Philomena Proposal for enhanced tagging.

Philomena improvement proposal that I'm crossposting from Ponybooru: associative tags. The idea was originally discussed between me and a background pony over on Derpi. However, they aren't currently interested in implementing it or any similar proposal.

Why ask over on Derpi in the first place?
1. The idea came up naturally in conversation
2. Derpi remains the de facto booru of record for 98% of images. Tagging policy changes there, if accepted, will improve tags on here, Ponybooru, and Twibooru as well when their respective importer bots run.

Why discuss in this thread rather than on the Philomena project itself?
1. To get buy-in from here (and/or Ponybooru) before sending it to the Philomena GitHub
2. Gain feedback on how to improve the proposal from more places
3. Hopefully find the BP that was in the Derpi thread for more thoughts from them (as it was inspired by their idea in the first place)

What is the idea?
While the system as first proposed in the Derpi thread looks like S-expressions you'd feed into a LISP interpreter, there may be a simpler input.

Rather than merely tag images with Twilight Sparkle, Rarity, butt, horn, they could instead be tagged with Twilight Sparkle/butt, Rarity/horn to describe an image with Twilight's butt and Rarity's horn. Likewise, the implied X tags could be standardized into Gilda/implied or Rainbow Dash/offscreen.

While this proposal as presented still leaves some ambiguity in orgy scenes, the associative tags allow us obsessive categorizers to be properly obsessive and link "accessory" tags to the character they accompany.

What about search?
1. If you want to find (or hide) only stallion butts (rather than match images with a stallion and a mare's butt), something like {1}/stallion && {1}/butt would be the search string.
2. Searching for just butt would match legacy images with a plain butt tag as well as every single butt tag associated with a character (i.e. Twilight Sparkle/butt will match as well)

Other benefits/drawbacks?
* The only obvious drawback is that pony boorus each have 2.7 million images tagged the old way. This may be a better proposal for new boorus starting from zero. Maybe performance would be weird, but that's for the Postgres experts to discuss.
* An additional benefit is the consolidation of per-character ad hoc tags, like twibutt and rearity.
* Could be a differentiating feature from Derpi, if it gets implemented and used here and not there.
* Encourage uploaders to be anal about tagging the species, breed, and gender of each character.

Changes to the tag box?
I may make a mock-up later if I remember.
Rather than making users repeatedly type out character/ before typing the tag they want, the fancy tag editor could be enhanced with separate sub-boxes for each character.

>General tags< artist:none of your business, safe, tree, outdoor, prank >Character tags< -? Twilight Sparkle | pony, unicorn, butt, rearing -? Rarity | anthro, unicorn, R63, horn -? Rainbow Dash | offscreen, laughing -? Gilda | implied +[New Character]

I don't like it. Tagging is already too well set to start messing with things in my opinion. It would also exponentially increase the time taken to properly tag an image and make it more difficult to search. It just complicates things too much. I really hope Derpi doesn't do this.

@Background Pony #5CB1
This.
Do you even see how awful Derpi fags tag their shit? I get so annoyed I edit tags in my free time. This will only makes it more complicated to find things. For example, if you want stallion butt only (faggot), you can do "stallion, butt, -mare" or "stallion, butt, solo" instead of all that.

@Background Pony #5CB1

Tagging is already too well set to start messing with things in my opinion

Fair enough. This may be a better system for something starting anew rather than a database with 3 million images

It would also exponentially increase the time taken to properly tag an image and make it more difficult to search

How would rarity/butt be any more time-consuming or difficult to remember than remembering whether to use rarity butt, butt focus: rarity, rearity, or diamond ass when you want to view (or tag) the marshmallow plot? For that matter, how would that be more work for the mods who wouldn't have to alias all the variations that people make up because they didn't think of the existing tag?

Part of what inspired the original proposal on Derpi was the number of character-specific butt tags and the inconsistency in the puns to name them. For a particularly bad example, check out this Derpi thread on tagging drunk & high characters. Why have all that trouble over character name/drunk or character name/high?

I hope Derpi doesn't do this

They've already said no. Ponybooru seemed intrigued but mostly totally ignored my post there.


@omelettepony

For example, if you want stallion butt only (faggot), you can do "stallion, butt, -mare" or "stallion, butt, solo" instead of all that.

Those searches miss images of a stallion's rear end where a mare also happens to be in the frame.

@Background Pony #9DAD
>How would rarity/butt be any more time-consuming or difficult to remember than remembering whether to use rarity butt, butt focus: rarity, rearity, or diamond ass when you want to view (or tag) the marshmallow plot?
Let's say you have a couple of ponies. Now you would have to tag Rarity:butt+plot+tail+unicorn, Applejack: butt+plot+tail+earth pony, twilight: butt+plot+tail+unicorn instead of rarity, applejack, twilight, butt, plot, tail, unicorn, earth pony. The more items you actually want to tag for each, you will need to tag for each pony. This is why it get exponentially worse than how things currently are.

>Part of what inspired the original proposal on Derpi was the number of character-specific butt tags and the inconsistency in the puns to name them.
Then keep whatever fun tags you'd like and have plot/butt automatically added.

>They've already said no. Ponybooru seemed intrigued but mostly totally ignored my post there.
Thank Celestia.

@Background Pony #9DAD
>Those searches miss images of a stallion's rear end where a mare also happens to be in the frame.
What do you mean, as in a mare could still be in the picture or it will not have mares in picture? I clearly said stallion butt only, relating to your original post. The "-mare" tag would exclude all inages tagged with mares if you want stallion ass (fucking faggot), and the "solo" tag means there won't be any other character than the stallion himself.

@omelettepony
The meant that if a mare was further back in the scene (or a different panel in the case of comics), you'd lose out on images that feature a stallion's plot but happen to have a mare somewhere in it. And in your previous search, you could do this instead for any results for the both of them like so:
(stallion, butt, -mare) OR (stallion, butt, solo) Granted, the former would already include the latter. But it'd also catch any images missing the solo tag as an upside I guess.

That being said
@Background Pony #9DAD
>Changes to the tag box? etc.
That tagging would be WAY too far for me to even want to bother. As potentially useful as that is, even e621 doesn't do that shit, and they're autists into tagging as far as they already do.