Danbooru

Tas implications: too_many

Posted under General

Cyberia-Mix said:
I question the necessity for this tag.

Can you please elucidate? I mean, it's always good to have more opinions, but without any sort of rationale as to why, it's hard to give it much weight.

As far as this topic goes, I'll also note there was more discussion on this in forum #67646.

I apologize for the incoming wall of text, but as I'll explain, what we're currently starting to do with too_many is actually a much bigger task than it may seem, and needs to be treated on a larger scale.
Before you start questionning my reasoning, know that this issue has been in my mind for a long time, and that writing this post had me brainstorming for days. Anything unclear was most likely kept short to avoid even more tl;dr.

DschingisKhan said:
As far as this topic goes, I'll also note there was more discussion on this in forum #67646.

Alright I missed that thread, thanks.

DschingisKhan said:
Can you please elucidate?

I'd think someone browsing too_many_cats is unlikely to be interested in most of the other too_many_X tags. To me the umbrella tag seems to be here for the sake of having things ordered rather than because it'd be used.
A similar thing happened with shiny when it was made the umbrella of shiny_skin, shiny_clothes and shiny_hair. What are the odds that you're interested in several of them at the same time?
For too many, there definitely is a point in lumping the different animals in the same search, but for instance I don't see how you could want to find books with anything else.

Anyway, more importantly so, forum #67646 raised 2 critical questions that actually make the issue far bigger than what too_many alone can cover.

> First, while "too many" is initially intended as "extravagant, uncommonly high concentrations of something" (originally cats so), there's no real reason not to tag "any high concentrations of something" after all.
However, this is a different concept and ought to be tagged separately.
It was already a problem with too_many_cards. Unlike books or cats, profusions of cards are nothing abnormal, until you reach at least hundreds of them. Currently in too_many_cards only post #1020938 and post #6745 are somewhat striking as such.
Now it's spreading to hearts, stars and knives, and by the time we add flowers, pastries, candies, birds, fishes, butterflies, stuffed toys, school supplies, underwear, ribbons, weaponry and so on, posts actually qualifying as "too many" will be drowned in the larger pool of posts qualifying as just "many".

This larger pool of posts would probably be tagged multiple_X, as in "a visibly large, yet not so overwhelming amount of X in the image". Personally I don't like "multiple" that much, as I think it's too easily mistaken for 2+, which is not what we want. But it works well on multiple_wings so far.
Or we could go with many_X. Sounds kinda dumb but the obvious connection with too_many_X makes it easy to remember (I'll go with multiple for the rest of this post to make things simpler).
Other names are welcome of course.

Then, users must be able to predict why a post is found under "too_many" rather than under "multiple", or vice versa. Therefore the boundary between the two can't be based on numbers.
The definition of too_many can't be lax, because "real" cases like post #1018675 would remain drowned, while making multiple look confusing and useless.
So it needs to be strict. "An overwhelming or absurd amount of X in the image". For example, many posts in too_many_cats would move to multiple_cats, as they have no such degree of crazyness.

(More on multiple below.)

> Second, this raises the question of theme/focus.
cat is one of those tags where focus can stretch more than average (from things like post #1047948 to things like post #567597). And since it's a huge tag, finding posts with a higher focus is pretty tedious.
That's where too_many comes in handy, since too_many cat (or whatever) naturally returns a higher proportion of posts focusing on cats than cat alone does.
From forum #67790:

Hinacle said:
too_many_cats's wiki's limit has been 6, but I honestly think 4 or 5 would be fine too. The vast majority of posts on the cat tag or the clone tag only have 1 or 2.

When I read this I think we're actually trying to enforce too_many as a quick fix against this lack of thematic/focus tags, rather than addressing the issue itself.

A cats_(theme) (or focus, emphasis...) tag would cover all images that revolve around cats, but since bird_(theme), bunny_(theme) and so on would work the same they could directly all be lumped together into a single animals_(theme) tag. There might even be a pool for that already.
Other topics in need of such focus tags are the various "beautiful X" pools, where posts need to be splitted between well drawn (pool) and focus (tag), the "food porn" pool, wings, flower, possibly animal_ears, star, heart, tears, and that's about all I can find in the first 10 pages of gentags. Not that many tags are concerned so.

