UPDATE: Unnecessarily aggressive post ahead made by someone with lack of information.

WARNING: Sorry for my attitude but this is really pissing me off

You may or may not have seen a lot of tickets written "Invalid locked tags" on the tickets page.

Well, I basically found out that a lot of posts from the character Muscle Mouse are incorrectly tagged, including people in the comments contesting that.

Tags confirming that the character is female when there is no evidence of that in the image, going against the Tag What You See policy.

To my revolt, these tags are locked.

I didn't look at the edit history because I'm not interested in knowing who did this, I just reported all of them expecting that it would be fixed (I also accidentally reported one child post).

While doing this I noticed a note saying "Abuse of this system will lead to disciplinary action".

That convinced me to write this, also because it makes no sense to report all these posts if it's very likely that many others on this site have the same problem.

If they're not "collective mistakes", then I can say that injustice reigns in literally everywhere, including e621, and I really hope it's not an abuse of power.

At first I didn't agree with TWYS, for me, if the artist is saying that the character's gender is X, it's because it's X.

No one should know more than the creator of the work, but the idea is to tag only what the poster sees, and it makes sense, because the tags describe the content, not it's context.

It's internal information vs. external information.

The problem is that certain people do worse than tagging external information, they tag what they think they're seeing or what they want to see.

And the worst is when the invalid tags are locked.

At least in Muscle Mouse's case, the logic apparently is: if there's a penis, it's male, if there's nothing, it's female (with rare exceptions).

If I get banned (or something like that) because of this post and/or because of the tickets and nothing gets solved, then unfortunately e621 is a hopeless case.

goatfox said:
If I get banned (or something like that) because of this post and/or because of the tickets and nothing gets solved, then unfortunately e621 is a hopeless case.

E621 is a hopeless case because you failed to read a warning and created 19 support tickets?
Okay then.

goatfox said:
Tags confirming that the character is female when there is no evidence of that in the image, going against the Tag What You See policy.

...

At least in Muscle Mouse's case, the logic apparently is: if there's a penis, it's male, if there's nothing, it's female (with rare exceptions).

In your eyes, what do you think qualifies as female? Other than the apparent genitalia?

While doing this I noticed a note saying "Abuse of this system will lead to disciplinary action".

...

The problem is that certain people do worse than tagging external information, they tag what they think they're seeing or what they want to see.

...

And the worst is when the invalid tags are locked.

When tags are locked, it's for a good reason (such as preventing a tag war).

Only mods can lock tags, which means it is up to their judgment on the appropriateness of tags on posts in relation to the site's policies.

If you do believe that tags are incorrectly locked (and sometimes this does happen), you can, in all your rights, contest these locked tags via the report system.
However, once the mods have told you the reason behind the locked tags and you continue to erroneously report these posts, then it will be considered as 'abuse'.

bitwolfy said:
E621 is a hopeless case because you failed to read a warning and created 19 support tickets?
Okay then.

No, this isn't about me, I'm saying it would be a "hopeless case" IF they only cared about punishing an user rather then [also] fixing issues.
The intention of this post is to report a serious problem.

thegreatwolfgang said:
In your eyes, what do you think qualifies as female? Other than the apparent genitalia?

I don't know, we live in a world where many gender identities exists, many are declared by the person themselves, we tag what we're seeing, not who we're seeing, if there's no evidence of any gender, that's when "ambiguous_gender" comes in.

thegreatwolfgang said:
When tags are locked, it's for a good reason (such as preventing a tag war).

Only mods can lock tags, which means it is up to their judgment on the appropriateness of tags on posts in relation to the site's policies.

If you do believe that tags are incorrectly locked (and sometimes this does happen), you can, in all your rights, contest these locked tags via the report system.
However, once the mods have told you the reason behind the locked tags and you continue to erroneously report these posts, then it will be considered as 'abuse'.

It's basically like creating a law that you won't follow.

It's all logic, I'm not bragging saying I'm right because "I am right", I'm saying I'm right because it's logic.

Also, locking the wrong tags it's like punishing the victim and giving freedom to the guilty.

howto:tag_genders specifically outlines what to do when genitals are not visible. There's no problem here, you just fundamentally misunderstand gender tagging.

goatfox said:
I don't know, we live in a world where many gender identities exists, many are declared by the person themselves, we tag what we're seeing, not who we're seeing, if there's no evidence of any gender, that's when "ambiguous_gender" comes in.

Like what @Lafcadio has said, it seems that you are misinformed by how gender is tagged on the site.

Yes, it is true that we do tag based on what we see.
But, in the absence of apparent genitalia and breasts, we can also tag based on what we know in terms of gender cues.

To quote the How to Tag Genders page:

• Masculine (anthro, humanoid): Broad shoulders, thicker/flatter eyebrows, squared jaw, prominent "adams apple", body fat distributed mostly to lower torso ("beer gut"/"apple shape"), facial hair (mustache, beard), thicker arm and body hair.
• Feminine (anthro, humanoid): Usually smaller in proportion to masculine characters, wide hips and pelvis, more arched eyebrows, smaller hands/feet, breasts, body fat distributed to lower/mid torso and thighs ("pear shape").

If their bodies look masculine/feminine, it is enough for the male/female tags to be justified.
Ambiguous_gender should only apply in cases where you really cannot make out their gender based on the (limited) visual cues.

If it disappoints you so much that a canonically male character is being tagged as female, you can always add the male_(lore) tag.

UPDATE: Another unnecessarily aggressive post, this one no longer represent 100% of my opinion.

As I feared.

Well then, first of all I want to thank you two who helped me, and apologize for not getting more informed, I was going to justify that I never wanted to go out there editing tags but this is not a justification.

BUT now I want to repeat the warning I made at the beginning and also say that nothing I write from now on (necessarily) refers to a specific person, but to e621, and that I sometimes lose a formal posture in situations like this.

Let's conclude: e621's gender tagging policy is terrible, if not the worst.

Again, it's not Tag What You See, it's Tag What You Think You See.

The policy basically induces who's posting to presume things and define the genre based on stereotypes, and what should organize actually makes a big mess.

Viewers don't need to know how things work on the site, so they will use the tags as a source of information (even if they shouldn't), and will think they're seeing a woman when they're actually seeing a man, or think they're seeing a man when they're actually seeing a woman. They'll get confused when they discover that it's not what they thought, and using the lore tags (which few use) would only increase the confusion.

Searching by genres is meaningless if the person is, for example, looking for X (and only X) and the site gives you what appears to be X (even knowing they're not).

If people don't care so much about the character genders at the point you can tell them that an X is Y, then it would be much better to get rid of all the genre tags, because they would be unnecessary.

On the other hand, let's suppose the following [ridiculous] situation involving blacklisting:

A "macho man" joins e621.
-Hey bro, I don't wanna see any fags here, so just in case, I'm gonna blacklist the males - or male/male which would make more sense, ambiguous_gender included.
Then the "macho man" sees a post, in which no genitalia appears, saying "female" and finds out in the comments that he has "done things" to one or more men. Then he blames everything and everyone for "making" him gay or for making him have to "wash" his eyes.

