• male/male solo is an often made mistake when tagging. My assumption: Users try to tag a characters' sexuality even though: yaoi, fag, gay, homosexual, and homo, are all aliased to male/male.

• The same fore female/female solo and bisexual solo, but it's not that escalated, yet.

• For male/female solo it seems like, the misunderstanding that disembodied_penises count as characters, causes the false tags. I would still add hetero, straight, heterosexual to the BUR.

• For intersex/intersex /female /male solo there are no tag aliases, that could indicate sexualities.

I would suggest creating an unalias BUR:
unalias yaoi -> male/male
unalias fag -> male/male
unalias gay -> male/male
unalias homosexual -> male/male
unalias homo -> male/male

unalias yuri -> female/female
unalias lesbians -> female/female
unalias lesbian -> female/female

unalias bi -> bisexual

unalias hetero -> male/female
unalias straight -> male/female
unalias heterosexual -> male/female

And then a category BUR:
category yaoi -> invalid
category fag -> invalid
category gay -> invalid
category homosexual -> invalid
category homo -> invalid

category yuri -> invalid
category lesbians -> invalid
category lesbian -> invalid

category bi -> invalid

category hetero -> invalid
category straight -> invalid
category heterosexual -> invalid

dubsthefox said:
category yaoi -> invalid
category fag -> invalid
category gay -> invalid
category homosexual -> invalid
category homo -> invalid

I would alias these together: yaoi, fag, homosexual, homo -> gay, then category gay -> invalid. Same with yuri, lesbians -> lesbian and hetero, heterosexual -> straight.

From a quick glance at the first page of results for "male/male solo", while they are mostly solo male images, at least 25% of them are images of more than one character that were tagged 'solo' by mistake, so what you're proposing won't fix the problem. While you'll never be able to stop every case of mistagging, I think having some sort of "Tagging Basics / Common Mistakes" page linked to from the upload form would be more useful (it would also help with other frequent mistags by new users, like confusing humanoids and anthros).

I would imagine that 'gay', 'lesbian' and 'straight' are very common search terms for casual users of the site, so making them all invalid to stop a minority of users mistagging doesn't sound right to me.

Would rather "sexuality" all end up its own tag, which then is invalid. That way people can't try to just leave the invalid tag on in order to keep a tag to find it, as all sexualities will be mixed into it.

jockjamdoorslam said:
I would imagine that 'gay', 'lesbian' and 'straight' are very common search terms for casual users of the site...

That's a good point. For someone, who spends unhealthy amounts of time on e621, it's kinda intuitive to search for male/male instead of gay... you changed my mind on that.
But I still think that's the reason for lots of miss tagging. I guess we just have to be faster than the new users, then.

jockjamdoorslam said:
From a quick glance at the first page of results for "male/male solo", while they are mostly solo male images, at least 25% of them are images of more than one character that were tagged 'solo' by mistake, so what you're proposing won't fix the problem. While you'll never be able to stop every case of mistagging, I think having some sort of "Tagging Basics / Common Mistakes" page linked to from the upload form would be more useful (it would also help with other frequent mistags by new users, like confusing humanoids and anthros).

I wish I could share your optimism that anyone would ever read it. I've said this before, but a really effective solution to stop exactly this problem would be to run a simple validation script on every new upload which has a list of tags which should never appear together, each with an accompanying hand-written explanation of why it's wrong. You could stop 90% of common mistakes with just a few lines, especially if it could use search operators like ~.

wat8548 said:
I wish I could share your optimism that anyone would ever read it. I've said this before, but a really effective solution to stop exactly this problem would be to run a simple validation script on every new upload which has a list of tags which should never appear together, each with an accompanying hand-written explanation of why it's wrong. You could stop 90% of common mistakes with just a few lines, especially if it could use search operators like ~.

It's a bit more complicated than that. A post can in fact be accurately tagged solo and male/male at the same time in specific cases, such as a two panel comic contained in a single image file. Each panel is tagged separately but all tags are shown on the same post.

if not aliasing it to male/male why not just alias it to the singular tag, like gay -> male

gattonero2001 said:
It's a bit more complicated than that. A post can in fact be accurately tagged solo and male/male at the same time...

