I've been looking at a lot of "vintage" art lately, and I have to wonder — why don't we have meta tags for decades?

If you want to look at art made through the first seven decades of 20th century, you can search 20th century, which is absolutely fine, individual decades "before the furry fandom" don't have a lot of content, the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s combined have a grand total of 227 posts.

However, once you pass 1980, there's no umbrella tag like 20th_century or ancient_art... if you, like me, are interested in seeing 1990s or 2000s furry art and it doesn't matter whether it was made in 1992 or 1999, searching becomes incredibly tedious, the search string ends up being ~1990 ~1991 ~1992 ~1993 ~1994 ~1995 ~1996 ~1997 ~1998 ~1999, and god help you if you want to search for anything specific within that decade (or if you make a single typo), you might as well type out your search in a note before pasting it.

Considering that this site is a "furry art archive", having tags for each of the first three decades of the furry fandom, rather than just specific years, would be pretty salient. You'd be able to see the trends, characters, art styles and techniques of a specific decade with just a single tag.

Additionally, having tags for the 80s, 90s and 00s would help in tagging posts that are obviously from a certain decade, but lack a specific written date on the image or an active source — it would be like a museum labelling a piece with an unknown year as "circa 1890s". I've encountered a few posts that I know are from the 2000s, but I don't know the specific year, so this "vintage" (the 2000s are vintage now, feel old yet?) art falls through the cracks, there are probably a lot of currently undated posts — especially with art from the 1980s and 1990s but obviously including the 2000s — made to e6 before 2010 that would really benefit from decade tags.

My proposal?

• There should be three tags, these tags should be named 1980s_(media), 1990s_(media), and 2000s_(media) (I'm open to suggestions on the tag names though)
• That format should (hopefully) deter users from tagging artwork that are "decade themed" under these meta tags, which would be inevitable if they were just 1990s etc.
• The individual years would imply the decade (e.g. a post tagged 1989 automatically gets 1980s_(media)).
• Like ancient art or 20th century, a post could fall under these tags, without a specific year needed, as long as there's good reason to assume the artwork was produced in that decade

+1 I like this idea!

Before anyone asks, I'm only proposing tags for the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, not before 1980 for reasons covered above, and not for the 2010s or 2020s.

1. The 2010s were recent enough that individual years are more relevant than the entire decade collectively, if users want to feel nostalgia for the recent past, they're probably going to search an individual year, the 2010s are so recent that the oldest post on the first page of searching ~2010 ~2011 ~2012 ~2013 ~2014 ~2015 ~2016 ~2017 ~2018 ~2019 is from two days ago
2. The majority of posts on this site were created between 2010-2019, and the number of posts grows every day, there are so many posts that going back 750 pages only displays posts made three years ago, a 2010s_(media) tag would be one of the largest tags on the site, and barely useful for searching at all. Maybe if this site exists in 2050, a 2010s_(media) tag will make sense, but it definitely doesn't right now.
3. It's easier to give exact dates for posts made in the recent past, most likely have active sources.

+1 as well.

maplebytes said:
Before anyone asks, I'm only proposing tags for the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, not before 1980 for reasons covered above, and not for the 2010s or 2020s.

1....the 2010s are so recent that the oldest post on the first page of searching ~2010 ~2011 ~2012 ~2013 ~2014 ~2015 ~2016 ~2017 ~2018 ~2019 is from two days ago

it probably doesn't help the fact that years are not tagged by uploaders most of the time, and really the best "creation date" for most posts is, "this post was at least created before (upload date)"

cutefox123 said:
it probably doesn't help the fact that years are not tagged by uploaders most of the time, and really the best "creation date" for most posts is, "this post was at least created before (upload date)"

I'm guilty of not always tagging years, it's understandable if it slips people's minds or doesn't occur to them, especially when they're posting something made recently, in that case, the post date is already a clue to when the art was made, even if it's not accurate.

