alright, these things have been an annoyance for far too long and we ought to fix them. I know this is _mostly_ a me problem but there are definitely other people who've experienced it.

to catch anyone up to speed, shortcut aliases are a family of aliased tags that make longer, commonly used tags shorter. the specific tags in question in this thread are the ones for the basic gender and form pairing tags, like m/f = male/female and an/fe = anthro_on_feral, as well as the x_penetrating_y tags, m/p/fm = male_penetrating_female and a/p/f = anthro_penetrating_feral.

so, you might have already noticed that those two sets didn't use the same letters to refer to the same concepts, in the basic paring tags f = female while in the penetrating tags fm = female, and, not only that, but the two use the same letter, f, to refer to two entirely different concepts of female and feral respectively.

"So, what do we do, then?" well, that's what we're here to discuss. there a lot of fucking tags in these groups and that means a lot of BURs. so, before we do anything, we kind of need a plan, and there needs to be some amount of agreement about it.

———————————————————————————————————

let's just start at the beginning: what should be done with a?
currently it has 3 different meanings across the site. a = ambiguous in the pairing tags (est. 2015), a = andromorph in the tf/crossgender tags (est. 2019, August), a = anthro in the penetrating tags (est. 2019, June).

• my opinion, we should just go with a = andromorph for everything, I think it makes sense for gender abbreviations to use single characters whenever possible to be more consistent _{(sorry, maleherm)}. by extension, I think ? = ambiguous and an = anthro should be the primary abbreviations for the two that remain. while we're at it g = gynomorph.

the second one is a bit easier: what should be done with f?
f = feral is the odd one out here, everywhere else on the site seems to agree that f = female.

• my opinion, f = female is the obvious choice, fm = female has always seemed very silly to me. fe = feral should replace f = feral where necessary.

finally: how do we create parity between with the form tag ones?
the normal pairing shortcuts for these are in a real sorry state, with two of the forms not even having any shortcuts. this question partially hinges on how we deal with the previous problems, but at least expanding hd = humanoid on both seems to be kind of obvious.

• my opinion, the abbreviations should be hn, hd, an, fe, tr. the existing hu and t could be left as-is or extended to both sides, I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other. "Why use tr when there's not really any ambiguity with t?" consistency.

Abbreviations, I feel, can be quite personal, so they are better left to RE621.
But if you want to make them work for everyone, then they have to be easy to remember, hard to confuse, and easy to type.

Using less letters doesn't necessary make it better - being consistent is more important.
Different styles or different number of letters for gender and form can help:

---syllable--
male		ml
female		fm
gynomorph	gm
andromorph	am
herm		hm
maleherm	mh
intersex	is
ambiguous	ab, maybe ag
--shortened--
human		hu	hum
humanoid	hn	hud
anthro		an	ant
feral		fe	fer
taur		ta	tau

Drop the slashes, on and pe are easier, especially on mobile.

waydence said:
Using less letters doesn't necessary make it better - being consistent is more important.
Different styles or different number of letters for gender and form can help:

---syllable--
male		ml
female		fm
gynomorph	gm
andromorph	am
herm		hm
maleherm	mh
intersex	is
ambiguous	ab, maybe ag
--shortened--
human		hu	hum
humanoid	hn	hud
anthro		an	ant
feral		fe	fer
taur		ta	tau

Drop the slashes, on and pe are easier, especially on mobile.

I mean that's a lot more keystrokes, and a lot more to remember. stuff like m/m are great precisely because it's the minimum amount of things you need to remember, and the minimum amount of things you need to type letter, delimiter, letter.

you say that consistency is important, but I don't see the consistency here:

male		ml (second consonant)
female		fm (first of second syllable)
gynomorph	gm (first of third syllable)
andromorph	am (first of third syllable)
herm		hm (last consonant)
maleherm	mh (first of second syllable)
intersex	is (first of third syllable)
ambiguous	ab (first of second syllable)
		ag (last of second syllable)

I feel like the most consistent thing would be to use single letters where possible and then maleherm being the only compound word gets mh, and ambiguous gets the universal symbol for ambiguity, ?.

waydence said:
Drop the slashes, on and pe are easier, especially on mobile.

I don't see how typing on is better than /, in my opinion every additional character is a chance to either fatfinger an incorrect key or type something out of order.

seems especially bad since the letters are all on one side of the keyboard but at diffrent heights, not something that's super natural to type.

the great thing about a, f, g, h, m, and ?, is that, coincidentally, most of them are homerow keys, and the two that aren't are either the same row as / or literally the same key as /. this all makes them really quick and easy to type.

waydence said:
especially on mobile.

also, what do you mean by this? to me these mostly seem really awkward to type on mobile. a lot of these are patterns where you wouldn't be able to comfortably double-thumb them, where as the existing ones are all pretty easy...