Yeah, it's ridiculous but it's just an example of how this policy makes no sense.

It would be better to Tag What It IS based on the source and use Tag What You See only when you don't have the source or the source does not give this information, using ambiguous_gender whenever there is no visual evidence.

I joined e621 in 2017 thinking what anyone would think, the genre in the tags is a fact, simple as that. I even considered start editing posts to fix, or better, detail the tags (because that would avoids conflicts). I didn't do that, and a while later I discovered TWYS, so I became uncomfortable and less interested in the site.
Now the interest has gone to zero.

It reminds me of when I used to edit articles on Wikipedia in 2016, I didn't liked some rules at first, but then I understood that they made sense (since then, if I'm not wrong, more rules have been made).
In this case here, it just doesn't make sense, being 100% honest, that was the worst rule I remember seeing.

It kinda breaks my heart to say that even Rule 34 (which is really, really messy) is slightly better because of that.

Sorry about this, I know that probably nobody here (at e621) will agree with anything I said and I can be heavily criticized, but that's it.

In fact, being banned wouldn't be a problem at all at this point because I give up :/

I'm kinda' with Goat on this one. Just subbed in a ticket to dispute a locked "female" tagged image when quite honestly the only things dubbing it "female" were stuff that'd just as easily qualify for a combo "girly" + "ambiguous gender" tag.

TWYtyS in the case of sexualities doesn't really bother me because I swing like a game of tetherball, but I can see where Goat's coming from in the case of, say, explicitly monosexual folk finding themselves a little distressed that they just whacked it to a character only to find they've got they aren't into. It feels both bonkers and tedious to have to block out an incredibly specific tag that's solely in-place to alleviate the mere presence of TWYtyS.

I still contend that TWYtyS is kind of a dumpster fire, especially when you start to think outside of a cis- mindset, or when uploaders and/or commenters sometimes deliberately misgender a character. Ultimately though, it doesn't bother me (too much) unless it's locked in something that really does not have any actual weight enforcing that.

"TWYS sexually confused me"
This is one of the worst takes on "TWYS bad" I've seen in a while.

Tags are used to allow people to search (or blacklist) specific content. Basing tags on information provided by the artist directly and negatively affects that.
As an example, let's take these images:

post #1957947 post #2473825 post #1311422

According to the artists, these are all futas. If they were tagged according to the artists' intentions, people who were looking for futa content specifically would be confused, as the images do not prominently feature futa characters. Meanwhile, people who blacklist futa content would never see these images at all, even though they might be interested in something like that.

That's all there is to say about that.

Edit: Replaced an example image with a better one

goatfox said:
stuff

What you think you see, hmm?

You would prefer... tagging what you don't think you see? Tagging what you see without thinking? The eyes are wired to the brain, I hate to tell you this, but in order to tag what you see you inherently look at something, think "I see this", and then proceed to tag it.

There are proper channels for disputing what you believe is incorrect. If tags are upheld and you are applying this much anger and energy to fictional images on the internet, I highly recommend taking a nap and maybe avoiding the internet for a while. This site's tagging system is meant for a casual user to use tags to find images that visually represent what they are after. Stories and "lore" are irrelevant, though if you want to tag what you can't see, or if the story of whatever image or the character in it conflicts with what is visually apparent, an entire Lore tag system was implemented specifically for that purpose.

Or you could behave in a juvenile manner like you were given an oatmeal cookie instead of chocolate chip, burn the bridge, ask to be banned, and just not use the site.

bitwolfy said:
Words

Pretty sure most if not all of that's at Goat.

Not to sidetrack or act like I'm being high & mighty and decimating your argument but that (EDIT: I'm referring to post 2245101 which has since been replaced)blatantly has some backsack action going on despite its tags and should've been (I already did it) updated accordingly. The parent post, which is less obvious, is also tagged "gynomorph." Again, not trying to count that as a win for "down with TWYS," but that's definitely a slip-up from someone's end.
EDIT: Actually, hey! That character in the first image is trans-NB! I feel like that's a WHOLE other can of worms to open up on whether or not they qualify for the "gynomorph_(lore)" tag. Not to say you can't be intersex AND trans, but you can definitely have top/bottom surgery and not be intersex. That'd probably call on asking the character owner, but that's not helpful to this debate. (I might still do that if I feel inclined to go on a tagging spree again, but that's irrelevant)

I feel like there's a very... weird line in regards to f*ta content. That's a very different line in that regard compared to "male/female" debates that tack on a whole other layer of trouble. I'll concede that that's a fair point for TWYS, but I still maintain my stance.

Where I'm coming from, I'm primarily annoyed in regards to characters with zero indicative traits of sex being dictated as one or the other, and subsequently locked.

tripwyre said: ...

Damn, you are right. Those are indeed balls.
Sorry, I'm pretty tired, and that looked like a pussy at a glance. I now realize that a pussy would be located higher up, closer to the anus.
I replaced that image with another one.

Going back to the original post, I don't disagree with the notion that some of the muscle_mouse posts should be tagged as ambiguous_gender, not locked in on female. I just don't think that a few mistakes like that justify tearing down the whole system.

bitwolfy said:
saywords

No worries, slip-ups happen. That's another detail I'll amend to my post, hahah. I also added piece about how the first one is trans and nonbinary, putting the status as "gynomorph_(lore)" into question (namely the definition of it being intersex). But that's... not entirely relevant so much as a question towards people's tagging decisions.

Picking up on that same bit, that's a fair & valid point. I can see that TWYS has its uses now, but it's definitely resulted in unfortunate cases like the Muscle Mouse bit and a certain character I'm likewise frustrated about getting locked into a sex-specific tag that really need to uh, not be that.

EDIT: ACK! That new second image is another trans character! The more I see things getting stuck into the "gynomorph_(lore)" tag the more I become a little flustered with it. I still agree to TWYS but I feel like the trans and/or gender nonconforming characters seem to get lumped into things haphazardly.
(sorry for the constant edits. noticed one error after another)

bitwolfy said:
Meanwhile, people who blacklist futa content would never see these images at all, even though they might be interested in something like that.

I think what they are trying to emphasise is that some people may get self-conscious after having 'gratified' oneself to a content that they would otherwise be disgusted by, which remind me of the old Felix Argyle memes.

tripwyre said:
Where I'm coming from, I'm primarily annoyed in regards to characters with zero indicative traits of sex being dictated as one or the other, and subsequently locked.

I can understand the frustration, perhaps one day the tagging might change or improve.
But as it currently stands, we also tag based on what we think (the gender) resembles best in the post, even in the absence of discernible features like breasts and genitalia.

thegreatwolfgang said:
...even in the absence of discernible features like breasts and genitalia.