It could be a warning, and not a strict `can not post` script

versperus said:
if not aliasing it to male/male why not just alias it to the singular tag, like gay -> male

I mean... It would get rid of the male/male solo problem, but it would feel wrong.

dubsthefox said:
It could be a warning, and not a strict `can not post` script

Exactly what I was proposing, though I will add that it would have to be a warning you have to explicitly click past (using a not especially prominent link) in order to post. This warning would also replace the useless pop-up that comes when you post with invalid tags, which has never persuaded a single noob to fix their shit.

sorry to dig this up almost a year later, but this problem is still a problem, particularly with new posts that haven't had a chance to get the community tag workover. I could kill hours just flipping through new submissions incorrectly tagged "male/male solo"

run a simple validation script on every new upload which has a list of tags which should never appear together, each with an accompanying hand-written explanation of why it's wrong

makes the most sense to me - generally speaking, pics that contain pairings (male/male, male/female, female/female, whatever) do not also contain solo content (though there are obviously exceptions, like comics, or background imagery) - it's definitely more of a 'warning' than an 'error' to see "male/male solo" but it is still something it might be worth warning uploaders / taggers about.

"homosexual" definitely shouldn't alias to "male/male". That's only a subset of what homosexual means.

About a month ago, I have asked in the Discord e621-helpdesk: "Is there a realistic chance we could get sexuality_(lore) tags, so the people stop using gender/gender tags for it?"

I got the answer: "Nichts da." It's German, and could be interpreted as "forget about it", "no way", or "fuck off" (depending on the intent of the writer.) By a member I have never seen before, and who's not even on the e621 server anymore.

After that, the chat continued normally, and I think the mods didn't see it.

I still remove those tags occasionally, but to clean it completely, I would have to put way more time into tagging. Andy well... the problem will stay there and build up again, even if we could clean it completely.

sexuality_(lore) tags sound like a good idea. It could also help with tagging some examples of orientation_play, which can be a bit awkward under TWYS sometimes.

Orientation_play should be a lore tag too, tbh. The only indication for it is text, emojis, or other symbols of some sort. And the sexuality_(lore) tags... I think I'll bring that up again in the Discord, some day.

Crossposting topic #34241 here for ease of reference.

Part of the reason that this was refused years ago (and repeatedly since?) was that there's no objective (or even subjective) way to tag something like this consistently. It's why I have really recommended that people put this information in the Wiki and descriptions, if they want it clear. For actual OC's, it's a kind of obvious solution. I'm not even sure it CAN be done with tags in any reliable way. This way lies raging and drama, especially with the sorts that would deliberately abuse this hard-to-verify system.

vulpes_artifex said:
"homosexual" definitely shouldn't alias to "male/male". That's only a subset of what homosexual means.

Hell, it doesn't even exclude female/female, haha. Anyways, that's kind of not how aliasing works. We wanted to get rid of the tag with conflicting/ambiguous meanings, and then have more accurate and specific ones like the pairing tags. Since the majority of that posts tagged with that would have been male/male... It was less work to alias it and fix the others.

furrin_gok said:
Would rather "sexuality" all end up its own tag, which then is invalid. That way people can't try to just leave the invalid tag on in order to keep a tag to find it, as all sexualities will be mixed into it.

Something like gay_(lore), lesbian_(lore), straight_(lore), bisexual_(lore), pansexual_(lore) ?
(No idea if there are more variants, and the point was not to make an exhaustive list)

post #4163746 Oh look, most recent solo male/male result. Yeah, the male/male alias needs to die die die. gay_(lore) would be far less damn annoying. Also, it shouldn't even be possible to add both solo and male/male (or male/female or any of the others!) tags to the same post, right?

BTW, the symbol for homosexuality is a pair of male_symbols, so I guess you can see where this is going.

https://e621.net/post_versions?lr=1565973&search%5Bupdater_id%5D=1565973 Education approach? It's not a big deal to explain that it's a different tag and link to this topic, right?

https://e621.net/posts/4163747?q=user%3Akamiru Hmm, I wonder if I should submit a feature request to make posts you click in that uploader search go to here, so that it finds all the user's posts, assuming you made the most obvious search. Hmm, are they anthro or humanoid images? I think they're anthro?

https://e621.net/forum_posts?commit=Search&search%5Btopic_title_matches%5D=male%2Fmale A ton of relevant results.

alphamule said:
Also, it shouldn't even be possible to add both solo and male/male (or male/female or any of the others!) tags to the same post, right?

It should be. As said in an earlier post, it could be a single person in a panel in a comic, then male/male in the next panel.

snpthecat said:
It should be. As said in an earlier post, it could be a single person in a panel in a comic, then male/male in the next panel.

