Tag discussion: simplifying the #gender tag system

I've read the old discussions on how the 1girl, 2girls, male, 6+boys, etc tags developed and I can't help but wonder, at this point, we tag so much information, there's so much overlap, and yet it's still often tricky to get exactly what you want, not least because not all images are properly tagged so searches with -tags like solo -male don't always give you what you're looking for. Why not just tag how many of each gender there is and let the computer calculate the rest? (Either in the search or when tagging, I know storage vs CPU load performance might be an issue here)

I've seen and tagged so many solo images with 1girl that I get the impression that people just don't want to use it, though might be an illusion because I've been tagging old or poorly tagged posts. I can see, however, how it can look a little obnoxious to have every tag list start with 1girl and such. Another issue I have is that these tags apply to just about every image on danbooru. It's like the rating tag, the character information is often so obvious, I think "well why isn't it tagged and stored like ratings are rather than cluttering up the tag list?". However, currently the tag system is far more complex than a simple "how safe? [q] [e]". This how I see the system works:*I know the female tag is no longer supposed to be used.First, are there human characters in the picture?

• no: no_humans - how many non-human characters?
• non: no tag
• one: solo
• several: ???
• yes
• How many identifiably female characters?
• non: no tag
• one: 1girl female_present - alone?
• yes: solo female*
• no: no tag
• several: #girls multiple_girls female_present
• How many identifiably male characters?
• non: no tag
• one: 1boy male - alone?
• yes: solo male
• no: no tag
• several: #boys multiple_boys male_present - only males?
• yes: male
• no: no tag
• How many characters are left?
• non: no tag
• one: androgynous - alone?
• yes: solo
• no: no tag
• several: ???

Then, once the image is tagged, you have to combine these tags, often using -tags, to search for what you want: female, multiple girls, 1girl, 2girls, 3girls, 4girls, 5girls, 6+girls, male, multiple boys, 1boy, 2boys, 3boys, 4boys, 5boys, 6+boys, solo, no_humans, androgynous

I know I might have missed some cases above, but the point remains the same. There's a lot of redundancy in the tags, there's a lot of cracks in the tags, there's loads of potential to forget to add tags and the system is too complex to merely fix with implications. Wouldn't it be simpler to change it to behave like the rating tag?

• Number of human female characters: [__]
• Number of human male characters: [__]
• Number of human androgynous characters: [__]
• Number of non-human characters: [__]

I'm not sure how the futa, faceless_male and other corner cases, where the gender is unknown or the question irrelevant should, be handled, but once those 4 numbers are known, it should be easy enough to calculate all of the appropriate tags. A few examples:

0f, 0m 0an *non => no_humans
0f 1m 0an 0non => 1boy
0f 1+m 0an 0non => male only
*f 1+m *an *non => male present
*f 2+m *an *non => multiple_boys
1f 0m 0an 0non => 1girl
1+f 0m 0an 0non => female only
1+f *m *an *non => female present
2+f *m *an *non => multiple_girls

Is the current system even an issue?
Is my suggestion unfeasible?
Is my suggestion a stupid idea?
Is my suggestion too much work?

Woah! I read a bit further back and it seems there's quite the story behind 2girls. This is a nasty can of worms that I wish I hadn't touched; these threads only scratch the surface...

forum #2047 - Tags you should (not) use (page 2)
forum #5017 - shoujo-ai vs yuri
forum #7479 - The 2girls tag
forum #9304 - Regarding 2girls, 3girls, 4girls ...
forum #19959 - Pointless tags: female
forum #21359 - Tag Discussion: solo
forum #26731 - Question about #girls and #boys tag
forum #32831 - Overtagging with "yuri"
forum #39211 - Tag for images with no characters in them?
forum #43171 - Tag Implication: ngirls -> 2girls, 3girls, 4girls, 5girls, girls
forum #48513 - futanari+2girls
forum #49120 - *girls -> multiple_girls implications not working properly?
forum #68433 - 1girl, 1boy tags
forum #72781 - Application of 2girls/3girls/etc. tags

Some summaries I can get from these:

• People disagree on the usefulness of counting how many male/female characters there are in the first place; some people still want them dead.
• The usefulness of mulitple_girls and multiple_boys vs solo seems to be agreed on, though.
• 1girl and 1boy to give the gender of solo seems to be agreed on too.
• "Does futa count in *girls?" "When I want *girls, I don't want futa" still seems to get thrown out too.
• The yuri/shoujo-ai/platonic/2girls discussion where this was born is still going on and will likely be drawn back into the discussion....