I feel like I should clarify this is included in my "there are no indicative traits of sex" complaint.

i'll say it, transgendering broke the OG rule of tag what you see and it wont ever be the same.

caj983tka0dg said:
i'll say it, transgendering broke the OG rule of tag what you see and it wont ever be the same.

Dare I ask how? I'm not familiar with the history of the trans-tags but I know for a fact this has been an issue far-longer than the trans tags being open knowledge.

bitwolfy said:
Going back to the original post, I don't disagree with the notion that some of the muscle_mouse posts should be tagged as ambiguous_gender, not locked in on female. I just don't think that a few mistakes like that justify tearing down the whole system.

Having been around both the Mikhaila and Reggie dramas it always felt like the admins go all-in on hard-locking the tag people are complaining about as soon as they're fed up with it.

tripwyre said:
I also added piece about how the first one is trans and nonbinary, putting the status as "gynomorph_(lore)" into question (namely the definition of it being intersex). But that's... not entirely relevant so much as a question towards people's tagging decisions.

gynomorph_(lore) is still solely concerned with physical characteristics. The trans and nonbinary lore tags are the only actual-gender based tags.
I keep saying it's too confusing to people that the site terminology says gender where it means sex.

magnuseffect said:
Having been around both the Mikhaila and Reggie dramas it always felt like the admins go all-in on hard-locking the tag people are complaining about as soon as they're fed up with it.

That doesn't bode well.

magnuseffect said:
gynomorph_(lore) is still solely concerned with physical characteristics. The trans and nonbinary lore tags are still only actual-gender based tags.
I keep saying it's too confusing to people that the site terminology says gender where it means sex.

Like I said in that post, gynomorph_(lore) explicitly says "intersex character." There's a distinct line between being trans and intersex that sometimes happens to intersect, but they're still different. By definition intersex refers to this being an at-birth scenario, whereas trans tags make the validity of that dubious, depending. I might just be looking into definitions a little too deeply, though.

tripwyre said:
There's a distinct line between being trans and intersex that sometimes happens to intersect, but they're still different. By definition intersex refers to this being an at-birth scenario, whereas trans tags make the validity of that dubious, depending. I might just be looking into definitions a little too deeply, though.

The site-terminology of intersex is also removed from real-world definition. I can see it being concerning to a lot of people though, as it muddles genetically-intersex people in with fantasy-idealised constructs.

magnuseffect said:
The site-terminology of intersex is also removed from real-world definition. I can see it being concerning to a lot of people though, as it muddles genetically-intersex people in with fantasy-idealised constructs.

Guh, that's a fair point. I didn't check into that one. That's a my bad.

I'm pretty new to this site. A bit more than half a year. At first I thought e621 is the chocolate site under all that dung sites. While I still agree that e621 is one of the best ones (if not the best even though I'm no furry) it's dung, too, like it revealed itself as to me a few weeks ago.
TWYS is pretty logical why I thought that using it is good even if I don't liked it that much.
This post included shows just in what bad way rules and customs got implemented or transformed to such an extent that IMO having sometimes no rules is better.
Tagging feminine or masculine as female or male is plainly stupid. Just make two more tags feminine_appearance and masculine_appearance.

No real transparency.
Logical things get butchered with rules to an extend that it looses all the actual logic behind.
Hazy phrasing admins work on hours and hours to make it even hazier.
Problems and topics get more often solved subjectively than objectively.
Bad way of implementing lore_tags which could solve soooo many problems.

I'm still somehow bound to here because how "good" this site is but I'm just disappointed with this discussion just adding another great part of disappointment to it.
I think I'll soon switch to just downloading what I find here and not mingling in the community I thought I found.

Oh well. Even if I'm disappointed, this site is free and has some good stuff. So I appreciate that at least.

Have a fine day

agiant said:
No real transparency.
Logical things get butchered with rules to an extend that it looses all the actual logic behind.
Hazy phrasing admins work on hours and hours to make it even hazier.
Problems and topics get more often solved subjectively than objectively.
Bad way of implementing lore_tags which could solve soooo many problems.

I'm not terribly active on the forum, but I'm not sure what you're referring to.

agiant said:
No real transparency.

I think a lot of that is that there's so much in the way of already-answered questions and baseless complaint that something has to be pretty significant before the admins can even put any thought into it, and 99% of member-opinions literally do not matter.
It doesn't help that most (if not all? I'm not privy to the funding breakdown.) of the staff aren't paid to put up with all this.

strikerman said:
I'm not terribly active on the forum, but I'm not sure what you're referring to.

Let's stay at the topic this post was posted as.
All the active "good" members walk around stating "TWYS, TWYS". TWYS is pretty clear and easy to understand but if you have the luck to stumble upon some funny things like these locked gender tags (I didn't stumble upon those, I have other experiences though) you start to check why and than you see some weird things like if something looks feminine you tag it as female. You need and have to include some of these to lighten the workload of managing the server but if it feels like there are more such exemptions without any logic behind it whatsoever than logical ones left, TWYS looses almost all it's logic and simplicity.

Another one of my favorite topics are lore tags. Actually lore tags are a bit earlier than I got a bit used to the site. So I can make only some assumptions and deductions from what is there.
They started with the right direction but in one of the most wrong ways. They wanted to create mirror tags (or at least that's what I understand from this thread ) for things that actually can't be tagged with TWYS like genders sometimes for example. One mistake I can see though for example is they just started to collect and collect really useful or not. Anyways that it looks like it got axed and I say it looks like because there is no update in the actual thread but the lore tags which look like hosted much more than just 11 (+1 useless) tags but don't anymore. So what happened? I don't know. So what is happening? I don't know.

Another point are features. They have a very nice template how you should do things to suggest a feature and what could happen like it getting denied or approved or something. I have some features I suggested which just collect dust in some corner. They don't follow their own script or don't update it.

Here is an example on some "improvements" on some rules. You have to scroll a bit until you get to my comment. It starts a few comments before mine.

Instead of setting some basic logical structure like threshold and time limits some things just change and some don't.
These are just some examples. I collected some more in just six months.

Last but not least I don't want to undermine the things the people do for this site and like I said this is still one of the best sites under it's category. Anyways a soccer/football ball is as good as it is round and if it is an egg it's bad even if your egg is the most beautiful or roundest out there.

magnuseffect said:
I think a lot of that is that there's so much in the way of already-answered questions and baseless complaint that something has to be pretty significant before the admins can even put any thought into it, and 99% of member-opinions literally do not matter.
It doesn't help that most (if not all? I'm not privy to the funding breakdown.) of the staff aren't paid to put up with all this.

Something that could solve some of the problems in that regard could be some updates actually. Update the guidlines for features or the lore tags for example. I for example read every single comment on the lore tags thread searched for it and checked other threads out that could help with my questions for naught. In the end I opened a thread and asked some simple questions and got many replies but didn't get an answer to my questions.
These are only examples.

agiant said:
Something that could solve some of the problems in that regard could be some updates actually. Update the guidlines for features or the lore tags for example. I for example read every single comment on the lore tags thread searched for it and checked other threads out that could help with my questions for naught. In the end I opened a thread and asked some simple questions and got many replies but didn't get an answer to my questions.
These are only examples.

