The bulk update request #7630 has been rejected.

remove alias dude (0) -> male (2549586)

Reason: This explanation has been migrated from forum topic #43828.

I just noticed that dude was at some point aliased to male. This was brought up a little while ago, but I didn't see a response: forum post' #393763 (or https://e621.net/forum_posts/393763 , the DText page does not describe a syntax for forum posts). If we look at the wiki pages for these tags, they did not describe similar information. dude was clearly defined as applying only when particular text was present, unrelated to the gender of characters present. See post #2084045 for an example of a post that used to be tagged with dude. If this tag name is not appropriate, is there a way to lookup posts previously given this tag so that a migration to a new tag might be possible?

EDIT: The bulk update request #7630 (forum #401159) has been rejected by @slyroon.

I generally don't like "do we really need this" arguments, but... Do we really need a tag for the word dude?

Perhaps not, but if that's the case, is there a way to recover the posts previously marked with that tag to avoid losing them?

I think the referenced post provides a decent explanation of the possibly valuable information lost:

A decent number of accurate searches were washed away with that alias for a very specific theme. The "bros being bros" "dudes being dudes" thing is a very specific theme. Is there a tag for that? Who knows how many were washed away with that alias if there isn't one I'm not aware of.

You can browse post history to see additions of dude, but I just disagree with this tag existing in general.
There is very limited use for a contextual pronoun tag like "dude". This should be the job of a transcript field, not a tag.

lafcadio said:
You can browse post history to see additions of dude, but I just disagree with this tag existing in general.
There is very limited use for a contextual pronoun tag like "dude". This should be the job of a transcript field, not a tag.

Thank you for mentioning the post history search tool! That summarily answers my question of how to recover the previously tagged posts. Is there a way to search the transcript field? I agree that would be much better alternative for the noting the property of having "dude" in the post. The cheat sheet for post searching does not mention a transcript field in the text search section.

thedoctrier said:
Thank you for mentioning the post history search tool! That summarily answers my question of how to recover the previously tagged posts. Is there a way to search the transcript field? I agree that would be much better alternative for the noting the property of having "dude" in the post. The cheat sheet for post searching does not mention a transcript field in the text search section.

The site currently doesn't have a transcript field. It really should.

nimphia said:
The site currently doesn't have a transcript field. It really should.

I mean, that'd help a bit, but a searchable transcript field wouldn't be a silver bullet to the problem, we'd probably still need some quote-type tags since, phrases and multisyllabic words can be bisected by moans, breaths, pauses, and expletives, (ex. "I fucking love you!" is still i_love_you), and individual words can be extended (ex. "good booooy~" is still good_boy)

nimphia said:
The site currently doesn't have a transcript field. It really should.

See forum topic #21405 for last status on transcript field. It looks like it's been on the back burner for some time now.

I'm not a fan of tags that just transcribe text in the image. Especially if you start allowing for variations so it's not exactly the word that appears in the image, and you get into the weeds of how different it can be to still apply for the tag. Does it depend on the phonetics of the word (duuude, doood, dewdddd, due'd), or the meaning (dude as in "hey"/"over here", or as in "geez..."/"man..."). How about other languages with different alphabets.

watsit said:
I'm not a fan of tags that just transcribe text in the image. Especially if you start allowing for variations so it's not exactly the word that appears in the image, and you get into the weeds of how different it can be to still apply for the tag. Does it depend on the phonetics of the word (duuude, doood, dewdddd, due'd), or the meaning (dude as in "hey"/"over here", or as in "geez..."/"man..."). How about other languages with different alphabets.

honestly, at least for this one, yeah. I'm not really sure what the utility of this one was supposed to be, any case I can think of could probably be covered by a tag whose not just a direct quote tag.

dba_afish said:
honestly, at least for this one, yeah. I'm not really sure what the utility of this one was supposed to be, any case I can think of could probably be covered by a tag whose not just a direct quote tag.

I don't think the usefulness of the tag came directly from it specifying a particular word was present. It's moreso that the presence of the word "dude" is pretty straightforward to assess, and it acts as a strong signal of the desired skater/bro-esque tone/theme. Other words that signal similar (but not identical) ideas by their presence include "rad" or "gnarly".

As a personal example, when I first used the tag in a search, the posts tagged with it matched very well with my expectations regarding what the tag would indicate (even if the specific implementation was "check for this word").

The bulk update request #7630 (forum #401159) has been rejected by @slyroon.

thedoctrier said:
I don't think the usefulness of the tag came directly from it specifying a particular word was present. It's moreso that the presence of the word "dude" is pretty straightforward to assess, and it acts as a strong signal of the desired skater/bro-esque tone/theme. Other words that signal similar (but not identical) ideas by their presence include "rad" or "gnarly".

As a personal example, when I first used the tag in a search, the posts tagged with it matched very well with my expectations regarding what the tag would indicate (even if the specific implementation was "check for this word").

This right here is key. It's a very specific, very obvious theme in a great many images that have it. What could be used to tag it? Bro hasn't been obliterated (yet), and that being aliased will destroy the ease of searching for the theme.

zeorp said:
This right here is key. It's a very specific, very obvious theme in a great many images that have it. What could be used to tag it? Bro hasn't been obliterated (yet), and that being aliased will destroy the ease of searching for the theme.

what theme? looking through the posts it seems to me to be a pretty big mess, most but not all of the posts are the bros_being_bros dynamic, most but not all of them are posts with frat_boys, quite a few of them contain no dialogue, quite a few don't really fit anything I'd really call bro-y at all.

dba_afish said:
what theme? looking through the posts it seems to me to be a pretty big mess, most but not all of the posts are the bros_being_bros dynamic, most but not all of them are posts with frat_boys, quite a few of them contain no dialogue, quite a few don't really fit anything I'd really call bro-y at all.

Thank you, bros_being_bros looks like exactly it.

Edit:
There, I went through all the "bro" posts and those that had dude removed and added it to a bunch of them. I hope I wasn't too overly zealous. Redrusker's in particular were a hard call a lot of the time.
https://e621.net/post_versions?commit=Search&search%5Btags%5D=bros_being_bros&search%5Btags_added%5D=bros_being_bros&search%5Bupdater_id%5D=115343

I'm not sure if there's a way to search for posts that still have dude that haven't had the alias applied yet. But I can see why the alias was made. The vast majority of them were just "male," as the alias says.