But for older art specifically, the date becomes far more important. Whether something uploaded last week is from 2019 or 2023 doesn't matter that much, but 2003? That's a little more relevant. If you don't know it's from 2003 specifically, but know it's from the 2000s, what do you do? For anything pre-1980 with an ambiguous date, 20th century and ancient art come in handy, post-1980 and you're out of luck.

+1 This is a well-thought-out idea and makes sense to me.

cutefox123 said:
it probably doesn't help the fact that years are not tagged by uploaders most of the time, and really the best "creation date" for most posts is, "this post was at least created before (upload date)"

Honestly, the only reliable way I see to tag a date for a post is if it's on the image. It's not uncommon for artists to post art that is months or years old, that may or may not have been on another account previously or on Patreon or something first, and which may or may not have touch-up work done, so the date it was posted may not reflect when it was made.

+1, i bet there's funny animal culture stuff that's old enough to warrant a 1970's_(media) metatag as well

dripen_arn said:
+1, i bet there's funny animal culture stuff that's old enough to warrant a 1970's_(media) metatag as well

I'm not entirely against there being tags for earlier decades, but the 1970s as a whole has about 45 posts — that could change (seriously, there's a lot of underground comix "proto-furry" art out there just waiting to be uploaded). The 1970s also already have the umbrella tags of ancient art and 20th century, so personally, it's less of a priority to me than the 80s, 90s and 00s which are just as "historical" and have hundreds or thousands of times more content than previous decades, but lack any kind of umbrella tag to help collect the art from those eras.

kora_viridian said:
I like this idea.

I'd extend it to go ahead and have implications for 2010s (2010...2019) and 2020s (2020...2029) as well. (Yes, have the implications for 2024...2029 set up now, even though we're not there yet.) I agree that the 2010s and 2020s tags might not be the most useful for searching, but if the "decade" tags end up being useful, we'll end up having them for everything now or later. We can either have the decade tags get applied as things are uploaded now, or we can have a big update later that makes the lights go dim in the server room. :)

While it's not a bad idea, I'm more interested in going for the historical decades first, which have a very slowly growing number of posts, rather than get right to the massive undertaking or massive change that would happen with adding the implications for the current and previous decades.

I wonder if it would be useful, or splitting hairs, to distinguish between "I definitely know this art is from this decade" and "this art looks like it was from this decade". Something like 1990s_(media) and circa_1990s.

There are already tags for "decade themes" that could be cleaned up and clarified, if you mean modern pieces with 80s/90s/00s looks. But if you mean something that looks of that decade, I'd say that if it appears to be made with the tools available at the time (or techniques popular at the time), and there's good reason to assume it's old art, as well as there being no evidence that it's a modern creation, I think it would be safe to tag the post under the appropriate (decade)_media tag. I don't think there would be a large amount of false positives.

Another possibility for the naming is to rename the decade theme tags to 1990s_theme, 1980s_theme, etc

cloudpie said:
Another possibility for the naming is to rename the decade theme tags to 1990s_theme, 1980s_theme, etc

Too subjective, and I do not reckon this is what maple wants.

kora_viridian said:
I'd extend it to go ahead and have implications for 2010s (2010...2019) and 2020s (2020...2029) as well. (Yes, have the implications for 2024...2029 set up now, even though we're not there yet.) I agree that the 2010s and 2020s tags might not be the most useful for searching, but if the "decade" tags end up being useful, we'll end up having them for everything now or later. We can either have the decade tags get applied as things are uploaded now, or we can have a big update later that makes the lights go dim in the server room. :)

I tend to agree with Maplebytes' logic in excluding the 2010s and 2020s for now. Let's at least get the 80s, 90s, and 00s squared away and see how they work before extending this scheme beyond them.

-1, it adds an extra tag on every single post that it applies to (god forbid we include the 2020s) and adds zero new information or functionality. The cost is high and the benefit minimal.

