George, that is not what I meant at all by "bad."
I meant "handdrawn digimon shota milf porn."
And things like that. But, probably people shouldn't post some of the things you listed either.
Posted under General
"If you're truly unsure if a posted image is deemed acceptable/unacceptable contact the administrator for verification. Otherwise [for banning prevention] DON'T POST IT."
Not really necessary as all images added by non-privileged members will be screened by the mods/admins. If it's shit, it won't go up. Don't bother readding it.
Regarding the _(artist) thing, I'd change that to something easier to type, eg ".artist" or even ".art" (finding something that doesn't conflict with existing tags and syntax). Such tags would get the "artist" type assigned automatically. When tags are displayed, if they have the ".artist" suffix and are of type "artist", strip the suffix in the display text (so it get displayed simply as "gnappo (artist)", but the link goes to "gnappo.artist"). When you search for "gnappo.artist", or tag something as "gnappo.artist", etc., if there is a "gnappo" tag with type "artist", use that tag instead. Prevent creating "gnappo.artist" if there is a "gnappo" of type artist already.
First, a couple of smaller points, more complex stuff goes in a separate post for easier reading:
(albert, please implement linking. Why is there no single linking method spanning all of {wiki, comments, forum} in place anyway?)
jxh2154: your example of {barefoot, feet} is actually an example of physical trait vs. feature tags. If feet are featured prominently, I tag it "feet". If not, but some characters are barefooted, it gets "barefoot". The previous rule doesn't apply if it's some kind of obvious context (such as swimsuit or nude), *unless* it's a prominent feature, in which case it gets both "barefoot" and "feet" again.
This gives us the maximum coverage, as you can search for all barefooted pics, and if you want only those where it's important, you go "barefoot feet", and you can still have all feet without them necessarily being bare, and also you can exclude bare feet but get other kinds.
George: "Images that are copyright without the copyright owner's permission."
Then there would be no danbooru. Or any imageboard ever for that matter =P
So, yes, we flagrantly ignore the "Please do not post these fanarts on other sites" messages you see (in English no less) on nearly every fanartist's site. But we also make way more effort to provide source and attribution than any other imageboard, and *certainly* don't claim the work as our own, so I don't exactly lose sleep over it.
This has come up recently as I wanted to move azuma_syoujuan to azuma_shoujuan and wasn't quite sure how to tackle it, if it's a good idea etc., and I see there's also a recent thread about bow_ditama vs. jidama_bou. This is a mark of more general issue, what to do when artists / established usage / public opinion go against common sense and coherent rules. So far it's been pretty clear we do want artists identified as uniquely as possible, preferably with real names. I fully support that policy, as it's perfectly clear and consistent.
However, the whatever name the artist lists as their name on the page is not necessarily the name they are known by, as has been the case with utsura_uraraka -> eretto, or afterschool_of_the_5th_year -> kantoku. There are also problems with inconsistent and non-standard romanisation, as with itou_noiji (aka. noizi_ito) or jidama_bou (better known as bow_ditama). It also affects titles and characters (lavie_head vs. whatever other wild guess fansubbers made at some point).
Frankly, I stand firmly on the position that artists are not allowed to decide on their names spelling outside of Japanese, and that canonical form should always be proper hepburn. However, as seen above, the discrepancies sometimes are too great to make the connection obvious. Aliases fix that when searching and inputting, but they don't make it obvious in any way to the viewer that utsura_uraraka is now named eretto. Therefore, it'd be very useful to be able to mark synonymous tags that not only are aliased, but also shown when displaying (but not editing) posts, with some kind of visual indication to make it clear it's only an alternative name for one of the other tags.
I think the artist wiki is a better way to do that, as opposed to adding more tag clutter.
And as for character spellings, ANN is generally our "authority file".
On the whole though, I agree with using proper, standard romanization, but to be perfectly honest as long as it's easily traceable to that specific artist (as the artist wiki provides), the most important thing is just uniqueness of the tags. If that means syoujin vs shoujin, I don't care terribly much either way.
I'm wondering if one solution to tag ambiguity is to allow the same tag to exist in multiple types. I've not thought this through fully so I've probably missed some major flaw, and this is a bit hard to explain, but it goes something like this:
You upload an image containing the character zxcvb. The tag does not exist so is created untyped so you retag it char:zxcvb so zxcvb is now set as a char-typed tag.
The next time you upload an image of zxcvb, you tag it zxcvb and since it already exists as a char tag it will by default be added to the images as a char-type tag.
If then an image comes along by artist zxcvb you would have to tag it as artist:zxcvb and zxcvb would now be created as an artist-type tag as well.
Since the tag now exists twice, future images of either would have to be explicitly set as one or the other (with one type perhaps set as the default), either by using the prefix when tagging, or by a prompt after.
The drawbacks would be some extra work (although not really any more than having to type zxcvb_(artist) over and over) and the fact that retyping tags would be harder after the fact (at the moment, if there were 50 images by artist qwerty with an untyped tag, you can easily change the lot in one go but under this system you'd need a preview like with the mass edit tool to verify which images' tags you need to retype)
"'If you're truly unsure if a posted image is deemed acceptable/unacceptable contact the administrator for verification. Otherwise [for banning prevention] DON'T POST IT.'
Not really necessary as all images added by non-privileged members will be screened by the mods/admins. If it's shit, it won't go up. Don't bother readding it."
Although if you find a lot of stuff you upload not appearing, it is probably a good sign that you're doing something wrong and that reposting is probably a bad idea.
That does bring me to a question - if a non-'privelidged' member uploads a non-safe image, can they see it?
"I see there's also a recent thread about bow_ditama vs. jidama_bou"
Provided you consider a 5-month-dead reanimated corpse 'recent'.