My point was that there isn't enough energy to work an update like this.
It also doesn't help that we're all going to think we're Right, on wildly varying opinions.

magnuseffect said:
My point was that there isn't enough energy to work an update like this.
It also doesn't help that we're all going to think we're Right, on wildly varying opinions.

Sorry but I see wasted energy here and there. A simple update like "We are quite busy at the moment. So there will be not much to no response for your feature requests" is not much to do.
Or in the lore tags something like "The task how we started it revealed itself as something bigger than we could handle. For the time being we reduce the lore tags to a bare minimum of the gender tags and the incest tag and close further implementation. We will update this thread when we take the task back on."

Also I don't know if I seem like someone who thinks his thoughts are the right ones but I'm the last person to think like that. I'm always questioning myself and open for discussions as long as they stay objective and logical because human beings can't think outside of some boxes sometimes. But exactly that is one of the things missing. People get personal, illogical or don't listen.

agiant said:
All the active "good" members walk around stating "TWYS, TWYS". TWYS is pretty clear and easy to understand but if you have the luck to stumble upon some funny things like these locked gender tags (I didn't stumble upon those, I have other experiences though) you start to check why and than you see some weird things like if something looks feminine you tag it as female.

I'm not sure how it's a "funny thing". The female tag is used for characters that look female. Something that's feminine is (characteristically) female, by definition . If you don't see apparent breasts or a pussy to tag it female, other feminine traits are then considered, which people can make their best guess with. If it's still unclear, then it's ambiguous.

It's not an objective standard, reasonable people can disagree on whether the traits a given character has classifies as a given gender/sex or not. Locked tags are the result of the staff ending user disagreements, meaning they're locked as a result of users already having fought over what tags should apply (at least in similar pictures). And with locking it, they make their own subjective judgment based on the available factors. Their judgment is no better or worse than yours, but as the purpose of the lock is to end tag wars, there's not much point to getting worked up over it.

I took a few steps back. Whatever the reason I catch myself being or taking few things to aggressively. So sorry for that. I have some points I agree here, some I don't but I'll step out of the discussion for now.

watsit said:
I'm not sure how it's a "funny thing". The female tag is used for characters that look female. Something that's feminine is (characteristically) female, by definition . If you don't see apparent breasts or a pussy to tag it female, other feminine traits are then considered, which people can make their best guess with. If it's still unclear, then it's ambiguous.

It's not an objective standard, reasonable people can disagree on whether the traits a given character has classifies as a given gender/sex or not. Locked tags are the result of the staff ending user disagreements, meaning they're locked as a result of users already having fought over what tags should apply (at least in similar pictures). And with locking it, they make their own subjective judgment based on the available factors. Their judgment is no better or worse than yours, but as the purpose of the lock is to end tag wars, there's not much point to getting worked up over it.

You're absolutely right with that point.

Jeez, a day out and all these posts were made. I'm afraid to read them but here we go...

votp said:
What you think you see, hmm?

You would prefer... tagging what you don't think you see? Tagging what you see without thinking? The eyes are wired to the brain, I hate to tell you this, but in order to tag what you see you inherently look at something, think "I see this", and then proceed to tag it.

votp said:
Or you could behave in a juvenile manner like you were given an oatmeal cookie instead of chocolate chip, burn the bridge, ask to be banned, and just not use the site.

Mocking won't get you anywhere. You know pretty well what I meant by "Tag What You Think You See".

votp said:
There are proper channels for disputing what you believe is incorrect. If tags are upheld and you are applying this much anger and energy to fictional images on the internet, I highly recommend taking a nap and maybe avoiding the internet for a while.

If I'm not wrong, half of being a furry involves fictional stuff.

votp said:
This site's tagging system is meant for a casual user to use tags to find images that visually represent what they are after.
Stories and "lore" are irrelevant, though if you want to tag what you can't see, or if the story of whatever image or the character in it conflicts with what is visually apparent, an entire Lore tag system was implemented specifically for that purpose.

The other general tags are pretty fine in that case, but using genders to look for what you visually see? Would be better to replace them with something like "female_looking" or "male_looking" instead.
People aren't obligated to know that they should always look for what they visually want and not what they basically want.
I forgot to mention this, but it would also be better to tag "ambiguous_gender" everytime there's no visual evidence, so I'm not saying the only solution would be tagging what you can't see.

bitwolfy said:
Going back to the original post, I don't disagree with the notion that some of the muscle_mouse posts should be tagged as ambiguous_gender, not locked in on female. I just don't think that a few mistakes like that justify tearing down the whole system.

Whoa, chill out, I don't want to tear the system down, I just really wish it could be improved

Edit: Now that I thought, I realized my post sounded like a terrorist attack against the site, I really apologize for that.

thegreatwolfgang said:
I think what they are trying to emphasise is that some people may get self-conscious after having 'gratified' oneself to a content that they would otherwise be disgusted by, which remind me of the old Felix Argyle memes.

Correct!

magnuseffect said:
Having been around both the Mikhaila and Reggie dramas it always felt like the admins go all-in on hard-locking the tag people are complaining about as soon as they're fed up with it.

tripwyre said:
That doesn't bode well.

Indeed.

agiant said:
At first I thought e621 is the chocolate site under all that dung sites.

Me too.

This post included shows just in what bad way rules and customs got implemented or transformed to such an extent that IMO having sometimes no rules is better.

Yeah, like you said, sometimes, because sometimes rules can be a great way to organize stuff.

Tagging feminine or masculine as female or male is plainly stupid. Just make two more tags feminine_appearance and masculine_appearance.

Yeah, that's the thing!

goatfox said:

Yeah, that's the thing!

By the way I moved away from the feminine_appearance tag a bit. Feminine appearance is that of a women/female but a tag like feminine_traits could solve many problems I think.
What bothered me in that post was that there were some examples and the wording seemed pretty wrong for me. I'm still not satisfied with it but the how to page is done fine enough I believe.
Nevertheless that there are still some problems with locked tags is unchanged.

EDIT: A new tag is always bound to problems and work. So I don't know if the work behind is worth it. It's just some solutions seem funny sometimes.
I would like to have a logical construct you can follow pretty easily and if not followed it needs a reason. As simple as nobody from the staff wants to do it or there are things higher in priority than this or something similar.

agiant said:
By the way I moved away from the feminine_appearance tag a bit. Feminine appearance is that of a women/female but a tag like feminine_traits could solve many problems I think.

The problem with that is it would overlap with girly. A character that's clearly male (flat chest, penis and balls on display), but still has feminine traits or appearance (wide hips and a curvy figure, for example).

watsit said:
The problem with that is it would overlap with girly. A character that's clearly male (flat chest, penis and balls on display), but still has feminine traits or appearance (wide hips and a curvy figure, for example).

