Excessive post of same character

In the past few days there has been charcter dumps from games posted. It is the same charcter in the same pose and costume. The only difference is a slight expression change. I dont feel a slight difference warrants a new post. To me this just seems like spamming to get post numbers. One image of their choice in each costume should be enough and all that is allowed. I dont like scrolling though four pages of the same image where the only difference is an expression change in order to find the single post I like to see. It's like trying to find a candle in front of a search light and personally ruins my browsing experience. So is this allowed and if so should there be a limit to how many images can be posted at a time?

I was just thinking that myself.

futaba_mikana transparent_background has 280 posts in it (and counting) but they're essentially just 4 (similar) postures, in 2 outfits (that are just recolours of one another), with the same set of expressions on her face for each one, with each expression having an image with a nose blush, and one with just cheeks blushing

hitohira_kazane transparent_background has 1160. All uploaded by the same person as each other and as the Futaba Mikana ones.

haru_haru_(koikoko) transparent_background has 1847. Same uploader. Same franchise.

The franchise has the 452nd most uses of any copyright tag (over 3.5k, and more than azumanga daioh, nichijou, negima, shana, inuyasha, harry potter etc.), with only 4 actual bits of art that aren't just game asset rips

Not the first time something like this has been brought up: topic #32997

You can add the tag Koi Suru Kokoro To Mahou No Kotoba to the blacklist. Of course, this won't completely solve the problem, as you'll still have to scroll through pages that are either completely empty or contain just a few posts. But I think it's still better than, as you said, "trying to find a candle in front of a search light"

BaiserLaVerite said in forum #439721:

Not the first time something like this has been brought up: topic #32997

So basically 9 months later and still no solution. For me this is just spam and ruins my browsing experience. I'm not a fan of having to go through three pages of the same character to see something different. Maybe limit the number of post to 20 in a 24hr period. Does not seem really unfair across the board.

BaiserLaVerite said in forum #439721:

Not the first time something like this has been brought up: topic #32997

Well since large variant spam has returned to danbooru I would like to reiterate the point I made in the previous discussion because it still holds true:

voiceofthecold said in forum #377817:

Personally I am of the opinion the great dairi spam of 2025 is exposing a critical truth: we must free the restricted users from this unjust 2 tag tyranny. Even as little as increasing it to 3 tags would ease the frustration of casual site users who are making accounts just to complain basic site navagability is being hampered by countless pages of spam that they don't have enough alloted tags to remove when searching for their favorite waifus.

If for whatever reason the persecution of the restricted users must continue, could we at least make it so blacklisting tags is treated the same as excluding them in the search, ie not giving a blank result but removing the post from the user's interface all together? I think that would be a perfectly fair design choice, as it would alleviate a lot of frustration not only from users being met with 6 pages in a row of blacklisted large variant spam, but also for people who blacklist rating:q and rating:e (and don't use safebooru because they still want to see rating:s posts) and get several pages turned empty when some guy dumps a bunch of corn.

Also kind of unrelated but I think it's funny how the tag that's getting variant spammed has 126 pages of posts, but a grand total of 4 posts that are actual fanart and not game assets

I think people who mass dump variant sets like these should limit themselves to a handful of posts a hour or something. Otherwise you put us in an uncomfortable position where we have to decide whether we need to ban variant sets because they affect normal users browsing the site.

It's kind of ridiculous to open the front page and have to scroll through 10 pages of posts of the exact same sprite but different expressions, just to find other art.

@CommentaryRequest: please refrain from mass uploading minor variants of the same character. No one wants this. Everyone hates it. If you keep this up, I'm demoting you to Builder so that you can't spam unlimited numbers of posts.

Danbooru has existed for over 20 years, and in all that time people have refrained from dumping CG sets because people knew that's not what the site is meant for. It's only in the last year or so that people have started doing this, and it's only out of some autistic urge to make their own upload numbers go up, not to make Danbooru a better site.

If you want to upload these somewhere, upload them to E-Hentai. Danbooru is fundamentally not designed for this. Other sites like E-H are designed around galleries, where it's fine to upload galleries containing hundreds of variations of the same image. The tradeoff is that images aren't individually tagged. On Danbooru, each image is individually tagged. That means that if you search for a tag, you get every single image under that tag. There's no real getting around this. Either you tag every image, and when you search a tag you get everything under that tag, even if they're all the same thing, or you have galleries of untagged (or identically tagged) images, and you have no way to search for individual images. You can't really have both.

