Danbooru

What is allowed, and what is not?

Posted under General

Not a bitching thread, just needing a question answered.

In an effort to better understand the desired nature of Danbooru's culture, I'm going to blatantly ask, what is allowed, and what is not?

I'm about to upload for the first time, and I now see this message:

"Please keep the following guidelines in mind when uploading something. Consistently violating these rules will result in a ban.

* Do not upload furry, yaoi, guro, toon, or poorly drawn art
* Do not upload things with compression artifacts
* Do not upload things with obnoxious watermarks
* Group doujinshi, manga pages, and similar game CGs together"

However, after searching for the tag "Yaoi," which it says here is not allowed, the results are 64 pages long. 64 pages of something that's a bannable offense? I've also read on the forum that mods don't like porn, specifically tentacles, and often disapprove these images. I found this laughable since from what I can see, at least 50% of the content on this site is pornographic and a search for tentacles yields 66 pages of results.

Obviously, I'm missing something. I don't have much hentai to upload that isn't on this site, or guro, or anything it says I can't post, so I have nothing to worry about. I'm just really confused. Can someone please explain?

Updated by jxh2154

I haven't been here forever but I'm guessing most of the offending posts are from before the rules were set in motion. As for not liking porn, I can't really recall precisely what forum posts you are talking about but I think it might be more along the lines of "live action" porn rather than porn of the drawn persuasion.

What a mod/janitor will approve tends to be based on his/her own subjective interests and standards.

eli said:
I haven't been here forever but I'm guessing most of the offending posts are from before the rules were set in motion.

I checked the dates on a few guro images, and all the ones I looked at were posted only a few weeks ago.

Not complaining, I think guro, yaoi, furry, whatever, should be allowed. If the mods accept them, good in my opinion. But why the conflicting rules / lack of rule enforcement?

Guro mostly still exists because some people believe in a "tasteful guro," if you will. I don't know how to explain the way the rules work. The best way I can think is that they are guidelines (as it says) more than they are rules.

I'm going to leave it to someone a bit more familiar with the system than myself to further explain - or to correct me, since I am still a little confused sometimes as well. But I hope I helped a little. =)

abcadeff said: nI checked the dates on a few guro images, and all the ones I looked at were posted only a few weeks ago. nNot complaining, I think guro, yaoi, furry, whatever, should be allowed. If the mods accept them, good in my opinion. But why the conflicting rules / lack of rule enforcement?

For my part, I won't ever be accepting any of the above. Especially guro or furry.

Actually, I don't think I've ever personally seen yaoi in the mod queue when I've checked, so that one is sort of moot.

So basically, these rules aren't really "bannable offenses", and the primary factor determining whether an image is accepted or not is if a moderator likes the pic / feels like the pic should be accepted. And the mods here happen to not like yaoi, guro, or furry, and thus won't accept such pics unless they are valuable in other ways. Is that how it is? Such a system, while confusing, seems extremely practical.

Something like that. In general, follow your taste. Also, some mods do like guro, they just understand the pointlessness of pushing it and the need to sacrifice personal preferences to keep the site running smoothly :). I suspect it's similar with other mods and other verbotten materials.

Danbooru started as a site for a bunch of friends to store some images they liked. As new people kept signing up, it eventually got out of hand, and even had to be shut down after too many retards started spamming porn GIFs, or even RARs and other random things. Eventually it was reopened, but these posting guidelines were instated so that people would be a bit more cautious, making less work for the mods.

In other words, the rules are there to scare the sense into you. Following the rules strictly will generally keep you within the boundaries of what's considered good around here, though there are images that would be accepted but break the rules.

Basic rule of thumb: lurk at danbooru for a while, you'll get a sense for what kind of images the community is interested in (unless you're just an idiot, in which case you should go away, danbooru doesn't want you). One can bend the rules, but the newer and more "untested" one is, the less bending one can afford to do.

And, as I mentioned, there was a period in danbooru's history where people were posting random shit all over the place, so try to ignore those older posts when trying to make decisions about what's good. Of course, the posts that are REALLY old (close to the beginning of the site, perhaps) are good indicators of what danbooru's original intent was.

Oh, and one more thing - 64 pages, 66 pages, etc. are not a huge amount, especially for such broad tags as the ones you mentioned, since there are almost 14,000 pages of posts on danbooru at the time of this writing.

abcadeff said: So basically, these rules aren't really "bannable offenses", and the primary factor determining whether an image is accepted or not is if a moderator likes the pic / feels like the pic should be accepted

Fair enough reading, yes. We don't turn out a ten thousand page Lawbook of Danbooru because it's inherently a subjective thing, and if you set it in stone beyond a certain point, it really becomes impossible to live up to it.

0xCCBA696 said: Of course, the posts that are REALLY old (close to the beginning of the site, perhaps) are good indicators of what danbooru's original intent was.

Yes and no - some of what was posted (some even by albert) wouldn't pass now, for example low resolution screencaps of unremarkable scenes or generic av idol stuff.

0xCCBA696 said: Yes, which is why I said original intent, not current intent.

Ok, I thought you were saying that the current rules are meant to hearken back to how things were before it all went to hell (which is both true and not, depending). My mistake.

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