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@Kincyr
Necessary, no, harmless and can be useful to people, yes.

sometimes I wonder if color-specific tags are even necessary, especially since they’ve expanded to articles of clothing in some EqG pics

This subject was talked about before in a mega-thread that covered too many tags to really have a focused discussion on any of them, so I’m making a new thread, here.

There are a lot of tags describing a character’s color, and many of them have repeats for “fur”, “coat”, “skin”, “body”, and others. None of them have descriptions (and due to a bug, I can’t search if any have short descriptions). For example:
yellow fur, yellow coat, yellow skin, yellow body, yellow pony

Depending on the illustration, they can be effectively redundant, such as most canon ponies where “body” and “coat” are no different, and because they’re not illustrated with any fuzz, it’d be easy to think “skin” means the same thing. This divides up the topic between whichever tag someone thinks of when posting. This also means that tagging them all on the same post, like yellow coat + yellow fur or yellow body + yellow coat, conveys no extra information.

In other cases, they might all mean different things. Aside from just technicalities like Equestria Girls having skin (not coats) and ponies having coats (and rarely skin), some kinds of illustrations might truly have both, such as centaurs or satyrs.

In my opinion, “coat” and “fur” may as well mean the same thing, but the original topic’s author felt that “fur” should be kept separate for longhaired species. (If it influences any decisions, the tag coat implies clothes so that’s another potential conflict.)

Here’s what I’m thinking:
Alias all “[color] coat” to a matching “[color] body” tag. My reasoning is that one wouldn’t tag a coat color unless it’s the main color of the character’s body in the first place.

Define “[color] fur” tags in a way such as: “Use this tag for accent fur colors, or for fur colors on characters showing both fur and skin, such as a satyr. Do not use this tag for the predominant color of a character - instead, tag [color] body.” (By “accent”, I mean coat markings or other design features.)

Define “[color] skin” tags: “Use this tag for the bare skin color on a character that also has fur. Do not use this tag if the character is not furred at all, such as a human - instead, tag [color] body.” (see footnote)

Define “[color] body” tags: “Use this tag for the main color of a character, whether fur or skin.”

As for “[color] pony” (search not exhaustive), I don’t know whether to combine them with “[color] body” tags - if so, people wouldn’t be able to tell if a body color tag applies to the pony in a multi-species picture, but does that need to be possible?

Thoughts?

footnote: …with one big exception: dark skin/moderate dark skin/brown skin/tan skin are a hub for drama, so keeping these separately-tagged from furred characters is necessary to facilitate enforcement of site Rule #4. If they were combined, people could claim that they can’t filter selectively enough.