1girl, Solo Focus and Background Characters

An issue with post #4750563 recently brought to my attention some issues we might have come across.
I was advised to open a topic so that we are all on the same page and aware of how to tackle posts like this.

The gist of the topic is using 1girl on posts such as these (post #4750563) along with solo focus and a supplementing tag like people. And NOT 4boys, 6+girls...etc.

In my opinion using the latter would make for a bad browsing experience and counterintuitive for the users wanting to see a single girl as the focus of the image.

After discussing it with some of you over on the Discord server. And exchanging some opinions here. It was important to bring everyone on board with this.

I would like to hear your thoughts about this. For full disclosure, as you look at the tag history for that post. I made the mistake of tagging it solo initially. And someone was kind enough to fix that.

If we are having these dialectics then +1 to not tagging negligible figures

The tagging system we have is listing a bunch of atomized characteristics and gets easily skewed by being overeager to add a barely visible feature to it. There is more merit in understanding the art than the obtuse detailing we usually do, the post here is a nice case to point it out the 1girl is in the foreground and a blurred-out background with random featureless people.

But yeah we have to be predictable about it kittey was just correcting a random post out of the blue and in this case people is also a rather unknown tag; doesn't seem that much different from crowd tbh

I've got an example from my uploads, I didn't even notice the other girls in the back, back when I uploaded this: post #4238900.

pronebone said:

I've got an example from my uploads, I didn't even notice the other girls in the back, back when I uploaded this: post #4238900.

This one is hard but probably 3girls is correct just because the other 2 are identifiable and not generic. Since solo is essentially chartags:1

I'm a bit so-so on either option, but I feel like if the background characters have tags (like in pronebone's example) they should be included in the counter tags. They very much should not be tagged with solo at least.

I don't view it as particularly useful to tag tiny background characters as 3 girls because it just hurts usability. Is that not the type of post you would want to see in a 1girl search?

Talulah said:

I don't view it as particularly useful to tag tiny background characters as 3 girls because it just hurts usability. Is that not the type of post you would want to see in a 1girl search?

No, I expect it to turn up in a 3girl search since that's proper tagging.

tbh I would've just tagged post #4750563 and post #4238900 as 1girl solo_focus.

Unbreakable said:

No, I expect it to turn up in a 3girl search since that's proper tagging.

Making a reply about the policy we have in place now is not at all useful in a thread attempting to discuss these policies. "We keep things the way they are because this is how we do things" will not yield any progress. Even moreso with a descriptive reply to a prescriptive rhetorical question. Tagging is supposed to be useful, not a solid set of rules that are so heavily enforced to the degree they become detrimental.

Talulah said:

Making a reply about the policy we have in place now is not at all useful in a thread attempting to discuss these policies. "We keep things the way they are because this is how we do things" will not yield any progress. Even moreso with a descriptive reply to a prescriptive rhetorical question. Tagging is supposed to be useful, not a solid set of rules that are so heavily enforced to the degree they become detrimental.

The topic asked for my opinion and I gave it, it's not deeper than that. If the current policy was the reverse I would have said the same.

In that case would it be dumb to have a tag called "background characters" tag it 1girl and solo_focus and add the character names?

Because in the case of post #4238900 if they were all original characters then it would definitely be just 1girl solo_focus.

This discussion could be compared to topic #15982 and the character watermark tag in a way.

There are times we're far too focused on being "right" rather than being usable. I think this is one of those times.

If I search 1girl solo focus and post #4750563 doesn't come up, something is wrong with how its tagged.
Conversely, if I search 6+girls and post #4750563 does show up when I was looking for images like post #4787777, there is something wrong and non-functional with how we're handling the tags.

A handful of faceless randos in 10% of the background when a single character is taking up 90% of the foreground should be tagging with people or crowd, not with individual gender tags. And I think, deep down, we know this because we're not tagging every crowd as 6+others. I'm only seeing this kind of tagging on images where the faceless people happen to be wearing skirts and dresses.

This may be a dumb question, but should scenery artworks follow the same logic?
I usually tag people appearing if they're at least somewhat visible, but artworks like post #4333765 showing up in a scenery 6+others search may be overkill?
Are they considered part of the image, since scenery artworks have the entire scenery as focus? Or do they count as just small details?