What people seem to want:

• Everyone wants to know when there is only one character in the image.
• Most want to know the gender of said character.
• Some people want futa and "true" female when they search, some people want to avoid futa, either entirely or search for them separately. Some lump futa under female.
• Some want to be able to search for images with no males. Some want to search for only males.
• Some want to be able to count how many of each gender there are, others don't want to have to tag that and only want to bother with multiple_gender.

By "human" do you mean "humanoid"? There is a big difference between between tagging based on humans and tagging based on humanoids, and by restricting it to humans would mean every non-human character under tags like the demon_girl and angel tag would be exempted for these tags. There are also grey areas even then, since you have things like centaur monster_girl which would not be classified as even a humanoid.

While it is nice to have these tagged, I would classify this type of knowledge as "nonessential" information about the image, which makes it completely different from an image's rating. Changing this to behave like the rating system would be honestly a horrible idea, because that means that it is mandatory for every image and thus would increase the workload excessively for uploaders. If you make it non-mandatory then that means you either have a default or a blank in this area, and again someone is going to have to spend the time to go through the images. I would think only a minor gain would be accomplish by this then, and so would question the utility of spending the effort to implement the idea.

Just condensing a bunch of issues I have with your definitions here:

• The male_present idea does not seem necessary, as it is mostly redundant with searches such as ~multiple_boys ~1boy -male or multiple_boys -male/1boy -male.
• Restricting 1girl or 1boy is also unnecessary, as you're making these tags redundant with male solo and solo -male searches. The 1boy/girl tags are much more valuable being used in images where there is more than one character than being used in solo images.
• Female also seems somewhat unnecessary because if you perform a multiple_girls search you get 5596 pages of images, multiple_girls -multiple_boys gets 5521 pages, and multiple_girls -multiple_boys -1boy gets 5482. Although there may be many not properly tagged, I do think the bulk is still on the side of female-only type images. What this means is you can search multiple_girls and do next to no sifting to find female-only images.
• Non-humans, such as like pokemon, also shouldn't be restricted from some of these categories such as the male tag. If you have an image of two male trainers and their pokemon, it should still fall under the male tag regardless of the fact that their pokemon are out with them or not.

Futanari for the most part is visibly female, I think they're supposed to be completely female physically outside of an "addition," and so would fall under the *girl/s tags as far as I'm aware. I think grayer would be a newhalf, since the only visual identification for tagging purposes would be the utter lack of primary female sexual characteristics and the presence of secondary female characteristics.

Just to clarify the ideas in my first post:

I'm aware that there are huge grey areas in the no_humans tag. I should've mentioned that the "non-humans" aspect was deliberately vague to cover corner cases as I was getting too bogged down when I tried to clear them up. I understand that grey areas like futa, personification, animals, aliens, monsters, etc are all important if you're going to involve no_humans and androgynous in the discussion.

The "gender_present" tag, in fact the whole "flowchart" I gave wasn't a suggestion, but my impression of the current systems. I was attempting to highlight that, we have to manually add all the appropriate tags, when (in this case) the computer can calculate all the details just from *girls and *boys. After that we can be done with it because we can calculate any other corner case from those 2 bits of information.

It's the same concept as implications; we don't need to tag long_hair because we've tagged very_long_hair and there's an implication. So why should we have to tag solo, male and 1boy, when you can just give it "1 male 0 females" and have it calculate everything.

As well, having written it down, it's clear that my "make the tags separate, like ratings" idea was a silly idea. That there's still a lot of debate on how detailed tags should be, which made me want to summarize the discussion. Instead, it's just made me realize what a can of worms this is.