I don't see a problem with that though. girly could implement feminine_traits.

agiant said:
I don't see a problem with that though. girly could implement feminine_traits.

Then we'd be missing a tag for characters that appear female/feminine and aren't male or intersex.

watsit said:
Then we'd be missing a tag for characters that appear female/feminine and aren't male or intersex.

Sry misread. Edited it to the right response.
You could just feminine_traits -male -intersex
You would tag everything that has feminine traits or appearance with that tag
you could even have female and herm implementing it but if you think that's over the board you could just have it be tagged for non female or herm posts ambiguous included. Similar to solo focus like that a female has feminine traits is clear so no need for kinda

EDIT:
For these cases I would appreciate a system with thresholds and time limits. Like if a specific tag doesn't have for example 100 posts under it after 6 months it gets deleted or assimilated or something similar

agiant said:
You could just feminine_traits -male -intersex

That would miss out male/intersex characters interacting with feminine not-apparently-male/intersex characters.

watsit said:
That would miss out male/intersex characters interacting with feminine not-apparently-male/intersex characters.

That's true but it's a sacrifice you take similar to all other combined tags.
There are many such tags. Tags that even got demolished even though that lead to exactly that problem with exactly that reasoning. i understand though it's done to lessen the workload.
Therefore I would love to see a system which (almost) everybody can agree with (or at least follow) and those that don't would have clearly some problems. Like I said having thresholds and time limits is IMO such a system which also could get automated to some point.

watsit said:
The female tag is used for characters that look female. Something that's feminine is (characteristically) female, by definition.

You're right at that point.
But what's the first thing you think when you see the words "male" or "female"?
I'm pretty sure most think about the gender, not the characteristics.

But that clarified that when the site says that, they're referring to the characteristics, not the gender.

At least would be better to welcome every user explaining how it works and telling them not to expect to see a female when searching for one.

watsit said:
The problem with that is it would overlap with girly. A character that's clearly male (flat chest, penis and balls on display), but still has feminine traits or appearance (wide hips and a curvy figure, for example).

Doesn't "girly" refers specifically to femboys?

goatfox said:
But what's the first thing you think when you see the words "male" or "female"?

On this site? A character that looks like a male or female. TWYS tags visual characteristics, not gender identity. Gender identity is handled by the non-TWYS lore tags.

goatfox said:
Doesn't "girly" refers specifically to femboys?

Males that have feminine features, yes. On this site, that typically means being able to see a penis/balls (or at least a notable bulge) and no breasts, but with a body shape or face that's more feminine.

watsit said:
On this site? A character that looks like a male or female.

But what if you were a new user?
Like I said...

At least would be better to [somehow] welcome every user explaining how it works and telling them not to expect to see a female when searching for one.

Plus, mentioning the lore tags would also be useful.
But still, few posts have these lore tags (correct me if I'm wrong)

watsit said:
Gender identity is handled by the non-TWYS lore tags.

Now that you mention:
The tags are organized by categories, in which Lore (maybe Artist as well if you think about it) is non-TWYS.
To avoid confusion, maybe would be better to let the general tags more clear, with something like what was discussed a few posts above.

watsit said:
Males that have feminine features, yes. On this site, that typically means being able to see a penis/balls (or at least a notable bulge) and no breasts, but with a body shape or face that's more feminine.

A not-so-good idea would be if girly were renamed femboy (I bet the opposite probably already happened, just like when dickgirl became gynomorph) and became a lore tag.
Like, the word "girly" doesn't specifically mean a feminine male, so it would make this idea even worse if it were a lore tag.

goatfox said:
To avoid confusion, maybe would be better to let the general tags more clear, with something like what was discussed a few posts above.

Actually, what would be the problem of doing so? Everything could still be the same, the only thing to do would be rename male and female to masculine and feminine, so even a non-fluent English speaker like me could understand they're not genders. Also...

watsit said:
The problem with that is it would overlap with girly. A character that's clearly male (flat chest, penis and balls on display), but still has feminine traits or appearance (wide hips and a curvy figure, for example).

Have you ever thought that, based on this meaning of "male" and "female", female and girly are technically the same?

The lore tags are not really established at the moment. They are pretty new (still in beta) and have 11(+1) tags. There are 10 gender tags, the incest tag and a useless tag remaining from a time where there were more lore tags I believe but that's clearly not enough IMO. Especially if you restrain lore tags the usage of those will suffer, too.
You could change the name of lore tags to truth tags maybe to make it more intuitive maybe but that is really not where the problem lies IMO.
Also having a tag like feminine_traits would be a great improvement I believe.

I share the point that girly doesn't mean a boy like a girl but that's what is behind it at e621.

goatfox said:
Actually, what would be the problem of doing so? Everything could still be the same, the only thing to do would be rename male and female to masculine and feminine, so even a non-fluent English speaker like me could understand they're not genders.

Hmm... That's an idea. Could work I believe.

goatfox said:
Also...
Have you ever thought that, based on this meaning of "male" and "female", female and girly are technically the same?

The difference would be that girly is clearly a male because of penis. You tag as female if there is no other indication of it being something else. Therefore you can't tag a female as girly and a girly as female.

goatfox said:
Actually, what would be the problem of doing so? Everything could still be the same, the only thing to do would be rename male and female to masculine and feminine, so even a non-fluent English speaker like me could understand they're not genders.

Same problem as feminine_traits/masculine_traits. A girly male would be "feminine" but not female. Similarly, a boyish female would be "masculine" but not male. The only way around it is to place restrictions on when the tag can otherwise apply, which would be more unintuitive to new users.

Besides which, feminine and masculine are already aliased to girly and manly, respectively (both implying feminine/masculine traits on a character whose sex that wouldn't typically have those traits). Changing that would cause even more problems.

goatfox said:
Have you ever thought that, based on this meaning of "male" and "female", female and girly are technically the same?

A female-tagged character wouldn't have a penis and balls or crotch bulge. The girly tag can only be applied to a male-tagged character because other sexes already imply femininity (female, gynomorph, and herm), or have a feminine counterpart (girly maleherm -> herm, girly andromorph -> female).

agiant said:
The lore tags are not really established at the moment. They are pretty new (still in beta) and have 11(+1) tags.

I knew they were new, what I didn't knew is that they're still in beta.

agiant said:
I share the point that girly doesn't mean a boy like a girl but that's what is behind it at e621.

Actually, this isn't only in e621, the difference is that here they have tag aliases, which is another great point from e621 that I don't remember seeing anywhere else.

watsit said:
A female-tagged character wouldn't have a penis and balls or crotch bulge. The girly tag can only be applied to a male-tagged character because other sexes already imply femininity (female, gynomorph, and herm), or have a feminine counterpart (girly maleherm -> herm, girly andromorph -> female).

What I tried to say is that, if female doesn't refers to the gender and it coexist with girly, feminine or feminine_traits could coexist as well. One could still search for female looking characters with flat chest and a dick as girly and a female looking character without these body parts visible as feminine/feminine_traits. Also, does the words "feminine" and "masculine" refers solely to boys and girls, respectively?

