Astolfo said:
Like BrokenEagle said in the other topic, if the two things were tagged correctly, there is a significant difference between (what should be tagged as) spiral eyes and (what should be tagged as) @_@.
"If" being the issue. We have to remember that ultimately whether a tag is used properly depends on its name, not on the wiki definition. Tags with obscure or confusing names always end up either being used wrong or not being used at all.
There are two main distinctions here, one of spirals inside the iris vs the irises themselves being spirals, and another based on whether the spirals are induced by emotions vs being natural.
For the first distinction, it's easy to tell the difference, and BE pointed out post #3723727 in the other thread which imo is a perfect example of this. For this kind of thing I think it's possible to have a tag specifically for the spiral irises, tough the big issue is coming up with a proper name for it, because even something like "spiral_irises" could also mean the spirals making up the inside of the irises.
For the latter, I believe it's impossible for us to keep the tags fully distinct, not unless someone monitors every single post being tagged with it over the years. The natural tag implicating the broader tag would be a better solution imo.
Note that the issue of spiral eyes vs @_@ is not a recent thing, even sorting by ID you can see a lot of posts like post #327322, post #482809, post #211379 on the first page alone that fit on @_@ instead, and the same goes the other way.
Astolfo said:
I don't think the alias alone is a good solution because it conflates both things into one single undistinguishable tag despite being rather different things
The alias is only the first step for fixing this. I'm willing to help in populating a natural_spiral_eyes tag or whatever else we decide to call it, and any other tags we want to create to differentiate full spirals vs spirals inside irises. The issue is, at the moment both tags are used for both things, so there's no real order being disrupted by this alias (for example @_@ hex_maniac_(pokemon) has a very close post count to spiral_eyes hex_maniac_(pokemon), 400ish vs 500ish). I don't think merging the tags will make it harder to then populate new specific tags.
We have to start from somewhere, otherwise it'll keep being the same mess that nobody wants to touch.