Instead of searching for ~1990 ~1991 ~1992 ~1993 ~1994 ~1995 ~1996 ~1997 ~1998 ~1999 you can just use 199*. The result is 97% identical.

Or 199* -1900s which is 99.9% identical.

+1, I quite like it. It's a natural extension of the 20th century tag, and covers years that are just as important. I think it'd be a great resource to people who like to go far back (Like me!), and may even interest more people to explore artwork from these decades.

leomole said:
-1, it adds an extra tag on every single post that it applies to (god forbid we include the 2020s) and adds zero new information or functionality. The cost is high and the benefit minimal.

Instead of searching for ~1990 ~1991 ~1992 ~1993 ~1994 ~1995 ~1996 ~1997 ~1998 ~1999 you can just use 199*. The result is 97% identical.

Shit yeah, I hadn't thought of 199*. -1 now, sorry. This seems like it would work just as well.

leomole said:
-1, it adds an extra tag on every single post that it applies to (god forbid we include the 2020s) and adds zero new information or functionality. The cost is high and the benefit minimal.

Instead of searching for ~1990 ~1991 ~1992 ~1993 ~1994 ~1995 ~1996 ~1997 ~1998 ~1999 you can just use 199*. The result is 97% identical.

ironically enough, some of the descrepenies come from the 1990's tag, a tag soely used for 90's references (i know it's technically different to the 1990's_(media) metatag maple's proposing, get off my case)

watsit said:
Honestly, the only reliable way I see to tag a date for a post is if it's on the image. It's not uncommon for artists to post art that is months or years old, that may or may not have been on another account previously or on Patreon or something first, and which may or may not have touch-up work done, so the date it was posted may not reflect when it was made.

... which is why I said it was made at least before this date... aka, if this art didnt exist before the posted date... it couldnt have possibly been posted

+1, because with current tagging, searching for posts that are missing year tags requires -ancient_art + -1980..2023 (44 year tags + 1 'era' tag) . This is impossible as the stated maximum is 40 search terms . With OP's proposal, only 18 search terms would be needed, and presumably this would be viable until about 2045.

-ancient_art -198* -199* -200* -201* -202* is 99.9% identical to that query, and this approach is viable until 2370.

leomole said:
-ancient_art -198* -199* -200* -201* -202* is 99.9% identical to that query, and this approach is viable until 2370.

.. TBH negating wildcards has been janky for me in the past, but sure, I guess.

leomole said:
-1, it adds an extra tag on every single post that it applies to (god forbid we include the 2020s) and adds zero new information or functionality. The cost is high and the benefit minimal.

Instead of searching for ~1990 ~1991 ~1992 ~1993 ~1994 ~1995 ~1996 ~1997 ~1998 ~1999 you can just use 199*. The result is 97% identical.

Or 199* -1900s which is 99.9% identical.

Years don't get tagged because sometimes folks have no idea when they were posted. Sure, the tag seems redundant, but it would help with posts made in the 80's or 90's in which the exact year of publication is unknown.

leomole said:
-1, it adds an extra tag on every single post that it applies to (god forbid we include the 2020s) and adds zero new information or functionality. The cost is high and the benefit minimal.

Instead of searching for ~1990 ~1991 ~1992 ~1993 ~1994 ~1995 ~1996 ~1997 ~1998 ~1999 you can just use 199*. The result is 97% identical.

Or 199* -1900s which is 99.9% identical.

But that still doesn't address posts that are clearly made pre-2010 which are undated, there's no way of tagging posts that are from the 80s, 90s or 00s without knowing the specific year. Art pre-1980 has 20th_century and ancient_art for content without a clear date, while anything past 1980 relies on having a specific year, or it goes without any way of searching for it based on date.

I suspect the number of posts with known decade but unknown year is rather small. But that sounds like a good application of your proposed 2000s_(media) tag.

For the reason stated above I oppose implications like 2005 -> 2000s_(media), but I will +1 adding functionality with the 2000s_(media) tags when a more correct tag is not known.