But, going against all I just said, it sounded to me, from what you said, that is not always that "male" and "female" aren't referring to genders.
I might have misunderstood something so sorry.

Wish I could rename this thread, the title is kinda aggressive lol

goatfox said:
Wish I could rename this thread, the title is kinda aggressive lol

Simply click Edit at the top page next to Subscribe. Only the OP can see it.

watsit said:
Same problem as feminine_traits/masculine_traits. A girly male would be "feminine" but not female. Similarly, a boyish female would be "masculine" but not male. The only way around it is to place restrictions on when the tag can otherwise apply, which would be more unintuitive to new users.

That's still no problem though. Not for a new traits tag or the feminine or masculine tags.
What the trait tags would change is that it clearly states that you can just see feminine traits. What you could do though for example is if a chara has feminine and masculine traits you could tag it as both and with a ambiguous gender tag.
The difference with the feminine and masculine tags would be that it clearly states that it is not a gender which female and male is.
If you want to be strict you can't see if some character is a female or male if you can't see genitals. So the tag female and male is actually wrong. Even though that would be nitpicking there is a solution which could work with goatfox' suggestion. All will take some time but people will get used to that, too.

watsit said:
Besides which, feminine and masculine are already aliased to girly and manly, respectively (both implying feminine/masculine traits on a character whose sex that wouldn't typically have those traits). Changing that would cause even more problems.

I don't know how aliasing works in the background but adding the girly and manly tags to the posts, than removing the feminine and masculine tags entirely, adding it to female and male than making feminine and masculine the main tag would work I believe.
Even if that leads to some confusing at first it's IMO the better way, how things should be and taking a step into the right direction is the right thing to do I believe.

watsit said:
A female-tagged character wouldn't have a penis and balls or crotch bulge. The girly tag can only be applied to a male-tagged character because other sexes already imply femininity (female, gynomorph, and herm), or have a feminine counterpart (girly maleherm -> herm, girly andromorph -> female).

Again I don't know how it works in the background and if the girly definition is like a all accepted thing in such communities. But girly doesn't mean male. At least ambiguous gender should be included, too.

monsterbomb10010 said:
Simply click Edit at the top page next to Subscribe. Only the OP can see it.

Thank you, also, what an adorable avatar <3

agiant said:
That's still no problem though. Not for a new traits tag or the feminine or masculine tags.
What the trait tags would change is that it clearly states that you can just see feminine traits.

Seems redundant since the existing sex/gender tags along with 'girly', 'manly' cover it. The existing tags also offer more detailed searches and blacklists; a male with female traits, or a character with female traits only. Your suggestion would prevent 'female' from being applied to anything that doesn't have a clear pussy/breasts, while 'feminine_traits' would apply to anything vaguely feminine, regardless of other traits. This doesn't seem very useful since people have sex/gender preferences, and probably wouldn't appreciate feminine-only characters being grouped together with girly males, or masculine-only characters being grouped together with manly females. It would severely limit search results to avoid the potential of the unwanted case.

Also, you have tags like male_on_anthro and female_focus. If these characters don't have genitals on display, can they no longer be tagged this way? Or do you expect masculine_on_anthro and feminine_focus tags (owing to the same vagueness as the base proposed tags)?

agiant said:
If you want to be strict you can't see if some character is a female or male if you can't see genitals. So the tag female and male is actually wrong.

Scientifically speaking, even if you can see genitals you can't discern their genetic makeup. But it comes down to usefulness; this is an art archive, a collection of visual-based content. People are going to be interested in visual elements of said content, so the tags are going to be biased toward visual traits over 100% accurate use of terminology.

agiant said:
I don't know how aliasing works in the background but adding the girly and manly tags to the posts, than removing the feminine and masculine tags entirely, adding it to female and male than making feminine and male the main tag would work I believe.

Except for users accustomed to their current meaning, and will continue tagging, searching, and blacklisting it without realizing they've changed.

agiant said:
Again I don't know how it works in the background and if the girly definition is like a all accepted thing in such communities. But girly doesn't mean male. At least ambiguous gender should be included, too.

For this site and others like it, it generally means 'a character displaying feminine traits whose sex wouldn't typically have them". Sure, technically 'girly' can be applied to a 'female' character, but as a female would be assumed to have feminine traits by default, it's redundant in the vast majority of cases. Similar reason why there's no cis_gender tag to apply to non-trans characters; cis is what the vast majority of cases will be, and trans gets tagged when a character's not cis. So too, 'girly'/'feminine' is what the vast majority of 'female' characters are, and 'manly'/'masculine' gets tagged when a female is not 'girly'/'feminine'.

watsit said:
Except for users accustomed to their current meaning, and will continue tagging, searching, and blacklisting it without realizing they've changed.

The site could notify all users with a news.

Ok, here we go again.

watsit said:
Stuff

To summarize your points (by the way it's not easy because you mix things up sometimes):
-gender tags plus girly/manly cover feminine/masculine_traits. Therefore they are not useful.
-replacing tags with *_traits tags worsens the situation.
-What to do with tags that reference female/male when replaced with feminine/masculine? They stay the same way vague they were.
-the point that gender can only be identified by seeing genitals is actually not valid because you can't see the DNA. Came as an answer to my point.
-The current tags offer more detailed searches and blacklisting.
-There are many users accustomed to the current version. Changing things up will only lead to chaos.
-You can ignore some obvious cases like tagging females girly because only exceptions don't follow the case and those get tagged as manyl for example.

I think that's all. Is something missing?

Now to get to every point one by one.
gender tags plus girly/manly cover feminine/masculine_traits. Therefore they are not useful.
1. They are not covered. Ambiguous genders gets ignored
2. The threshold the way it is currently is higher than *_traits which leads to even bigger gaps between the current tags and *_traits

Replacing tags with *_traits tags worsens the situation.
Nobody talked about replacing tags with *_traits tags. They should be new tags. If you say those would be redundant you would first need to run numbers and see.
If (and that's just an if) you see replacing as an option replacing girly/manly with combination tags would be in my eyes an option, which has it's cons as loosing some detail but also some pros for winning some other details. You would for this also need to run the numbers.

What to do with tags that reference female/male when replaced with feminine/masculine? They stay the same way vague they were.
The 2nd suggestion was replacing female/male with feminine/masculine totally. No other changes at all. The pro of this point is that female/male is not a vague word but used vaguely while feminine/masculine is vague and used the way it is. This makes it much more intuitive. The way female/male currently is used matches to 100% how feminine/masculine should be used. So there is no problem in changing all tags that use female/male with feminine/masculine.

The point that gender can only be identified by seeing genitals is actually not valid because you can't see the DNA. Came as an answer to my point.
While my point was just a pebble on the road side I believe you share this the same way. Anyways I believe there are some magnitudes difference between DNA says female/male and genitals say female/male. The case were the genitals are not matching the actual gender is insiginificantly low I believe but that's subjective and also not so important.

