Superfluous official_alternate_* tags

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Damian0358

BUR #54396 has been rejected.

remove alias alternate_outfit -> alternate_costume
create alias alternate_costume -> unofficial_costume
remove alias alternate_costume -> unofficial_costume
create alias unofficial_outfit -> unofficial_costume
deprecate alternate_costume
deprecate alternate_outfit
remove alias official_alternate_outfit -> official_alternate_costume
create alias official_alternate_costume -> official_costume
remove alias official_alternate_costume -> official_costume
create alias official_outfit -> official_costume
deprecate official_alternate_costume
deprecate official_alternate_outfit

Damian0358 said in forum #330641:

The only way to resolve something like this while maintaining the intended use of the tags is to abandon the alternate_* naming scheme entirely and changing it to something that forces taggers to think more critically about what it is they're tagging based on the tag name alone, ala the infrequent requests to turn alternate_*/official_alternate_* into unofficial_*/official_* respectively, but to quote evazion again, "as a regular user it is incredibly frustrating how established tags are constantly moved around for no good reason" (said in the context of users thinking whether v had to be changed because it seemed ambiguous). It's either that or making every alternate tag like alternate color, where the official/unofficial distinction never mattered.

It's a random Thursday and I've been asked to submit this BUR and finally get something done. I don't think this BUR is going to get anything done. Not only are these tags relatively old, nearly 20 and over 5 years old respectively, but they're also horribly massive. Even if we were to do this change, we'd be updating over a million posts in the process.

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TheGamingRodent zetsubousensei Pokemon by gender ratio Confetto Sunnily Bright LightSolas ngo enthusiast Historyanon Knowledge Seeker Alixiron TenaciousTurtleDucks CommentaryRequest NeptuneStarPrime nonemouse Blookryynnn sillyyJDR
ngo enthusiast

just replying to mention i stand by historyanon's point. it's useful to have a tag to indicate when a character is wearing an alternate costume but doesn't have a character tag, though i do understand everyone's points here (and am probably guilty of using alternate whatevers)

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Damian0358

Historyanon said in forum #416853:

Not really a fan of this. As is, the tag official alternate costume at least is upfront about what it's for. Changing that to official costume loses the distinction of it being not the default outfit, making it likely the tag will get polluted by taggers putting it on any official costume, which would kill the utility of having the tag in the first place.

ngo_enthusiast said in forum #416854:

just replying to mention i stand by historyanon's point. it's useful to have a tag to indicate when a character is wearing an alternate costume but doesn't have a character tag, though i do understand everyone's points here (and am probably guilty of using alternate whatevers)

I appreciate the fact that this BUR has inspired defenders for the tag, but simultaneously, official alternate costume has a limited shelf-life. When enmaided stopped implying alternate costume, this was said;

nonamethanks said in forum #403974:

I'm removing this, but don't take it as an endorsement for official alternate costume. That tag needs to go.

Back when we were debating the creation of default costume tags for VTubers, he had this to say;

nonamethanks said in forum #240669:

What precedent? We already tag first ascensions with fate, and in this case it would just mean one more tag instead of excluding official alternate costume every time you want to see a specific attire, which frankly sucks ass as a solution.
Just look at the results under hoshimachi_suisei -official_alternate_costume and tell me that's a valid alternative. There's like 3 people in the entire site who care enough to use that tag.
The average user doesn't think "to see a character's attire I'm going to remove all of their other attires", that's not how people normally browse this site. And they shouldn't have to rely on the same handful of builders to do their weekly pass at mass adding that tag either to get reliable results.

I really hate official alternate costume, it's a stupid solution. We somehow gaslit ourselves into thinking that "a bunch of gold+ users doing weekly passes at 6+tag searches in order to mass add this tag so that it can be used as a proxy for multi-character exclusion so that members can actually find a single costume" is a good solution, instead of just tagging the costume itself.
Imagine if we didn't have a tag for standing and we just told people to search for 1girl -sitting_or_kneeling_or_lying. It's retarded. Just tag the actual thing.
This isn't even like anime where a character has a single default outfit, vtubers use tons of different costumes every stream and it's not rare for them to abandon their first costume for months at a time.

nonamethanks said in forum #240675:

I mean how it's being proposed as a convoluted alternative [in this discussion] instead of just creating a tag for the costume.

