General Tag Discussion

@Litrojia  
Hmm. There’s been so much added to the tag that I can’t really tell what it was originally used for. Right now it seems to cover griffons, hippogriffs and pegasi acting like birds, cute griffons, hippogriffs and pegasi and instances of the word “birb” being used. The last… I don’t think it really needs a tag; the first is already covered by the “[x] doing bird things” family; and if you want to find cute pictures by species you only really need to search “[species], cute”.
 
I dunno, this seems too diffuse to pull a specific meaning out of it, and I’m not sure if it really provides any particular utility.

Just like sexy and funny, cute is a functionally useless tag applied solely by individual personal preference, and never should have been kept in the first place.
 
birb is birds or birdlike creatures doing hyperbolically birdy things to comedic effect; anyone who’s seen the word birb used in the wild knows what it means.

@TexasUberAlles  

 
But how else are we supposed to know someone’s cute?

@Blissful690  
I think the point was that subjective tags (which “cute” undeniably is, to an extent) are unnecessary. I don’t agree with the tag’s inclusion or exclusion in every case, but it’s consistent enough for me that I use it quite a bit, and so do others.
 
However, I’ll make the case that tags made for “very cute” images like daaaaaaaaaaaw and hnnng are useless, since to me the “level” of cuteness is more subjective than whether an image is supposed to be cute or not in the first place. Possibly just personal preference, but I don’t think images with those tags are any different than the tags without them.
 
I agree that “sexy” is useless since we’ve already got suggestive, questionable, and explicit. Images tagged “funny” usually aren’t funny to me, but I feel that tag should probably be kept since those images attempted humor. However, “humor” and “joke” are already tags in their own right, yet “humorous” is aliased to “funny”. That’s a mess.

I could write a novel on why fluffy subjective tags are a waste of time and effort for everyone involved, but no one cares and everyone already knows lol.
 
Plus all the character specific cute tags too, and sexy tags, and pretty much just everything that isn’t helpful. What’s cute and sexy to me ain’t for others usually.

@LightningBolt  
:p

@LightningBolt  
Probably the biggest for this is solo female. I see people tossing that on so much stuff. What’s its description?  

 
The way people use it you’d think it was an alias for female.

@Damaged  
It’s supposed to be used for explicit and questionable titty porn stuff so people like me can filter it out of searches.

@Damaged  
With how much that tag and solo male get misused, plus the fact that you could just search gender alongside rating tags, I don’t think we really need those tags.  
I was considering making a post about it recently, but we’ve got duo male / female too, which I think aren’t reserved for sexualized images, plus males / females only which are. It had me really confused with tagging an image the other day.

@Litrojia  
Yes, those facts are true, but they miss the point that people’s filters have been using them as this meaning since the beginning and changing them or nuking them to the point where people will need to use complex filters for what used to be a single tag is just absurd. Not like people even tag the single tags properly as it is. The same applies to fe/males only too.

The older tag is just for canon characters, right?

@RebeccaHawkins  
I think it applies to any character as long as it shows them as being older

@LightningBolt & @Litrojia  
Sorry if this is late, but just to add to what LightningBolt said, if those tags need fixing, it’s better to fix them than to change their meaning.
 
They’re really handy, and even though we have to keep going back and fixing them, for the most part they’re doing their jobs.
 
So they’re worth the effort to clean them up if someone’s been misusing them.

@RebeccaHawkins  
That tag is often used in place of the FoalCon tag for characters who are assumed to be underage. So if there’s an OC who usually gets tagged FoalCon and an image shows them aged up so it’s no longer FoalCon, then that tag should be applied to the image. Especially if the image is also Anthro, otherwise it might get flagged as Rule #5.
 
Beyond that, it’s also appropriate on any character who is drawn older than they are in canon, or at least in the primary/not extended canon.

@Derpy Whooves  
But should be on safe images of OCs? Or characters from other franchises?

@RebeccaHawkins  
There are a lot of safe images that have the “older” tag on them.
 
Again as long as the image shows them as being older then their canon age, I think it is ok

@RebeccaHawkins  
It’s actually already on close to 12,000 safe-rate images now. So, it doesn’t just carry the “Not Foalcon” meaning. “Aged Up” and “Grown Up” and “Older” are all aliased, so all of those meanings, safe or explicit, are on the same tag now. On safe images it just means that the character is older than they are normally shown.
 
_{… it just occurred to me that we’d have absolutely no way to tell if FlufflePuff were “aged up” or not. Or what her actual age is in ‘canon’, given who her sister is. She might be older than the solar system.}

@Derpy Whooves  
@icey wicey 1517  
Thank you for your help, but I’m still a little confused. The tag’s description says that it’s aged up characters that are “canonically underage (those within the MLP:FIM universe)”. And to me that implies that it’s only for older versions of MLP characters. The description also says that it’s for adult versions of underage characters, but it gets used on pictures of older versions of characters that are canonically adults.

@RebeccaHawkins  
I think it might be best if the description gets updated to just say to be used for characters being shown as older then their canon age in general.

Also on a related note to what I posted in the shipping thread:  
@icey wicey 1517  

 
Since considering the current debate about their gender there, a rule 63 tag would come in handy for future situations

@RebeccaHawkins & @icey wicey 1517  
The description that’s there was from the old Rule #5 “September Change” stuff from the “Older” or “Aged Up” tags, so that’s pretty hard and fast, but I’ll look at the description to see if there’s a way to say it that will cause less confusion.
 
Just out of curiosity, which is the character or image that inspired this? Which is the character that you want to tag as “Aged Up” or “Older” or “Grown Up” which you don’t think this tag should be on?
 
@icey wicey 1517  
The problem with that is that the tag is used as a binary bit that allows canon underage characters to be drawn Anthro and Explicit. If it is valid on an image that would otherwise be Anthro Foalcon then it is an exception.
 
If a character doesn’t have a “Canon” age then that binary becomes slippery and wet and hard to light.

@Derpy Whooves  
There was no particular image, I was looking at the tag and saw a few oc only pictures, which I thought I shouldn’t be on.

Oh - ok. It’s fine on OC images. There’s lots of OCs where we “know” how old they “usually are”, and sometimes people want to fine or filter those images, so it’s fine.

@icey wicey 1517  

 
IMO it’d be better to have tags for “lil cheese (male)” and “lil cheese (female)” and probably also “lil cheese (nonbinary)”, since that leaves out the debate about which sex/gender is “canonical” or “original” and which one is the R63 one.

@saby  
That seems extremely overcomplicated.  
Main issue would be: How would you determine which image was male and which one was female?
 
Add to that people needing to know there’s specific separate character tags for the same character.
 
Show staff said the character was male, that’s what we’re going with on the site. If someone wants to draw him as a female, we have the rule 63 tag for that. We don’t need to make it more complex than that.