If people keep this up, it's going to require more radical solutions, such as:

• Limiting the number of uploads per day for everybody so Contributors can't spam more than 100 or so posts per day.
• Blacklisting large variant set by default so that people are discouraged from uploading them.
• Changing the front page algorithm from chronological to order:rank or something so that individual uploaders can't take over the front page. (I can already hear uploaders complaining because it would mean less visibility for their posts or because they like doing this on purpose).

voiceofthecold said in forum #439742:

If for whatever reason the persecution of the restricted users must continue, could we at least make it so blacklisting tags is treated the same as excluding them in the search, ie not giving a blank result but removing the post from the user's interface all together?

This would be a better user experience but there are various technical reasons why this is hard to do:

• Some people have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of blacklist rules, and these rules can be complex multi-tag searches instead of just single tags. Blacklists would have to be limited to a small number of single tags.
• If blacklisted posts were completely removed, then you couldn't toggle your blacklists temporarily off to see what's hidden. Depending on what you have blacklisted, you may or may not want to be able to peek at blacklisted posts.
• Even a simple blacklist containing only a few tags means that every single-tag search turns into a complex multi-tag search. This hurts performance for every search. Especially when you try to search for something that returns few results because of your blacklist. You can see this when you enable safe mode and try to search for a large NSFW tag like sex. It's really slow because the site has to work hard to find any rating:g posts.
• We couldn't show accurate page numbers for searches. This is because in order to show page numbers, we have to calculate the number of pages of results, which we can't do efficiently when every search is a complex multi-tag search. Normally if a tag has 5000 posts and you have 20 posts per page, then we know it has 250 pages. But if your blacklists hide some unknown number of posts, then we have no idea how many pages there will be without actually doing the full search and counting them. This is slow when we have to do it for every search by every user.

I understand. I will not repeat this again. I am very sorry for all the trouble I have caused.

I'd like to provide some probably controversial feedback that is unrelated to CR but on the topic of variants.

I feel the tagging (or lack thereof) of variant_set and large_variant_set should be upgraded to be treated the same as other commonly blacklisted tags (that is they should always be tagged, not doing so treated the same as not tagging furry) and that large_variant_set should be added to the default blacklist.

Its been a growing issue for months now where variants posted by dbz/carmilla etc spam the front page, this just the latest incident.

CommentaryRequest said in forum #439751:

I understand. I will not repeat this again. I am very sorry for all the trouble I have caused.

You were very receptive to the feedback given to you, immediately recognizing and acting on it, a sign of a good contributor. Please don't take what happened too harshly, especially keeping in mind what Artxe said.

evazion said in forum #439750:

• Limiting the number of uploads per day for everybody so Contributors can't spam more than 100 or so posts per day.
• Blacklisting large variant set by default so that people are discouraged from uploading them.
• Changing the front page algorithm from chronological to order:rank or something so that individual uploaders can't take over the front page. (I can already hear uploaders complaining because it would mean less visibility for their posts or because they like doing this on purpose).

Option #2 is the best one, option #3 and option #1 to a lesser extent don't really address the whole problem, and said problem is that this doesn't just affect front page browsers, this affects entire tags; look at a smaller tag involved in these large variant set dumps like parallel hairclips and you will see 26 (twenty-six) entire pages filled up by same three sprites. That's not even a particularly niche tag and it's far from the only example where someone wanting to look at characters with this design will have their browsing experience completly crapped on by spam.

The large variant sets aren't just ruining the browsing experience of front page users, they're ruining entire tags. Since it's not feasible to remove them from searches via blacklisting in a clean manner (and I thank you for the explanation as to why) I genuinely think the best solution is just to ban them, they've proven way more trouble than they're worth at this point.

Artxe said in forum #439753:

I'd like to provide some probably controversial feedback that is unrelated to CR but on the topic of variants.

I feel the tagging (or lack thereof) of variant_set and large_variant_set should be upgraded to be treated the same as other commonly blacklisted tags (that is they should always be tagged, not doing so treated the same as not tagging furry) and that large_variant_set should be added to the default blacklist.