I admit I'm fairly bad with romanization, especially with long vowel stuff. Even Hepburn has several variations so perhaps we should settle on one.
For artist names, since I usually get them from drag11 (which explicitly lists the artist's name, usually) I use that as the standard. The names drag11 provides also seem to match up with Moeoh and galge.com and Toranoana. Sadly, drag11 doesn't seem to offer any sort of centralized database listing every artist (which is what this site is slowly becoming).
The problem is when a kanji name is given but no reading is provided. Spending time digging through J-E dictionaries is tedious and ultimately provides the wrong answer, usually. This is when you have to resort to using the site or circle name, or in the worst case, the raw kanji.
One question you have to ask is, what are we trying to build here? Are we building a centralized database of artists? That's what the artist UI is aiming for and that's where we can argue about the details.
Or are we trying to let users find out more pictures from the same artist? In this case, the name doesn't really matter, as long it's consistent and unified. This is pretty much the case for posts, I think. Most people aren't going to care about the difference between Ishikei and NiseMIDI, or Eretto and Utsura Uraraka, as long as their search gets them their porn. That's why I'm not so hugely concerned about standardizing all the artist tags.
Albert, I'm with you on the artists.
Accuracy is important, yes, but only to a point. There are extremes on both sides - making shit up at the one end, using raw kanji tags on the other - that I'd like to stay far away from.
I use the rikaichan extension. If the artist doesn't provide a reading, I can use rikaichan's name dictionary to narrow it down to the common readings. Obviously, there's often more than one way to read a combination of kanji. So I have a few options to choose from.
Tiebreakers can come from a few sources. If I can't find the name spelled out in kana anywhere on the site, I usually look at 1) their email address, 2) the site name or url, or 3) names used in various top page graphics and such.
It's surprising how often that approach bears fruit. I'd say practically half the time there's ambiguity, looking a little bit harder makes it much more certain.
And when I simply have to guess, I'll apply one more filter: I'll prefer the reading the kanji give when used as standalone non-name words, provided that reading matches one of the name readings given. Because, hell, sometimes the PN/HN is just meant to be an object rather than a name.
If all this fails, I make my best guess and add the "name reading is best guess" note in the wiki and provide the kanji as an alias for anyone who thinks they can do a better job.
And if there's simply nothing even remotely resembling an artist name anywhere on the site whatsoever, I'll base it off the site name or URL.
I spend a *lot* of time sourcing artists here, so I want to find a balance of speed and accuracy, and I think the above has worked well so far.
And as you said, many people just want to fap, they don't care so much about our debates on the way to optimize information retrieval =P Not that that's carte blanche to tag randomly, but hell, I think we've got a ridiculously accurate database here, all things considered. The community astounds me.
Why not create a thread dedicated to name romanisation? When you're stumped, post in it so that people can try to help. The wiki is not a good place for asking questions, due to its usage pattern.
So, what about the tag types? You can already write stuff like "artist:some_guy" to set the tag type directly when tagging pictures, so why not extend that notation to the internal DB storage to better support homonymous tags of different types? I'd like to see some discussion about this.
The main issues I'd like to address are 1) the unsightly duplication of _(artist) (artist), 2) the inconsistency of having to use dude_(artist) when tagging even though we already have the artist:dude syntax (and the shorthand art:dude).
As for the romanization thread: I could, but when I'm tagging a lot it would be a pain to sit and wait for hours (or days) while people discuss it, and the images all languish untagged (and I probably lose track of them... I have 70+ tabs open in firefox at any one time lately). Or I could tag first, then ask, then revise if needed, but thats double the work. ::shrugs:: Dunno if the gain is worth it, especially when sometimes theres just no flat out right answer for a name reading unless the artist spells it out.
As for the types:
We don't actually have to type out "dude_(artist)" every time. It can be done that way if desired, but I certainly don't do it. That's what Find Artist or danbooruup's history-based drop-down or wild card searching are for (and I have firefox set up to I can type 'm *sometag*' and it searches automatically).
So having to constantly add a tagtype each time you tag that artist (or character... or series... o_O) would be far more time consuming and not worth the gains of making some tags look cleaner, in my opinion anyway.
So 1) is annoying but cosmetic 2) is only an issue if you manually type out all your tags which isn't necessary.
Basically, it seems possible to have the database store the same tag in different types but not without making tagging either a chore - having to retype every typed tag every time you upload. Or making it excessively complicated - needing separate entry boxes for each of the four types (char, art, copy, general), so that entering 'sakura' in the character upload box means the server knows it's a character, as opposed to sakura in the artist box, etc. Imagine four separate boxes on the search screen... the bookmarklet... the edit menu... danbooruup...
If there's a way that can avoid both those (fatal, in my eyes) pitfalls, I'm all for it, but I can't think of one myself.
This was posted a while back by 葉月 as a comment but it also needs to be posted here. Regarding notes:
Please take care to make the notes obscure as little of the pic as possible, that generally means the smallest bounding box of the text, unless the text is particularly unwieldy (ie. skewed, tilted or very big) or there exist natural boundaries for the note (such as a rectangular dialogue box in a game screenshot).
There isn't much point in us discussing which reading for a name is right when there's a good chance we'll be wrong anyway. We need confirmation from the actual artist, either through him providing a reading, by gleaning it from the URL or the email address, or some trusted third party source like a magazine.
forum #418:
Back on the 4 day old subject of how to tag cosplay's...
Does anyone think it would be a good idea to use a "_(cosplay)" posfix to identify the character being cosplayed e.g.
izumi_konata suzumiya_haruhi_(cosplay)
for a pic of Konata cosplaying Haruhi?
forum #538:
Yeah, probably a good idea.