In my opinion, this has been overdue for a very long time. We've had the gynomorph/andromorph tags for what, five years now, and yet their single letter abbreviations are still D and C respectively. For any who don't know, prior to about halfway through 2019 the tags that were used to describe these body types were "dickgirl" and "cuntboy", which were changed to what they are now because—let's be honest—the old ones were crass and kind of offensive. However, despite the main tags being changed, their shorthands stayed the same, which I'm sure has confused more than a fair share of newer users.

Fixing this for the gynomorph tag is easy enough, just add a bunch of new aliases with G rather than D. It's with andromorph that the problem arises: there's already a gender tag that's shortened to A, that being ambiguous. Obviously renaming either of the actual tags would be silly, so my suggested solution is to change ambiguous' abbreviation to AM and give A to andromorph.
My reasoning behind this is twofold; it's much more common for people to search for an actual gender when trying to find art and a shorter abbreviation would be more helpful on the more frequently searched tag, and it would result in nicer-looking formatting because of andromorph being the "counterpart" to gynomorph.

My proposed order of going about this would be to:

1. Alias G to gynomorph
2. Unalias A to ambiguous
3. Alias A to andromorph
4. Alias AM to ambiguous

That said, I want to hear everyone else's thoughts on this.

topic #44696

...C, D, and G are invalid tags, and A is tagged as a meme. The heck are you talking about?

lendrimujina said:
...C, D, and G are invalid tags, and A is tagged as a meme. The heck are you talking about?

I'm guessing Mothbean means the abbreviation tags used in pairing, like how f/a is currently female/ambiguous
Also mentioned in that topic dba mentioned.

lendrimujina said:
...C, D, and G are invalid tags, and A is tagged as a meme. The heck are you talking about?

shortcut aliases: d/d, c/c, a/a, gm/gm, etc..

Ah, my mistake.

dba_afish said:
shortcut aliases: d/d, c/c, a/a, gm/gm, etc..

So "gm" and "am" already have abbreviations like this?
And yeah, I agree that the "D" and "C" ones need to go, they're not only outdated and offensive, they're pretty unintuitive.

lendrimujina said:
Ah, my mistake.

So "gm" and "am" already have abbreviations like this?
And yeah, I agree that the "D" and "C" ones need to go, they're not only outdated and offensive, they're pretty unintuitive.

I don't see any reason to delete existing aliases. they don't conflict with anything and it's only going to mess with the people who've been using them since 2015, so this would be extra work for no real benefit.

the real problem is the contradiction/lack of parity between existing abbreviations. some tags, notably, the front-facing tag names of the gender_transformation and crossgender subtags use a = andromorph while the basic pairing shortcuts use a = ambiguous.

I've documented some more of the issues along with my preferred solutions in the thread I linked above.

dba_afish said:
I don't see any reason to delete existing aliases. they don't conflict with anything and it's only going to mess with the people who've been using them since 2015, so this would be extra work for no real benefit.

the real problem is the contradiction/lack of parity between existing abbreviations. some tags, notably, the front-facing tag names of the gender_transformation and crossgender subtags use a = andromorph while the basic pairing shortcuts use a = ambiguous.

I've documented some more of the issues along with my preferred solutions in the thread I linked above.

Oh god, those never even crossed my mind and I didn't even know the x/p/y abbreviation existed. I thought this was just a relatively minor issue caused by an incomplete tag update, but that's a massive formatting problem.

mothbean said:
Oh god, those never even crossed my mind and I didn't even know the x/p/y abbreviation existed. I thought this was just a relatively minor issue caused by an incomplete tag update, but that's a massive formatting problem.

This is why shorthand abbreviation aliases are generally not preferred. When they're so short, it's easy to run into conflicts where the same abbreviation can mean multiple things (or can be taken as a mistag; lav meaning looking_at_viewer, but can also be a misspelling of lab as the letters are right next to each other). These were just more lucky with the previous names having less of a chance for conflicts (though they still existed; f/p/a meaning feral_penetrating_anthro or female_penetrating_ambiguous?), and people have gotten used to the shorthands that have existed, but the new names make more of the abbreviations more ambiguous. Is it time to give them up? Especially with things like re621 allowing users to make their own abbreviations, they don't have to be an alias on the site.