Its been a growing issue for months now where variants posted from dbz/carmilla etc spam the front page, this just the latest incident.

Default blacklisting large variant set is not a solution. 100 tachi-es extracted from a game is not the same as a 10-post CG set with a plot.

For reference, here's how many event CGs + variants + chibi insets the game has
https://e-hentai.org/g/1230458/081eed6a47/
773 images. Work smart, not hard.

I don't fundamentally disagree that large sets just don't work well on the site, but I find it pretty stupid how selectively we seem to care about frontpage usability. It doesn't matter when half the frontpage has no tags apparently?

Also, this thread makes it sound like CommentaryRequest is an actual "offender" here. As you said, the "variant set meta" has been brewing for quite some months. It has always been getting the OK before, and even their own questions have been getting the OK, so acting like this is just something stupid they came up with themselves is ridiculous, especially with the threat of a demotion. They were far from the first one to start with this. With no real input from moderation it is hardly a surprise it reached this point, builders are known to <thing>-maxx and that shouldn't be a surprise by this point.

If contributors were to be limited, please make it 500 a day instead, not 100.

I think we wanted a solution way too fast. The real issue is the tachi-es and it was generally kept to a manageable and appropriate level. It's understandable that as we get new uploaders, they'll have new interests, and plenty of good art worth being here only comes from these CG/variant sets. dairi and crote didn't receive much serious attention besides pointing out they were used to game approvals and we might've gotten a bit antsy now that it's happened again to a more extreme degree.

The problem is that some things are left to fester too long and receive attention when it's a bit too late. To be clear and fair, CommentaryRequest did ask for advice regarding uploading these and if it would be appropriate to either get them out of the way ASAP or to interval it. It looks like their question got buried besides one reply saying it'd probably be best to get it out of the way quickly so it wouldn't wreck the front page later, and the fact that we have multiple uploaders doing this without much comment must've been a green signal for them.

It's not exactly fair to suggest that they were stepping out of the bounds of self-control given that they've already done this kind of mass uploading in the past with no serious comment. I understand the intent behind not wanting people to flood thousands of only slightly-differentiated posts but in the past, any time someone did even a fraction of this, it was mostly mild annoyance and memes, not genuine concern. I would love for us to avoid a situation where we have to neuter posts where we could otherwise have solved this sooner and more directly.

Ultimately most variant and CG uploaders only do 6-12 at a time at best and 13-40 at worst, and most people probably don't strongly mind even with 20 page size. It's less common to be doing thousands and this is only the third time it's happened; most people practice (decent) self-control or switch it up so it's not that bad.

In my opinion, I think it's best to just leave today at only asking to interval your uploads if you're planning to mass dump hundreds or thousands of similar images like this, if you even somehow manage to find a case where that can happen besides very dynamic VNs. Also, don't be a leech and cut into other people's matome uploading on purpose to mess with them.

I'd like to bring attention to something interesting I noticed about user #1369220's uploading patterns that relates to this topic. They upload a lot of tachi-e character sets, but not always all at once. They would sometimes post one or two from that set, then move on to a different set. I noticed this when I kept seeing the same character in the same pose pop up several days apart. These are self-datamined game assets, so I assumed they had access to all of them already and thought it was strange that they didn't just upload them all at once. But after the complaints brought up in this thread, I'm thinking that maybe they were onto something.

Freshblink said in forum #439761:

If contributors were to be limited, please make it 500 a day instead, not 100.

I agree that 100 is too low. I think setting a limit for everyone would be too extreme, but if we do set one, it should be higher than the number of posts a user could reasonably tag thoroughly in one day without copy-paste so it doesn't interfere with other large uploading projects.

voiceofthecold said in forum #439742:

Personally I am of the opinion the great dairi spam of 2025 is exposing a critical truth: we must free the restricted users from this unjust 2 tag tyranny. Even as little as increasing it to 3 tags would ease the frustration of casual site users who are making accounts just to complain basic site navagability is being hampered by countless pages of spam that they don't have enough alloted tags to remove when searching for their favorite waifus.

Admins were not interested in this.

evazion said in forum #439750:

If people keep this up, it's going to require more radical solutions, such as:

• Limiting the number of uploads per day for everybody so Contributors can't spam more than 100 or so posts per day.

