it another way, this would be the equivolant of allowing someone to provide one answer to the question "what is your favourite color", rather than having to say "well, not red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, or violet" when all they really mean is "blue".

You can blacklist male solo.

furrin_gok said:
You can blacklist male solo.

Fair enough, but this then comes at the expense of flexibility. I still think the male_solo and female_solo tag should be included, since tagging such works would be trivial (it's immediately obvious if it's solo or not solo), especially when compared to tags such as "gynomorph/male/male", "male_dominating_anthro", or "group_transformation".

Aside from that, however, the principle extrapolates very poorly, since if this were the case for other tags, we'd have to consciously always keep track of what's blacklisted and what's not in order to obtain the correct results for any given search.

As an alternative, someone proposed bringing back the “(gender)_only“ tags for images that include only characters of that gender, whether it’s one character or twenty. There are a number of reasons that might be a useful tag, and I believe it would also be able to be used for the same purpose that you propose bringing back solo_male.

scaliespe said:
As an alternative, someone proposed bringing back the “(gender)_only“ tags for images that include only characters of that gender, whether it’s one character or twenty. There are a number of reasons that might be a useful tag, and I believe it would also be able to be used for the same purpose that you propose bringing back solo_male.

I actually think that would be really good, because this seems like it would be very flexible. So one could search for male_only to return all male-exclusive related content, for those who are into only male (and not female) related content, while also providing the option to couple this with the solo, duo, or group tags, returning only male-exclusive solo, duo, or group content. This actually seems like a solution that would cater to all parties!

Sigh, I looked up "male_only", and it converts to "male". Please can we have the male_only and female_only tags?

ketchupee1 said:
So one could search for male_only to return all male-exclusive related content, for those who are into only male (and not female) related content

This would then have a problem with ambiguous_gender. ambiguous_gender is not its own gender/sex, it could still be male, female, or intersex, but a determination can't be made (often, but not always, allowing people to interpret it as whatever sex they want). Posts like
post #2840348 post #2842401
wouldn't be male_only, even though there's no obvious female or intersex character. Same with
post #2145841 post #2840119
These could easily be interpreted as male/male and work for people looking for male-only content. But when you actually look at it, you notice the lack of defining masculine characteristics for one of the characters causing it to be ambiguous_gender instead. With such a flimsy line between what would be considered <gender>_only, I can't see the tag providing what people actually want without including what people don't expect to find, and excluding what they would expect to find.

While I think that’s a fair point, it’s better to have a search that leaves out things you might want than to not be able to perform the search at all. I mean, that’s already the case with _every_ search due to incomplete tagging. Searching for red_shirt won’t return every single image on this site containing a red shirt, because not every image containing a red shirt is tagged with red_shirt. That doesn’t make the tag useless, though. If you’re searching for red shirts, you’ll still get thousands of relevant search results, even if you’re missing some. Likewise, by applying male_only and female_only and etc. only to posts that unambiguously contain that single gender, you can turn up plenty of relevant results and likely no irrelevant ones. Again, I think that’s better than not having the tag at all. It’s not like the existence of the tag actually causes any problems, and it’d be easy to maintain with a tag bot.