-

According to the above definition of too_many, it shouldn't be possible for a post to be tagged too_many_cats without being also relevant to animals_(theme).

Meanwhile, with multiple_X, too_many_X tags become redundant, so they could be deleted to only keep too_many. I don't really mind either way. Or keeping only the most common ones as previously suggested.

For the same reason as stated at the beginning, I'd still be against a possible umbrella to all the multiple_X tags.
I did consider having categories for elements of similar nature, but in the end it clearly doesn't seem like they'd ever be used enough to justify the hassle creating and gardening them would be.

To conclude, going by what I suggest, ultimately something like post #751567 should be tagged cat + multiple_cats + too_many + animals_(theme).

Updated

@Cyberia-Mix:

  • I support the idea of enforcing a distinction between merely "many" and "too_many". In particular, I agree that post #1020938 and post #6745 would be "too many cards". Then, post #1013149 and post #640627, for example, could be "many cards".
  • I spefically prefer many cats rather than multiple cats, because technically the latter would apply to two or three cats, and I don't think two or three cats is something especially taggable.
  • I prefer the word "focus" rather than "theme", for greater accuracy. post #94921 has an animal-themed hair ornament, but the focus of the image is not an animal. I don't want to have to clarify at animal (theme) that "Actually, it refers to the focus of the image as a whole." Compare with themed object, playing card theme and poke ball theme.
  • I prefer focus on animals rather than animals (focus). The former is natural and plain English rather than a word followed by its context. The former has the same number of keystrokes but it's two parentheses shorter. Parentheses become weird things like %28 in web addresses.

For many cats, how about clowder? It's the term used to describe a pack of cats.

...Well, half-joking aside, I'd like to suggest a standalone themed tag, and use it to tag pictures that have, as I would understand, images that have

  • a ridiculous/overwhelming number of a certain object, animal, idea, etc. and
  • said object exerting a dominating presence over the picture.

Then you could just search for the object you want (such as cat) alongside the themed tag, and get images that have either a large/ridiculous number of cats, or a cat theme that is prevalent throughout the image (with a bit of noise, understandably).

Actually, having extra noise isn't really a big problem here, since it should be rather easy to tell from the thumbnail when an image has a specific theme.

Shintear said:
Hence the tag would be used for images that are themed to a great and undeniable extent.

For the reasons I said above, I prefer "focus" to "theme".

We already have some tags of focus. Some of them are: face, hands, feet, nape, solo. Mixing them would make a lot of noise, even if we ignore the huge solo, so I'm against that idea.

I'd rather create multiple new tags of relatively specific focuses.

With that in mind, I could tag...

EDIT:

Wording and minor additions

Updated

I'll say that what you are proposing would be nice...but the thing is, at what point do we decide a certain thing needs to have one of these focus tags? As of now, we've suggested food, books, cats, animals, birds, bunnies...and we haven't even begun to look through images.

Maybe we should have a tag, call it "focused" for example, that can be used to tag pictures that focus in on a single thing, and all the tags you mentioned would be implemented to it.

So, cat + focused would bring up pictures where a cat, or multiple cats, are emphasized (or are the only things in the image).

Like I said earlier, I like the idea, but I think that we need an encompassing tag to save us from making and having to deal with dozens and dozens of new tags.

...Also, food_focus is kind of covered by the Food Porn pool.

Shintear said:
I'll say that what you are proposing would be nice...but the thing is, at what point do we decide a certain thing needs to have one of these focus tags? As of now, we've suggested food, books, cats, animals, birds, bunnies...and we haven't even begun to look through images.

I suppose we would decide about them on a case-by-case basis, like it happens with all other tags.

As an initial effort, I populated book focus and created a wiki for it. Feel free to comment and propose changes.

Updated

You can post wiki suggestions here, but don't create wikis for tags before we've had a chance to discuss them. They are a bother to delete.

Your efforts have shown that we DO NOT NEED a book focus tag. By even including images with a single book, you've just created a subjective book tag.
Nearly everything else is also already covered by the tags:
book
bookshelf
library
reading

S1eth said:
You can post wiki suggestions here, but don't create wikis for tags before we've had a chance to discuss them. They are a bother to delete.