The choices are these:

Do you see how two out of three choices are not choices at all?

Having specific tags for base skins is not an ideal solution, I know that, but our system was not designed to deal with characters with tons of relevant costumes like gachas and vtubers. Danbooru predates all of that. If we have to create a costume category so be it (if evazion ever feels like it), but in the meanwhile we shouldn't have to stab our own feet in an attempt to preserve a broken status quo that helps nobody.

Think about how things links up with what evazion said at the start of this topic:

evazion said in forum #330522:

All these official_alternate_* tags are bad ideas and need to go. Just make a tag for the actual outfit instead of coming up with deranged things like official alternate hair length.

The reason why 'official alternate' has gotten out of hand is because they based on the alternate tags and how they work. You tag them whenever something depicted is different from the norm, generally unofficially (unless you're alternate color).

I bring this up because some have suggested the addition of new rules for OAC, where you cannot tag it if the official alternate costume in question already has a tag. You cannot do that because no other alternate tag works like that, and when most people don't read wikis you're just going to inspire consistency issues that way. So it's either renaming it so that it's no longer constrained by the rules operating alternate tags (which also means no use of alternative, that's synonymized on Danbooru), or nuking it or aliasing it into AC because it's gotten out of hand.

As long as official alternate as a naming format exists, it's going to inspire tags like the ones this thread was made about. Of course, there's the other option of deprecating every other official alternate tag (and aliasing official alternate color into alternate color) so that only OAC has it, but which one of you is willing to do that BUR over figuring out a new name for OAC and AC?

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Historyanon

Damian0358 said in forum #416856:

Snip

I mean, the way to truly kill official alternate costume is

1) Have costume tags for default outfits, which in the fandoms I'm familiar with at least has been discouraged if not outright banned
2) Unite fandoms to create costume tags for any and every official outfit, no matter how many posts it has or where it appears, which currently varies wildly by fandom. Some like Kancolle, for example, create costume tags for official outfits that don't appear in-game, while Azur Lane doesn't.

Doing that, however, just trades official alternate costume for shittons of microtags, wiki bloat, and implication BURs, assuming that said tags even have enough posts that a BUR can even be created at all.

I don't feel that killing OAC really solves a problem so much as exchanges it for other problems.

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Damian0358

Historyanon said in forum #416859:

Doing that, however, just trades official alternate costume for shittons of microtags, wiki bloat, and implication BURs, assuming that said tags even have enough posts that a BUR can even be created at all.

I don't feel that killing OAC really solves a problem so much as exchanges it for other problems.

Yeah, that's why people want to try and limit the scope of the tag to ensure it survives, because it has its uses, but you cannot do that with its current name, whether it be keeping the alternate (because of previous precedent and it being confusing it if was handled differently) or by ensuring it's the only official alternate (by killing all the non-OAC official alternate tags, and then making the argument the added 'official' facilitates different rules from alternate tags).

It's either that, or death.

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Knowledge Seeker

If the tag has to go, I'd rather do "official costume", but I really feel it's just trading one problem for another no matter what angle we pick. Heck, even just killing the tag is gonna end up problematic, for all the reasons described above.

I think the best solution, like it or not, would be to add a costume category for gacha skins and whatnot. But I know Evazion very much would like to avoid that as much as possible, so we end up stuck with tags we don't want, but hesitate to get rid of because any possible solution is gonna get ugly.

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Historyanon

Damian0358 said in forum #416860:

Yeah, that's why people want to try and limit the scope of the tag to ensure it survives, because it has its uses, but you cannot do that with its current name, whether it be keeping the alternate (because of previous precedent and it being confusing it if was handled differently) or by ensuring it's the only official alternate (by killing all the non-OAC official alternate tags, and then making the argument the added 'official' facilitates different rules from alternate tags).

Firstly, this still doesn't address any of the issues with eliminating OAC I brought up above.

Secondly, the earlier proposal for limiting the scope of the tag, especially in a way that eliminates it from existing costume tags, would destroy the primary way I find it useful: searching for a character's default outfit, or for official outfits that, for whatever reason, don't have a chartag.

For my personal use, nuking OAC outright and limiting its scope as some have proposed are effectively the same result.

