Hey, there, folks! I used to lurk here as Smithings, but I didn't engage with y'all at all so none of you know who I am. The point is that I have recently become aware of a phenomenon in which a search for the tags "shota flaccid" turns up about five or so pictures instead of the usual billions and billions. There still seem to be pictures of that sort on the site, but now most of them are tagged as "young".

halp pls

Namurt said:
Hey, there, folks! I used to lurk here as Smithings, but I didn't engage with y'all at all so none of you know who I am. The point is that I have recently become aware of a phenomenon in which a search for the tags "shota flaccid" turns up about five or so pictures instead of the usual billions and billions. There still seem to be pictures of that sort on the site, but now most of them are tagged as "young".

halp pls

The shota tag used to be aliased to "young". So there was effectively no shota tag at all.

The alias was recently removed, but there's still a whole lot of work to be done adding the shota tag back onto the appropriate images.

If this is something you're particularly interested in, perhaps you could help get that tagging situation back into order.
If you see a young male image, just add the shota tag back onto it.

Namurt said:
Hey, there, folks! I used to lurk here as Smithings, but I didn't engage with y'all at all so none of you know who I am. The point is that I have recently become aware of a phenomenon in which a search for the tags "shota flaccid" turns up about five or so pictures instead of the usual billions and billions. There still seem to be pictures of that sort on the site, but now most of them are tagged as "young".

halp pls

That's because it wasn't long ago that "shota" and "loli" were allowed as tags at all. Previously, both of those tags would just return results for "young" instead. The fact that you're seeing so few pictures for "shota" just means that the "shota" tag hasn't been added to many posts yet ever since it's been allowed as a valid tag.

It was previously not allowed because we tend to shy away from gender-specific tags, or at least we did for several years. As the site grows, the need to start allowing certain tags in order to properly index artwork becomes greater.

However, we do have it configured such that the "loli" and "shota" tags IMPLY the "young" tag; so any time someone tags a post with loli/shota, it will also automatically be tagged "young". So if you want to see all the same results that you were seeing before, just search for "young flaccid", since that's exactly what the site was making you search for previously anyways, you just may not have realized it.

The title of this sounds like some shitty movie title. Back to the topic, using "young" will give the exact results you're looking for since that was practically what you've been searching for years. Eventually the shota tag will get cleaned up so it's a functional tag again.

Thanks for the explanations, folks; you're all quite kind.