Veradux said:

There are times we're far too focused on being "right" rather than being usable. I think this is one of those times.

If I search 1girl solo focus and post #4750563 doesn't come up, something is wrong with how its tagged.
Conversely, if I search 6+girls and post #4750563 does show up when I was looking for images like post #4787777, there is something wrong and non-functional with how we're handling the tags.

A handful of faceless randos in 10% of the background when a single character is taking up 90% of the foreground should be tagging with people or crowd, not with individual gender tags. And I think, deep down, we know this because we're not tagging every crowd as 6+others. I'm only seeing this kind of tagging on images where the faceless people happen to be wearing skirts and dresses.

I tend to agree with this, particularly when viewing the examples given. I wouldn't expect/want to find stuff like post #4750563 when looking for 6+ girls.

Username_Hidden said:

This may be a dumb question, but should scenery artworks follow the same logic?
I usually tag people appearing if they're at least somewhat visible, but artworks like post #4333765 showing up in a scenery 6+others search may be overkill?
Are they considered part of the image, since scenery artworks have the entire scenery as focus? Or do they count as just small details?

I'd tag this people, absolutely not a character count tag. It feels so counter-intuitive and counter-productive to tag something like this with a character count when they're basically tiny specks - at least it's definitely not the type of result I'd expect or want to find.

I've been tagging scenery posts with #others just to make them not show in the results for no gender tags, but I didn't know we had people or crowd or whatever. In retrospect, they should probably all be tagged with people or the likes instead of specific gender tags.

Talulah said:

I've been tagging scenery posts with #others just to make them not show in the results for no gender tags, but I didn't know we had people or crowd or whatever. In retrospect, they should probably all be tagged with people or the likes instead of specific gender tags.

What about artworks like post #3726200, where they're more than just specks? (Or solo very wide shot artworks being tagged solo)

Technically, the characters are in the background. If their personalities (faces) are visible, then logically users will count characters and not tag people.

This tag is for unnamed background characters that are not part of an image's focus, usually to bring life to a scene and make spaces look less empty.

The tag solo focus is not suitable if there are several central characters and several in the background. post #4669904 post #3195475

I think a separate tag for identifiable characters would work. Example, background character(s).
Then it would be possible to search for multiple characters with a background characters filter. It would complement the absence of the need to look for a separate solo focus, but it would not replace it.

Ideally not a new tag I think. Just so we keep things as simple and streamlined as possible.

We just need to come to some sort of agreement on this so we are all on the same page. Whatever compromises need to be taken.

For now, what I gather is that in situations where the background characters can be identified and are not the focus of the image post #4238900 we should do either of the following:

• Tag solo_focus, 1girl and the identifiable out of focus characters. (plus people for example)
• Tag solo_focus, (n)girls and the identifiable out of focus characters.

For situations where the background characters cannot be identified and are not the focus of the image post #4750563

• Tag solo_focus, 1girl and people or crowd
• Tag solo_focus, (n)girls/other/boys

For scenery cases where characters are not the focus nor they are identifiable:

• Tag crowd or people and not (n)others

For scenery cases where characters are not the focus but they are identifiable:

• Tag character count and characters.

I'm honestly too tired right now but I'll come back to this and add/amend anything you guys think should be the way forward.

I think we have to be reasonable here and think of what makes sense for us as a searching database.

I can't imagine anyone searching for 6+girls and wanting to see a solo picture with tiny colorful faceless specks in the background that can't even be discerned properly. I think it's reasonable to tag that kind of picture with 1girl solo_focus. That's in fact what's I've been doing for as long as I've been on this site, because it makes no sense for me to do otherwise.

There's cases and cases, of course. You want to tag a gangbang of faceless men as 6+boys, but I don't think a crowd in the distance from a rooftop pov deserves tagging the genders of each individual pixel. It's not even a matter of who's the focus in the picture, simply whether the characters are actually drawn or just undiscernible parts of the background that you need a magnifying glass to figure the gender of.

Just like you wouldn't tag a chibi inset squiggle or a spoken character with gender tags, you probably shouldn't tag post #4238900 with 3girls. Just 1girl solo_focus people should be fine.