Freshblink said in forum #439761:

If contributors were to be limited, please make it 500 a day instead, not 100.

Blank_User said in forum #439786:

I agree that 100 is too low. I think setting a limit for everyone would be too extreme, but if we do set one, it should be higher than the number of posts a user could reasonably tag thoroughly in one day without copy-paste so it doesn't interfere with other large uploading projects.

If the limit is too low, it prevents legitimate use. If it's too high, it does nothing to prevent the spam we're complaining about. It being 100 already won't help much, making it 500 would basically not help at all.

evazion said in forum #439750:

If people keep this up, it's going to require more radical solutions, such as:

• Limiting the number of uploads per day for everybody so Contributors can't spam more than 100 or so posts per day.
• Blacklisting large variant set by default so that people are discouraged from uploading them.
• Changing the front page algorithm from chronological to order:rank or something so that individual uploaders can't take over the front page. (I can already hear uploaders complaining because it would mean less visibility for their posts or because they like doing this on purpose).

Blacklisting would just make page after page of no posts, and changing to order:rank for the front page still leaves tag searches kinda shit.

Ultimately I think the issue is rewarding users for it. Someone dumped a ton of crote/dairi posts and despite a history of other bad behavior they got unres for it and were never reprimanded like CR is being for some reason. So other users viewed it as acceptable to do.

If we really cared about 'archival' (as some users have used to defend this) without flooding the front page or tag searches we could have some alternate solution, maybe a separate type of pool/gallery where you use untagged media assets and add tags to the gallery as a whole, like EH, or something like Yandere has where you can just exclude posts from the index/search but still have them exist as actual posts (though that could make moderation more difficult).

ANON_TOKYO said in forum #439760:

I don't fundamentally disagree that large sets just don't work well on the site, but I find it pretty stupid how selectively we seem to care about frontpage usability. It doesn't matter when half the frontpage has no tags apparently?

Individual uploaders flooding the frontpage is a longstanding issue. The only reason I haven't changed it already is because I know people would gripe about it endlessly even though having the frontpage be filled with whatever random garbage that happened to just be uploaded is not a good look for the site.

"Half the frontpage having no tags" is an exaggeration. If people are leaving their posts untagged or not tagging blacklistable tags, that's a problem, but usually these complaints are mixed in with other complaints about things like people taking 60 seconds to finish tagging a character's clothes after upload. It's not the end of the world if it takes a minute or two for a new post to show up in searches. This is why it's hard for me to take these types of complaints seriously. That and because I constantly see builders trying to use relatively minor issues like this to try to get uploaders they don't like permabanned.

Also, this thread makes it sound like CommentaryRequest is an actual "offender" here. As you said, the "variant set meta" has been brewing for quite some months. It has always been getting the OK before, and even their own questions have been getting the OK, so acting like this is just something stupid they came up with themselves is ridiculous, especially with the threat of a demotion. They were far from the first one to start with this. With no real input from moderation it is hardly a surprise it reached this point, builders are known to <thing>-maxx and that shouldn't be a surprise by this point.

I don't mean to single CommentaryRequest out here, and I didn't see that he already agreed to stop before my post. I apologize for coming down so hard.

But as you said, this has been going on for a while with multiple users. I wasn't happy with the dairi spam either, but at least then it was somewhat limited by having to go through the modqueue (even though people kept approving it, which I found even worse because it encouraged this behavior). But frankly, you should know without being told that dumping 2000 images in a few hours is not something people are going to like.

I see this variant set meta as yet another case of uploaders finding new ways of gaming the system in order to pump their numbers up. CG spam, 1upping, duplicates, mintagging, sniping, it all comes from the same place of people competing over uploads and trying to find the easiest ways to make their numbers go up. If 1upping a post lets you get 1 upload with no tagging effort, then uploading a CG set lets you get 20 posts with the same effort of tagging a single post.

Builders are always complaining about having restrictions placed on them just because once upon a time someone did something wrong. Well, here we are. It's either tell people to voluntarily stop flooding posts, or limit everyone to X uploads per day just because once upon a time a small number of users realized they could farm huge numbers of posts by uploading CG sets.