Danbooru

Nuking ;) tags

Posted under Tags

BUR #6351 has been rejected.

mass update ;d -> :d one_eye_closed
mass update ;) -> smile one_eye_closed
mass update ;o -> :o one_eye_closed
mass update ;p -> :p one_eye_closed
mass update ;3 -> :3 one_eye_closed
mass update ;( -> frown one_eye_closed
mass update ;< -> :< one_eye_closed
mass update ;> -> :> one_eye_closed
mass update ;t -> :t one_eye_closed
mass update ; -> :| one_eye_closed
mass update ;/ -> :/ one_eye_closed
mass update ;s -> :s one_eye_closed
mass update ;i -> :i one_eye_closed

These composite emoticon tags are nothing more than ugly tag padding. One could argue that their implications make it easier on taggers, but that doesn't hold water when the base emoticon tags are some of the shortest tags on Danbooru and one_eye_closed is the very first autocomplete result when typing just "on".

I believe these tags don't serve any real purpose and should be nuked immediately.

Before someone tries to die on this hill and claim these tags are important or needed, please take a look at the search analytics for the last week. Very few people are searching for these tags. The only one with a decent amount is ;d, and it still gets very few results compared to its size (39k posts!), which makes the argument that it's completely different from :d or that it's worth keeping them mutually exclusive ridiculous.

These are useless tags. ;| has been searched 3 times in the last 7 days.

Updated

This removes specificity for regular members wanting to search for something with a particular expression, but as you point out, people didn't really seem to care that much for these expression in the first place. Still miffed about this.

To me they've always felt counterintuitive given that all of the other tags are words. I don't know how popular it would be, but I could see it at least being more intuitive to search by some adjectives (e.g., smirking) or something as opposed to trying to go with the ASCII face route. Search engines like Google practically train people to never search by symbol. But if you bulk convert tags like this, you lose all of the fidelity. :t produces actually really good results, for example, but I didn't know about it until I saw it on a post and realized it was valuable.

electrongun said:

To me they've always felt counterintuitive given that all of the other tags are words. I don't know how popular it would be, but I could see it at least being more intuitive to search by some adjectives (e.g., smirking) or something as opposed to trying to go with the ASCII face route. Search engines like Google practically train people to never search by symbol. But if you bulk convert tags like this, you lose all of the fidelity. :t produces actually really good results, for example, but I didn't know about it until I saw it on a post and realized it was valuable.

We already have a bunch of expression tags: smirk, frown, smile, just to name a few simple ones. The problem with using words over emotes is that any time it comes up, it becomes immediately apparent that different regions have very different ideas regarding what a particular expression is named. While these particular emotes might not see much search use on danbooru, in general emotes are actually a lot more intuitive, as they can be visually identified regardless of what you think the expression should actually be called.

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