Edit: I also don't see a purpose in renaming it. Official alternate costume is perfect for describing exactly what it is: an official costume that isn't the default one. As I said before, taking "alternate" out of the tag risks users adding it to said default outfits. The tag is fine, comrade.

Updated by Historyanon

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nonemouse

Historyanon said in forum #416853:

Not really a fan of this. As is, the tag official alternate costume at least is upfront about what it's for. Changing that to official costume loses the distinction of it being not the default outfit, making it likely the tag will get polluted by taggers putting it on any official costume, which would kill the utility of having the tag in the first place.

I agree with this. official costume is a bad name that's going make the tag completely useless. If we're going to go with that name we might as well just nuke it and skip the middle step.

I could buy renaming the "alternate_*" to "unofficial_*" tags while leaving "official_alternate_*" tags in place, but I don't know if that's worth the squeeze for such big, well known tags.

EB said in forum #416874:

If it is to be killed, it needs to imply alternate_hair_length before being aliased. That is important information being lost.

Damian0358 said in forum #417006:

BUR #54445 has been rejected.

mass update official_alternate_hair_length -> alternate_hair_length

Requested above.

Because alternate hair length implies alternate hairstyle, I don't think this is workable either if we want to preserve the official / unofficial distinction.

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Damian0358

nonemouse said in forum #417021:

Because alternate hair length implies alternate hairstyle, I don't think this is workable either if we want to preserve the official / unofficial distinction.

As I've mentioned before, as far as I know, traditionally only alternate costume explicitly mentioned an official/unofficial divide. Before March 2022, the official alternate hairstyle tag was not mentioned in alternate hairstyle's wiki, and it was later that month that alternate costume's clause was added.

The fact that alternate color has the implications that it did proves that, before official alternate costume, such a divide wasn't really a thing beyond specific tags.

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evazion

I don't like official alternate costume but I can live with it. I think the only time it should ever be used is when the character's outfit doesn't have a tag yet, but in that case you'd be better off making an actual tag for the outfit instead of just dumping it under official alternate costume.

All the other official_alternate_* tags are terrible and should be straight deprecated or nuked. It drives me insane when I open a post and see five different official_alternate_* tags just to tag the fact that it's a skin. Completely braindead behavior.

Tagging the fact that an outfit or hairstyle is official is like tagging the fact that a character is a gacha character. Or that they're they're an NPC versus a playable character, or they're SSR rarity versus common, or that they're a cryo character versus a pyro character. It's pure meta-knowledge; it's not describing the image itself, it's describing some fact about the character in the image. This is obviously a bad idea. There are an infinite number of true statements you could make about a character, and most of them aren't visually apparent. This is what "tag what you see, not what you know" is supposed to mean. If you think this is stupid and we'd never do that, just give it time. Eventually some genius will quietly start an NPC tag or an SSR rarity tag and we'll go along with it long enough that we can't get rid of it.

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EB

nonemouse said in forum #417021:
Because alternate hair length implies alternate hairstyle, I don't think this is workable either if we want to preserve the official / unofficial distinction.

That is true. Remove that implication first then, then the mass update, then "official alternate hair length" can be aliased. At least in that case, we are not in a weird situation where unofficial hair lengths can be searched but somehow they can't be if they're official.

I still don't entirely feel we should alias that tag in the first place. This is a lot more noticeable aspect of a character than eye color (I would say making official/unofficial distinction there does feel a lot more unnecessary than the other tags).

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user 1434626

...Do we even need alternate hair length? Character + long hair is a two tag search to begin with. Even things like character + twintails is two tags and makes much more sense.

When do we get to the point of making crazy things up like official alternate braid count? Imagine if we started tagging k-pop idols with the (official) alternate hair length, hair color, eye color, costume, etc. tags (which would be 100% fine under the current usage of those tags) since many of the outfits drawn are from music videos and live shows.

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EB

Remuan said in forum #417048:

...Do we even need alternate hair length? Character + long hair is a two tag search to begin with. Even things like character + twintails is two tags and makes much more sense.

The main reason we need it is because of group images. If you have a short-haired character who is often paired with a long-haired one from the same series, trying to find them with long hair becomes very difficult without at least the "alternate" tag.

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