Derp, right. :(

snpthecat said:
It should be. As said in an earlier post, it could be a single person in a panel in a comic, then male/male in the next panel.

well, kinda but also kinda not. generally, a scene in a comic is treated as a contiguous whole. we don't tag each comic pannel individually, just like we don't tag each frame of an animation individually.

so, if a comic page has two total characters and one character is just off-camera in one pannel and visible in another it's treated as duo. if the character enters or exits the scene during the page, or there is a clear scene transition both solo and duo could apply.

darryus said:
if the character enters or exits the scene during the page, or there is a clear scene transition both solo and duo could apply.

That seems just as problematic to me since scene transitions can be very ambiguous (especially in animations), where some people see a clear scene transition and others don't (how many scenes are in post #3648378? I'd say 3 (at store, on the way home, then home), some may say 2 (at and leaving the store, then at home), others may say 1 (it's all one continuous scene); some people may consider instant_loss_2koma situations to be a single scene, while others consider them separate since there's a break with missing time between the shots). It also requires users to have more specific knowledge about the page with character counts when doing searches (e.g. you remember the page had three characters, but were they all in one scene, or was there a scene break and it was two in one scene and one in other, or perhaps even each character was in a different scene? or if you add -solo to your search because you definitely remember there was more than one character in the page, but it turns out there was a scene break and only one character shown on one side of the break).

There are also images where there are clear panel delineations, but the concept of "scenes" doesn't make sense. For example:
post #3162054
There is no "scene" progression in the panels, but there's no scene break either. They're related thematically, but there's no flow through the panels. So would that would be tagged duo and not group since each panel only has two characters and each is its own distinct shot? Or should they be considered related enough since they're thematically similar (a gym leader with one of their pokemon)?

It's just much easier, less confusing, and more consistent to consider the post as a whole for tagging, as we do for any tag, and not try to create arbitrary separations between parts of an image/animation. It also helps when looking for mistags, like male/male solo; you can just say that should never happen on a single post, without having to add disclaimers and exceptions (where different people may disagree on whether the exception applies to a given post).

watsit said:
*snip*

thaat's how we've always done it, yeah (see: multiple_images, sequence, comic, character_collage).
I mean, I don't know of there's really ever going to be a perfect solution, because sometines you're going to remember some parts of a posts but not others. I think tagging by scene is generally better since that's how memory works, or at least it is for me.

here's an example, I think I'd call this the quintessential problem post for this kind of situation, it's even had solo +/- toggle locked 4 times. post #811914 is a 2-minute long animation, the first 1:40 is a single scene of two characters having sex, and the last 20 seconds is a completely seperate, unrelated solo scene with a third character fellating himself.
in my opinion, this should be tagged +solo. I think the scene seperation is obvious enough, I can see the possibility that a user only remembers the end bit, and I don't think removing the tag is all that helpful for users just wanting to find the main part of the animation.

darryus said:
I mean, I don't know of there's really ever going to be a perfect solution, because sometines you're going to remember some parts of a posts but not others. I think tagging by scene is generally better since that's how memory works, or at least it is for me.

Can't say it is for me. Or rather, it may be some times but not others. On e6, I "know" to think in terms of posts. Did I see something in a post? Then it was tagged and I can search it. The problem with scene separation is that it's not TWYS. You don't see a scene break in the same way you see a character; a scene is a conceptual device for storytelling, something that some people will understand better than others, and different people may have different opinions on where exactly they split.

The way I see it, it's easier to account for things you know about (i.e. you remember a scene break, and know to not limit your scope to it), than to account for what you don't know invalidating what you do (e.g. a post not tagged duo/trio//group despite correctly remembering more than one visible character, because you don't remember the scene break). The character count tags become far less reliable/useful when they're dependent on something other than the character count, especially for things that can at times be quite subtle.

darryus said:
here's an example, I think I'd call this the quintessential problem post for this kind of situation, it's even had solo +/- toggle locked 4 times. post #811914 is a 2-minute long animation, the first 1:40 is a single scene of two characters having sex, and the last 20 seconds is a completely seperate, unrelated solo scene with a third character fellating himself.
in my opinion, this should be tagged +solo. I think the scene seperation is obvious enough, I can see the possibility that a user only remembers the end bit, and I don't think removing the tag is all that helpful for users just wanting to find the main part of the animation.

I would say it shouldn't be tagged solo. You can see more than one character in it, 100 seconds of two digimon going at it, to be exact, so adding -solo to a search should get you closer to finding the post, not end up removing the post from the results despite correctly knowing there is more than one visible character.

To put it into a different perspective, let's say that end bit was a human fellating himself instead of an otter. Should it be tagged solo+male_only+human_only because that last 20 seconds was a separate scene with only a solo male human? I'd say no. Like how *_only tags apply to the image/animation as a whole, character counts should too.