@djbubbles: > But then this isn't even applied...

djbubbles
2023-01-16T16:12:31-05:00

But then this isn't even applied consistently, as you then have cases like post #3867527 where a character (in this case Castlevania's Dracula) is tagged because of the presence of his signature triple fireball attack, because really how else do you tag this reference? It's not cosplay, and I'm not sure how else you would find this if Dracula wasn't tagged. Maybe you could make some general tag for the attack itself, but then it would just be 99% Dracula himself, and no one would use it.

Objectively speaking, Dracula is not in the image, and should not be tagged in it. If there's a general tag for the attack itself and no one uses it, so be it. People searching for Dracula are not searching for his fireball attack. If someone is looking specifically for that, they should search for that. If they don't know what the tag's name is and can't find it on the wiki for some reason, then they can use wildcards.

magcolo said:

That is honestly somewhat true, outfit is an important part of the character and it's sometimes even more distinguishable, especially in the alt skin apocalypse we live in. Character tag is currently used many other instances of the character not being present, clothes, hairstyle, accessory, even voicebanks. Well, otherwise, how do you find them?

It's not "somewhat true", your perspective is skewed by the deranged tagging people are doing on this site, which is why you point to a bunch of other examples and say "how else [would] you find them?" The last one is the only image where the actual characters (the mascots of the voicebanks) are depicted in any way (i.e., they're on the box art of the objects in the scene.) While they're not present in the scene as subjects, they are depicted and I think it would be reasonable to keep the character tag. Otherwise, everything else you listed seems, to me, to be objectively falsely tagged.

Outfits may be more distinguishable in some cases, especially for gacha characters with sameface and samemodel, but anyone who's ever been a big fan of a character would innately understand that the sentiment expressed here–that the clothes are enough to tag the image as if the character is present–has the undesirable conclusion of having characters you don't care about crap up your search results.

Personally, I don't think this really needs to be discussed so much as the mods/admins need to see this thread, look at the referenced past arguments I linked that have solidly proven that it's creating a worse search experience and is also objectively incorrect, and take rightful action to remove the auto-implication. This is the only rebuttal I will make to another user playing apologetics for an absurd status quo, even if they are well-intentioned and are making a good faith argument like you are, because I do not have the time nor the energy for it.