...

oh gods, right. I forgot that there's that terrible default keyboard on mobile where you're missing like half of the keys, it puts the number row as subkeys of the top letter row, mostly random punctuation as subkeys of the remaining letters, and slash is in a fucking sub-menu.

I don't know how people function with this thing, just looking at it is making me mildly ill.

dba_afish said:

oh gods, right. I forgot that there's that terrible default keyboard on mobile where you're missing like half of the keys, it puts the number row as subkeys of the top letter row, mostly random punctuation as subkeys of the remaining letters, and slash is in a fucking sub-menu.

I don't know how people function with this thing, just looking at it is making me mildly ill.

Hypothetically speaking, what keyboard do you use and where can you get it from for a friend

snpthecat said:
Hypothetically speaking, what keyboard do you use and where can you get it from for a friend

on Android, at least, you can...
click on the gear icon on the keyboard
select Languages
select English
the second to last option is PC, use that

should be mostly the same as a physical keyboard. the keys are a little squished and backspace is in a slightly different position, so it might be a bit awkward but it's worth it to be able to type an inline code blocks without going to sub-menus deep. _{(also for some reason the version of GBoard I'm using or something the default subkey of ' is ” rather than " for some reason, not sure if that's fixed in later versions of Android or something. it's only mildly annoying, though.)}

EDIT: also, tangential, but the personal dictionary is also pretty useful, it allows you to add any string of characters and attach a shortcut to it. for me it works really similar to how TinyAlias did back when eSixEXtend was a thing.

dba_afish said:
on Android, at least, you can...
click on the gear icon on the keyboard
select Languages
select English
the second to last option is PC, use that

should be mostly the same as a physical keyboard. the keys are a little squished and backspace is in a slightly different position, so it might be a bit awkward but it's worth it to be able to type an inline code blocks without going to sub-menus deep. _{(also for some reason the version of GBoard I'm using or something the default subkey of ' is ” rather than " for some reason, not sure if that's fixed in later versions of Android or something. it's only mildly annoying, though.)}

EDIT: also, tangential, but the personal dictionary is also pretty useful, it allows you to add any string of characters and attach a shortcut to it. for me it works really similar to how TinyAlias did back when eSixEXtend was a thing.

Nope, no ability to change to a pc keyboard in either keyboard or accessibility. Several submenus it is then.

And yeah there's text replacement but it's pretty fickle.

snpthecat said:
Nope, no ability to change to a pc keyboard in either keyboard or accessibility. Several submenus it is then.

And yeah there's text replacement but it's pretty fickle.

that's odd... I wonder if they removed it in later versions of Android or GBoard or something... do you have the option to change your keyboard language at all?

dba_afish said:
that's odd... I wonder if they removed it in later versions of Android or GBoard or something... do you have the option to change your keyboard language at all?

Oh yeah it seems i glossed over the fact i didn't mention I was using iphone
Yeah I can change language and layout to qwertz or azerty

snpthecat said:
Oh yeah it seems i glossed over the fact i didn't mention I was using iphone
Yeah I can change language and layout to qwertz or azerty

oh, yeah. then that's not to surprising.

you might be able to download a custom keyboard layout or something from the App Store, but I don't know.

I'm in support of your original suggestion almost in its entirety. Single letters for genders and double letters for forms both creates a nice split that helps them stick in the brain more easily and maintains the "short" part of shorthand.

I think that removing slashes from the tags is a bad idea in my opinion. It makes the tags harder to understand at a glance and is very counterintuitive if the intention is to make them easier to use on mobile. Admittedly, typing them might be easier, but that's not taking autocorrect into account. Just to see if I was correct in assuming that autocorrect would see a jumble of letters and turn them into an actual word, I decided to test a couple slash-less tags out. Here are the results:

mpg -> mag
mg -> my
hpf -> how
apa -> apartment
gpmh -> game
anpfe -> apple
trpan -> triangle
hmhd -> hard
hdpan -> HD pants

I don't know about you, but I would infinitely an ever so slightly slower typing process over fucking around with autocorrect. There's also the pbvious issue of it turning these things into proper words. Best case scenario, someone gets confused why every image in their search results contains an apple. Worst case scenario, images are flooded with random tags that were added by complete accident, resulting in a total breakdown of the tagging system. For all the reasons I've given, I'm completely against this idea.

My only suggestion is to make ta = taur since using the second letter rather than the last one is more intuitive. Maybe do the same for human and make its shorthand hu, but it actually does have a reason to use its last letter, so maybe not. I'm fine with that one how it is.

mothbean said:
Single letters for genders and double letters for forms both creates a nice split that helps them stick in the brain more easily and maintains the "short" part of shorthand.