There are many users accustomed to the current version. Changing things up will only lead to chaos.
I hope you don't mean how should we inform the people. That's some kids play. So I'll skip this and answer the point how I wrote it.
If there is a way to better something you still need to consider the negative consequences but the ones you stated are ones time would solve. So we just have to look if the end result would be worth it and I believe it would. You can discuss this or open the case to the public voting or something.

You can ignore some obvious cases like tagging females girly because only exceptions don't follow the case and those get tagged as manly for example.
You can use the same method for the new tags, too, and with having much less deviation from the actual meaning of the word. Something that is feminine doesn't need additionally the feminine_traits tag because that only gets used if something is not feminine but has some traits. That's IMO not that much deviated than from the original words definition than how it currently is. You need to be somehow well versed, stumble upon it and learn it to know how to really navigate through the site. It happened and still happens to me. Some things I just gave up.

The current tags offer more detailed searches and blacklisting.
1. More detail mean more exclusion, too. This is not a point which can be a pro or con for any of the situations. You at least need to run the numbers to see in which way that holds its importance.
2. A question here. In which way is it more detailed or in which way do you loose some searching and blacklisting power.
3. You saw maaaany cases in which exactly that happened to make things easier. That means that it looks like that point is not really that important actually.

I'll repeat myself but get lore tags back alive with a better system. That would also solve most problems in such similar cases and tag wars. I don't believe the people who are frustrated that their actual tags being not tagged because it's not visible would be still frustrated if some of those tags would go over the lore system than the TWYS system.

agiant said:

Stuff

Okay, so, your way of writing is a nightmare to read, bordering on completely unintelligible.
You seem to be talking in circles without... providing any real justification beyond "I think it would be a good idea"/"everyone else is just wrong".

Have you read any of the past site discussion threads on exactly why things are the way they are, and why changes like these have been refuted thus far? If not, you may want to do so, no point in repeating what's already been said.

Mairo or another staffer might have more valuable input, and be better able to decipher what points you're trying to convey.

votp said:
Okay, so, your way of writing is a nightmare to read, bordering on completely unintelligible.
You seem to be talking in circles without... providing any real justification beyond "I think it would be a good idea"/"everyone else is just wrong".

Have you read any of the past site discussion threads on exactly why things are the way they are, and why changes like these have been refuted thus far? If not, you may want to do so, no point in repeating what's already been said.

Mairo or another staffer might have more valuable input, and be better able to decipher what points you're trying to convey.

I'm not a native speaker. So maybe there are things making my writing difficult to read. I would be happy if you provided examples though. What was difficult to understand? In worst case I'll learn a thing about writing in English. Your comment by the way is not a pleasant read. Also doesn't help me at all either.

Anyways maybe I'm really that bad in writing because it looks like you understood things, I never even slightly intended. So which part let you think that way? Where do I make circles? Where do I say everybody is wrong?

And no I didn't invest weeks into reading stuff but hours even though I'm here for just some fun and just about six months. If you are an older member of this community, how would it be to, instead of talking in that insulting way, share the said posts. If you can't than how would it be to be just a bit more polite.

It might be that I was not polite either at some point but I realized and changed that myself, right? Again I'm sorry if I hurt or disturbed someone with that.

To get some of the weight from my shoulders, too. I have some similar complaints like yours. Somehow we always circle even though I believe I was pretty clear.

I was writing out this response when I realized how stupidly long it was getting. In the interest of brevity, I'll try to hit the important points, but forgive me if I miss something.

Replacing male/female with masculine/feminine, and otherwise keeping their usage and meaning identical, stops being intuitive when you consider girly males and manly females. A character like Ferris Argyle is undeniably feminine, but not female. This suggestion would mean you couldn't tag such a feminine character as feminine because the barest hint of a bulge to indicate a little masculinity overrides it all. In the same vein, a herm looks either or both feminine and masculine, but can't be tagged with either. That's not intuitive at all, and doesn't make much sense unless you realize the feminine tag is really just a stand-in for the female gender/sex tag.

In contrast, female/male does make intuitive sense when you realize you're dealing with probability and likelihood, rather than absolute fact (just like real-life interactions). If I see someone like this, it's not unreasonable to think they're female, even though they could be stuffing their shirt and/or have a dick just out of view. The probability and likelihood of that is low, so 'female' works in the absence of any more information. At the same time, if I see someone like this, it's not unreasonable to think they're male, even though I can't see that they definitely have a penis and balls. The probability and likelihood of that they have them is high, so 'male' works in the absence of any more information. If there is outside information that dictates these are wrong, that's what the lore tags are for.

Masculine traits and feminine traits are already covered by the manly and girly tags. They just don't apply when a character's sex is already indicative of them having masculine or feminine traits.

As for lore tags, there are already sex (physical) and gender (identity) lore tags which don't follow TWYS rules. You can apply them now on images they apply to.

I could've read more but I understand the point and will try to keep it short, too.

Ok. The feminine/masculine sounds not right here. That might be an explicit case but nevertheless it sounds as bad as some examples the other way round.
With this I'm at a point where neither female/male sound really right nor feminine/masculine. As proof for the problem with female/male is this post itself enough I believe. In your male and female examples tagging those as male or female respectively would not be unreasonable but tagging it as feminine and masculine would be undeniable.
Anyways I'm away from that at the moment. A system which has or could have the same kind of mistakes is not worth changing to.

To get to the grily/manly tags. To tag something girly I wouldn't say that just some feminine traits are enough. They really need some traits making the tagging just. Also they have to be male or am I wrong? So ambiguous_gender is ignored and while this might have quite a small number of cases maybe (I'm not sure, you would need to check it out) males/females respectively and other genders with traits not enough for girly/manly are ignored, too.

I don't know if I had to bring up lore tags here in that kind of way because like you said genders are already included. The thought process was though that if some things like gender runs with lore tags completely than being divided to lore tags if you're not sure, people would use those naturally and tagging wars wouldn't be an issue like it is now.
Having different tags for TWYS gender and lore gender would've also boosted that.
Also if lore tags got further developed their usage would automatically increase and spread and with that this kind of problems decrease. Best proof of that is Goatfox sleve who hadn't heared of them till now and I can understand why.

agiant said:
To get to the grily/manly tags. To tag something girly I wouldn't say that just some feminine traits are enough. They really need some traits making the tagging just. Also they have to be male or am I wrong?

As a consequence of how it works, more than a set rule. There's no point with tagging a female/herm/gynomorph character as girly. A girly maleherm would be better tagged as a herm. A girly andromorph would be indistinguishable from a flat-chested female. For a character to have enough feminine traits to be tagged 'girly', their apparent sex also couldn't be ambiguous enough for ambiguous_gender to apply. Consequently, the only gender/sex remaining that can be tagged girly is male.

