Do we care about specifying the differences in protected links?

Protected link can encompass a couple of different things and different levels of protection, and I was curious how much we cared about noting the differences.

As the wiki says:

A post whose source is only visible to certain users.
This includes posts that are followers-only, login-only (e.g. Discord), password-protected, or other forms of limiting access by the artist.

This can include limiting the picture to certain sizes only, to flat-out denying access to the picture at all.

This does not include posts that were deleted by the artist (bad ids) or paid rewards.

Perhaps the most obvious one on here are protected links from Twitter, which are follower-only. Some sites like Tumblr are just restricted to logged-in users, but anyone who's logged in can see it as long as they're not banned by OP. And then some Tumblr blogs can be password-protected, which loops me back around to what made me really start thinking about this, Poipiku.

Poipiku has a couple of different types of protection--you can have your post be age-restricted (which keeps it blocked until the user confirms they're 18 by checking a box), you can have your post be logged-in users only, follower-only (so the user has to link it up with their Twitter account to confirm they're following OP), mutuals only (so both the user and OP have to follow each other), and password protected (descriptions will usually include a hint of some kind to the password but not always). So even on a single platform, protected link can mean several different things!

So I was wondering if we like... cared about specifying what sort of protection it is. I think it'd probably be three main sub-categories:

• followers-only, where posts are restricted to people who are following OP (usually also means OP has to accept them as a follower) -- Twitter, free-level Patreon tiers, Poipiku, some Discord servers I'm guessing, etc
• logged-in only, where posts aren't restricted beyond "ya gotta be logged in" -- some tumblr blogs, Poipiku
• Could also encompass age-restricted posts where you also have to flip a switch in your content filter. As mentioned Poipiku R18 posts aren't by default blocked to logged-out users, but they are for Newgrounds, FurAffinity, Twitter, some Tumblr blogs, etc. Not necessarily set by OP mind you, sometimes it's by the platform itself
• password protected, which is probably mostly just going to be Poipiku posts and some Tumblr blogs

Just wondering if this would be like... useful or stupid.

I most certainly don't. Every now and again I think about paid rewards being granular also being pointless especially if you can't determine which subscription platform it came from but know it's a paid reward so you can only assign the parent tag. This can also generally only be determined by people who have access but taggers are already incredibly lazy to use any sort of metatags that actually do have value in searching or leading to more uploadable content.

Yeah I don't think this is particularly useful, since the important bit of information is just "you probably can't open it". FWIW, in my PR for fixing the Poipiku extractor, I added support for a list of "common" passwords. Conceptually, "R18 yes/no" and "Do <xyz> to get the password" aren't really the same anyway, so grouping them both under password_protected would be a bit silly anyway.