Although some genders/sexes will require double letters to disambiguate. a can be andromorph or ambiguous, so would need to be an and am (or maybe am could be confused for andromorph instead of ambiguous, so ag for ambiguous gender?), already breaking the system and creating ambiguity. Both male and maleherm start with m, and h is already taken for herm, needing another exception for mh to be maleherm. This leaves not only exceptions from the outset, but an inconsistency: mh is from maleherm, but you don't get am for andromorph, that's an instead because am would be ambiguous (pun not intended).

mothbean said:
My only suggestion is to make ta = taur since using the second letter rather than the last one is more intuitive. Maybe do the same for human and make its shorthand hu, but it actually does have a reason to use its last letter, so maybe not. I'm fine with that one how it is.

I could go either way with taur, I just went with tr since it felt more intuitive to me.

has ambiguity problems, and while technically, every letter in human is also in humanoid, hn and hd seem to be the least bad choices.

dba_afish said:
I could go either way with taur, I just went with tr since it felt more intuitive to me.

hu

has ambiguity problems, and while technically, every letter in human is also in humanoid, hn and hd seem to be the least bad choices.

Yeah, I think what you have for human and humanoid is the best option, I was mostly putting that out in case anyone liked it.

watsit said:
Although some genders/sexes will require double letters to disambiguate. a can be andromorph or ambiguous, so would need to be an and am (or maybe am could be confused for andromorph instead of ambiguous, so ag for ambiguous gender?), already breaking the system and creating ambiguity. Both male and maleherm start with m, and h is already taken for herm, needing another exception for mh to be maleherm. This leaves not only exceptions from the outset, but an inconsistency: mh is from maleherm, but you don't get am for andromorph, that's an instead because am would be ambiguous (pun not intended).

As I said in topic #46454, andromorph is "paired" with gynomorph, so I think having both of those tags use single-letter abbreviations is the most intuitive option. As for maleherm, I'd argue that it's more of an alternate version of the herm body type. Herm is thirteen times more common than maleherm, not to mention the word maleherm being herm with an extra bit of context tacked on.

mothbean said:
As I said in topic #46454, andromorph is "paired" with gynomorph, so I think having both of those tags use single-letter abbreviations is the most intuitive option.

Not to me. I'd argue ambiguous_gender is a more common sex tag, alongside male and female. That male, female, and ambiguous_gender feel like the primary sex tags to me, so if any should be chopped down to a single letter, it would be them. In contrast, one intersex tag already needs a double-letter abbreviation (maleherm -> mh), so another intersex tag getting a double-letter abbreviation due to ambiguity makes more sense. If one must have a single-letter abbreviation, it's more intuitive to me that ambiguous_gender gets it.

But this goes to show the ambiguity and how arbitrary it is; it's different depending on how the person thinks of it and the priority they assign to it. What's intuitive to one may not be to another. a is an ambiguous abbreviation, we don't give priority to one option over others even if one is particularly more popular (e.g. krystal is disambiguated, despite the vast majority of posts with a character named Krystal being the Star Fox character, and what most people think of from the name is her), and I don't think a tag should get a pass just because it's a shorthand/shortcut.

Most of the intersex combination tags also aren't really fully formed; gender/intersex are the main tags, with what would be subtags largely not used (missing implications, some missing entirely). Removing those shortcuts would simplify this a lot.

watsit said:
Not to me. I'd argue ambiguous_gender is a more common sex tag, alongside male and female. That male, female, and ambiguous_gender feel like the primary sex tags to me, so if any should be chopped down to a single letter, it would be them. In contrast, one intersex tag already needs a double-letter abbreviation (maleherm -> mh), so another intersex tag getting a double-letter abbreviation due to ambiguity makes more sense. If one must have a single-letter abbreviation, it's more intuitive to me that ambiguous_gender gets it.

But this goes to show the ambiguity and how arbitrary it is; it's different depending on how the person thinks of it and the priority they assign to it. What's intuitive to one may not be to another. a is an ambiguous abbreviation, we don't give priority to one option over others even if one is particularly more popular (e.g. krystal is disambiguated, despite the vast majority of posts with a character named Krystal being the Star Fox character, and what most people think of from the name is her), and I don't think a tag should get a pass just because it's a shorthand/shortcut.

The thing is, I cannot think of a time I've searched for ambiguous gender, whereas I've used the shortcuts for male, female, gynomorph, and intersex a ton. Even then, ? works very well as a single-character ambiguous shorthand. Is only getting a double-letter because it is by far the least common of all the gender tags on top of using a name based on an existing tag.

dba_afish said:
I could go either way with taur, I just went with tr since it felt more intuitive to me.

hu

has ambiguity problems, and while technically, every letter in human is also in humanoid, hn and hd seem to be the least bad choices.

There is a bit of an issue with using hd for humanoid that I just found, which is that it's currently aliased to hi-res

mothbean said:
There is a bit of an issue with using hd for humanoid that I just found, which is that it's currently aliased to hi-res

hd would only be used to mean humanoid in the context of hd/an, fe/p/hd and the like, so I'm not sure it's that big of a deal.