Sounds reasonable. Sorry for going ahead and creating the wiki before discussing it enough.

Below the line is the wiki I created for book focus:

----------

One or more books are the focus (the subject, the theme) of the image. Use this tag when books are very conspicuous, very noticeable, very visible.

Examples

As guidelines, use this tag when a great portion of the image is occupied by:

Counter-examples

Don't use this tag with these posts, that break the guidelines:

  • post #1051582 (The books are effectively hidden. They don't draw attention.)
  • post #1048703 (Same as above.)
  • post #455122 (Things, people, situations unrelated to the books are the focus of the image instead.)
  • post #989025 (There are only a few books in the background.)

Updated

Seems like if we start using book_focus and cat_focus, we would soon start making _focus tags for every conceivable thing. Bicycle_focus, penis_focus, Remilia_scarlet_focus, trombone_focus... when would it end?

A better system would be something like VNDB's tag scoring system :

"Tags can be assigned a vote from -3 to 3. This vote should be interpreted as follows:
-3: This tag really doesn't apply to the VN.
-2 and -1: These not very often used, but can be useful to show that you disagree, but are not 100% sure.
0: It is possible to change your vote to '0' to remove it.
1: The tag does apply to the visual novel, but is not too apparent or only plays a minor role.
2: The tag certainly applies to the visual novel.
3: The tag applies and is very apparent or plays a major role."

Replace "visual novel" with "picture" and this would be very useful. However, such a system is probably far from being implemented.

jjj14 said:
"Tags can be assigned a vote from -3 to 3. This vote should be interpreted as follows:
-3: This tag really doesn't apply to the VN.
-2 and -1: These not very often used, but can be useful to show that you disagree, but are not 100% sure.
0: It is possible to change your vote to '0' to remove it.
1: The tag does apply to the visual novel, but is not too apparent or only plays a minor role.
2: The tag certainly applies to the visual novel.
3: The tag applies and is very apparent or plays a major role."

By following that system, these would be approximately the themes and numerical values of the new focus tags and a number of old ones (I mentioned the old ones before, some messages above; they don't have the word "focus" in the name).

(feel free to correct me, as this is somewhat subjective)

Starting with the old focus tags:

  • pov ass
    • Theme: ass
    • Level: 3
  • ass
    • Theme: ass
    • Level: 2 or 3 together, I suppose (or possibly level 1 is present here, too, so it wouldn't be a "focus tag" at all)
  • legs
    • Theme: leg
    • Level: 2 or 3 together
  • bust
    • Theme: bust (someone from navel up)
    • Level: 3
  • face
    • Theme: face
    • Level: 2 or 3 together
  • portrait
    • Theme: face (again)
    • Level: 3
  • nape
    • Theme: nape
    • Level: 3, mostly
  • color
    • Theme: contrast of colors, I think
    • Level: 2 or 3 together, I think
  • fingers
    • Theme: finger
    • Level: 3
  • hands
    • Theme: hand
    • Level: 3
  • elbow
    • Theme: elbow
    • Level: 2 or 3 together, maybe
  • solo
    • Theme: only one person
    • Level: 3
  • still life
    • Theme: something inanimate
    • Level: 3
  • dominant colors (blue, yellow, etc.)
    • Theme: one color
    • Level: 3
  • a lot of tags of art techniques, image format and image composition

These are the two new focus tags I created (book focus and cat focus):

If they are unwanted in their current state ("By even including images with a single book, you've just created a subjective book tag"...), one possible alternative is restricting book focus and cat focus to level 3 images only, removing all those "Someone is reading a book" or "Someone is cuddling a cat" criteria in the process.

These would be the new rules:

EDITS:

  • Added a few more lines above, including "nape".
  • Oops! I said post #1045377 as an example of the most restricted cat focus in the last line, by mistake. Then I replaced it by a good example.
  • Added the addendum.

ADDENDUM:

Danielx21 said:

  • I support the idea of enforcing a distinction between merely "many" and "too_many". In particular, I agree that post #1020938 and post #6745 would be "too many cards". Then, post #1013149 and post #640627, for example, could be "many cards".

Don't forget this other unfinished subject. I would gladly separate too many knives into many knives and too many knives, for example, if people support that.

Updated

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