Danbooru

Tags describing viewer/character interaction deleted- why?

Posted under Tags

A few days ago, I discovered that many, if not all of the tags that indicate a portrayed character interacting with the viewer had been deleted, possibly by Builder BrokenEagle98.

This is utterly baffling because both were fairly old tags and describe accurately a unique action within a piece of art.

Additionally, somehow, for example, speaking_to_viewer was purged, but other character/viewer interaction tags like incoming_gift/kiss/hug/punch/pocky_kiss ext remain active, fulfilling a similar purpose but for some reason being left untouched despite many being used less than interacting_with_viewer ext.

Why was this done? It serves no purpose.

Plus it's really frustrating because I'd been going through posts a week ago accurately tagging as many images as I could and trying to get other people to use the tag more frequently. Yes, that's a personal squabble but all the same.

I've reapplied the tags to a *single* image I consider appropriate for both interacting_with_viewer_ and talking_to_viewer. It's here post #2282563.

I wasn't the one who deleted these tags, but I don't see a compelling reason for having them. Characters "interacting" with the viewer is an remarkably vague tag concept and it's largely redundant to pov, where some degree of viewer-character interaction is expected anyway. Likewise, characters speaking to the viewer can already be found by a pov talking search.

iridescent_slime said:

I wasn't the one who deleted these tags, but I don't see a compelling reason for having them. Characters "interacting" with the viewer is an remarkably vague tag concept and it's largely redundant to pov, where some degree of viewer-character interaction is expected anyway. Likewise, characters speaking to the viewer can already be found by a pov talking search.

because a character can interact with the viewer without ever talking to them. Let's make this the simplest, most robust interpretation possible and say interacting_with_viewer should apply to images where the character is touching the viewer or is being touched by the viewer. There is currently no tag to describe this. It is more specific than POV or looking_at_viewer, and tags are literally meant to make things specific.

Interacting with viewer is really just pov out_of_frame. If all posts were tagged accurately, this would find most if not all of them. If you want to get down to a certain kind of touch, well then we whole bunch denoting those (Tag Group:Hands).

As iridescent slime noted, speaking to viewer is really just talking pov or even talking solo. Once again, if all posts were tagged accurately that would be enough.

However TBQH I have no idea what talking is for, as I've never tagged that nor have I searched for it. If we need a tag to denote speaking to the viewer though, I would much rather use the tags talking plus either solo or pov. It's much better IMHO to use combos of tags to denote something rather than a specialized tag for every single thing. The latter only makes it harder to recall and use tags, especially with the current bloat of tags standing currently around 325K.

TheGreens said:

because a character can interact with the viewer without ever talking to them. Let's make this the simplest, most robust interpretation possible and say interacting_with_viewer should apply to images where the character is touching the viewer or is being touched by the viewer. There is currently no tag to describe this. It is more specific than POV or looking_at_viewer, and tags are literally meant to make things specific.

First, if someone wants to search for characters touching or being touched by the viewer, they can already do that by combining established tags. Searches like pov holding_hands and pov guided_breast_grab are more than adequate for this task. Interacting with viewer is a solution in want of a problem. As BrokenEagle98 said, combinations of broadly useful tags are preferable to narrow tags that individually see little use. It's unreasonable to expect uploaders to memorize thousands of unnecessarily specific tags when we can achieve similar results with a smaller, more manageable tag list. "Tags are literally meant to make things specific" is the sort of sentiment that leads to explosions of ridiculous niche tags like quagga ears and greek flag towel.

Second, as I stated earlier, interacting with viewer is hopelessly vague. What, precisely, constitutes "interacting"? The name of this tag leaves so much room for interpretation that it invites taggers to add it wherever they see fit, which ultimately culminates in the tag becoming useless for finding anything. Consider, for instance, post #2744579. It was one of the images tagged interacting with viewer, but where is the interaction? There is no conversation, no touching, and the character isn't even looking in the viewer's direction. If the character ignoring the viewer is all it takes to constitute "interacting", then literally anything with the pov tag could also be tagged as such, which makes this tag utterly superfluous.

Kikimaru said:

@BrokenEagle98

In the case of a mass purge like this, you should probably create a wiki entry for users searching this tag.

It wasn't a mass purge... it was only 39 posts total. I doubt anyone but the OP knew about those tags before this topic was created.

However, since search: talking pov doesn't also cover shouting pov, shouting pov, talking solo (etc) I feel this needs to be reinstated as a searchable tag.

There are a couple of ideas that would solve that without creating a specialized tag.

1. Create an umbrella tag for the talking, shouting, and whispering tags
2. Ammend the definition of pov to include talking, shouting, or whispering to the user

With either of the above, you could then use the power of OR tags to find everything you want in a single search.

With #1, if the umbrella tag's name was... conversing... then conversing ~pov ~solo would work.
With #2, then pov ~talking ~shouting ~whispering could be used.

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