On the other hand, manly can be tagged on gynomorph or female characters. A manly male/andromorph/maleherm is redundant. A manly herm would be better tagged as a maleherm. For a character to have enough masculine traits to be tagged 'manly', their apparent sex also couldn't be ambiguous enough for ambiguous_gender to apply. The remaining gender/sex options, gynomorph and female, are thus eligible for the manly tag.

agiant said:
I don't know if I had to bring up lore tags here in that kind of way because like you said genders are already included. The thought process was though that if some things like gender runs with lore tags completely than being divided to lore tags if you're not sure, people would use those naturally and tagging wars wouldn't be an issue like it is now.

The problem with relying on lore tags exclusively for gender/sex is that lore tags are supposed to be at the say-so of the creator, rather than a best-guess judgment. If a creator hasn't said that they're male/female/herm/whatever, and you can't see enough of the character to rule out all but one sex, they couldn't be tagged with one. This would happen on more images than you may expect, and the girly/manly tags wouldn't be a good substitute.

I can guess by the word "gender" in ambiguous_gender and crossgender that male and female are actually/also referring to genders.

What if they created these "traits" tags and kept male and female only as gender tags?

Examples:
You are seeing a character from the front. Can you see anything between the legs and/or on the chest? If you see one or more things, tag a gender based on that.

Now you're seeing a character from behind. You can't see the chest and perhaps not even the private parts, specially if the character is clothed. Then tag it ambiguous_gender.
Now see what fits most: Do they look female? Tag feminine_traits. Do they look male? Tag masculine_traits.

Each of them could always be tagged with ambiguous_gender, something like tag implications.
Maybe masculine_ambiguous and feminine_ambiguous could be better, but would that be grammatically correct (just to remember, I'm not a fluent English speaker)?

I posted that without reading the posts after my second-to-last one because I had this idea earlier today, but was busy with stuff and could only share it now.

But before I read them, I just wanted to say this, based on something that I do although I know it's not right and I don't really like to do, which is "suppose things".

IF the long posts above me are somewhat aggressive, I'll suggest to please, just calm down.
Things can be better discussed without arguing or something like that.
Yeah, you could say the same thing to me after those first posts, but hey, I was being stupid, I could have shown my opinions without being that aggressive, but sometimes I'm like that when I'm angry.
Do I like that? No way. But it's like, I kinda can't stay calm.
I'm just suggesting that, if you can stay calm, do that.

By the way, the only thing I'm doing here now in this topic is suggesting ideas, some I think it's good, and some I actually don't (lol). And if nothing happens, I think it's ok now. e621 is a high quality site, things are made carefully, and some might be hard to understand, but not impossible.

goatfox said:
I can guess by the word "gender" in ambiguous_gender and crossgender that male and female are actually/also referring to genders.

What if they created these "traits" tags and kept male and female only as gender tags?

Examples:
You are seeing a character from the front. Can you see anything between the legs and/or on the chest? If you see one or more things, tag a gender based on that.

Now you're seeing a character from behind. You can't see the chest and perhaps not even the private parts, specially if the character is clothed. Then tag it ambiguous_gender.
Now see what fits most: Do they look female? Tag feminine_traits. Do they look male? Tag masculine_traits.

Each of them could always be tagged with ambiguous_gender, something like tag implications.
Maybe masculine_ambiguous and feminine_ambiguous could be better, but would that be grammatically correct (just to remember, I'm not a fluent English speaker)?

A *_traits tag would loose its intuitiveness if you restrict its usage to that I believe. If such an approach would be taken than the suggestion of masculine/feminine_ambiguous is better IMO. I don't know if that would be great or bad though. Also you would somehow get further away from TWYS because you would need info from outside the post while still trying to uphold it. Even if your intention is not like that even now people have problems with TWYS and that seems tome not like an idea being that clear.
I wouldn't change TWYS while I know that there are many things not following that policy even officially or are quite difficult to uphold in many cases. It just have to many and great pros if it's truly uphold. Therefore my approach would be to develop things to help TWYS to uphold.

watsit said:
As a consequence of how it works, more than a set rule. There's no point with tagging a female/herm/gynomorph character as girly. A girly maleherm would be better tagged as a herm. A girly andromorph would be indistinguishable from a flat-chested female. For a character to have enough feminine traits to be tagged 'girly', their apparent sex also couldn't be ambiguous enough for ambiguous_gender to apply. Consequently, the only gender/sex remaining that can be tagged girly is male.

On the other hand, manly can be tagged on gynomorph or female characters. A manly male/andromorph/maleherm is redundant. A manly herm would be better tagged as a maleherm. For a character to have enough masculine traits to be tagged 'manly', their apparent sex also couldn't be ambiguous enough for ambiguous_gender to apply. The remaining gender/sex options, gynomorph and female, are thus eligible for the manly tag.

That's exactly my point though. Girly/manly is quite explicit while *_traits is not and could be useful IMO. That might be debatable but what you could do for example is search for "girly" characters which are not male or exclude them from searches.

watsit said:

The problem with relying on lore tags exclusively for gender/sex is that lore tags are supposed to be at the say-so of the creator, rather than a best-guess judgment. If a creator hasn't said that they're male/female/herm/whatever, and you can't see enough of the character to rule out all but one sex, they couldn't be tagged with one. This would happen on more images than you may expect, and the girly/manly tags wouldn't be a good substitute.

Actually that's what it is though. What character actually is rather than what it looks like. Also what goes (or should go) into lore tags is also other posts if it's from the same series and canonical info or something.
The thought process also relied on replacing gender tags in the general category with tags that are better suited for TWYS. While like I said I moved away from feminine/masculine, if they were good ones removing genders from general and moving them to lore would've been IMO clearly a good move. Anyways that by itself collapsed at the moment because of the missing replacement and genders are already a part of lore. So that case is alread closed I think.

EDIT:
Has nothing to do with this but I just realized I used implement instead of implicate a few times but I think most people understood. If not now you know XS

agiant said:
Also you would somehow get further away from TWYS because you would need info from outside the post while still trying to uphold it.

Why?

goatfox said:
Why?

Hmm... I don't know what my thought process was at that time anymore. I think I wanted to say that with something else because like that my statement makes no sense. At the moment your suggestion sounds pretty logical to me XD
But maybe it's also the result of some sleep deprivation XS

agiant said:
Hmm... I don't know what my thought process was at that time anymore. I think I wanted to say that with something else because like that my statement makes no sense. At the moment your suggestion sounds pretty logical to me XD
But maybe it's also the result of some sleep deprivation XS

I see XD

Just realized that there's a problem with the crossgender tags.

TWYS requires you to tag based on internal information of the content, right?

You would tag as crossgender, for example, a male character who's portrayed as a female or looks female (even if the character already looks female canonically).

But how do you know the character's official gender?

Wouldn't that be external information?

tags could be lore tags, just like the incest one, because the only way to know the character's official gender to say that the portrait in the content is crossgender, or to know that the characters in the content are relatives, is with external information.