The tag alias #50812 kinktober_2020 -> kinktober has been approved.

Reason: Redundant tag. The exact same results can be obtained with kinktober 2020.

EDIT: The tag alias kinktober_2020 -> kinktober (forum #304740) has been approved by @bitWolfy.

Shouldn't both be invalidated? There's no consistent theme to it at all except it's some fetishy artwork made during October.

The tag alias kinktober_2020 -> kinktober (forum #304740) has been approved by @bitWolfy.

watsit said:
Shouldn't both be invalidated? There's no consistent theme to it at all except it's some fetishy artwork made during October.

I disagree, Kinktober art is often explicitly labelled as such (usually with a day number). At the very least, that would be grounds for a tag.

wat8548 said:
I disagree, Kinktober art is often explicitly labelled as such (usually with a day number). At the very least, that would be grounds for a tag.

Saying "it's labelled as such" is just another way of saying "it's tagged as such", so this is essentially saying 'it should be tagged that way because it's tagged that way'. Just because there might be the word kinktober written somewhere on it or in the description or in a reply isn't grounds for making a tag out of it, in my opinion. There's no visual distinction to the contents of such posts, not even a consistent logo, it's just a kinky piece drawn or posted or something during October (artists may also do it early or late, so it can be a kinky piece drawn or posted or something during September or November, too, or they may have drawn it months ago but only posted it in October, or maybe they drew it in October but didn't post it until months later), arbitrarily given a #kinktober hashtag somewhere maybe sometimes. It screams of being a vanity tag, just something to put on an image without actually saying anything about the image, and the post would be perfectly fine without it. When considering such hashtags are created almost constantly by random people on a whim, who's to say what's allowed? They can overlap too, with the one to apply being random because it's the word the artist happened to think of that day. Where would it end?

What makes post #3026801 "kinktober"? Especially since it names "sextober" as the... meme? ... it belongs to, not kinktober. There's like a million different hashtags for these... challenges? ... which we often already have tags for indicating their intended content (inktober -> ink, smaugust -> smaug, sextober -> sex, moovember -> cow, etc), making these at best redundant. In some ways, it even feels like its stepping around invalid tags or tag definitions. Kinky was aliased to invalid_tag for being "Too subjective", yet "kinktober", which is kinky art made maybe in October, can still be tagged. Sextober doesn't have to have sex per e6's definition, even though the tag is supposed to indicate sex. I'll just wait for Cutember or Dawwcember to take off.

Then of course there's the issue of uploaders or taggers adding these tags on their own, either because the artist posted it at the right time even though they may or may not have mentioned it, or because it was posted on e6 at the right time. Who's to say whether the tag applies or not? Even if we go by the artist's say-so like with lore tags, since the tag doesn't indicate anything in the image, it's not immediately obvious whether it belongs on a given image or not without checking the sources and reading what the artist says, leading to many erroneous and missing uses of tags since few people will do that (and if the sources go down, making it impossible to know).

watsit said:
Saying "it's labelled as such" is just another way of saying "it's tagged as such", so this is essentially saying 'it should be tagged that way because it's tagged that way'.

No, it's essentially saying "it should be tagged that way because it's visible in the image". You know, like tags on this site are supposed to work.

post #2996210 post #2996428 post #2999516 post #3051262

I'm pointing out that, even if you removed kinktober from all images which did not explicitly depict that term in writing, you would still be left with more than enough to justify the tag's existence. Not that I think you should go down that path either, for reasons I explain below.

watsit said:
Just because there might be the word kinktober written somewhere on it or in the description or in a reply isn't grounds for making a tag out of it, in my opinion.

We make tags out of such things all the time, especially copyright tags. I've no idea where juice_that_makes_you_cum originated from, for example, but it's managed to amass 36 oddly specific posts so far.

watsit said:
There's no visual distinction to the contents of such posts, not even a consistent logo, it's just a kinky piece drawn or posted or something during October (artists may also do it early or late, so it can be a kinky piece drawn or posted or something during September or November, too, or they may have drawn it months ago but only posted it in October, or maybe they drew it in October but didn't post it until months later), arbitrarily given a #kinktober hashtag somewhere maybe sometimes.

The point of Kinktober is that you draw one piece of art themed around a given prompt on every day in October. It is not just "just a kinky piece posted during October". Even a post featuring the correct kink which was coincidentally drawn on the correct day wouldn't count unless the artist was also participating in the challenge. Sometimes artists fail the challenge, or complete it late, life happens. Sometimes they choose to skip days because they really dislike that day's kink or can't draw fast enough. None of this means the challenge doesn't exist. And the nature of the challenge means that it is both natural and (for the purposes of self-promotion) beneficial to advertise each image with the Kinktober tag.

watsit said:
It screams of being a vanity tag, just something to put on an image without actually saying anything about the image, and the post would be perfectly fine without it.

A vanity tag is one created by the poster to apply only to their own work, not an overly broad application of an existing tag. The way you're talking about it, you make it sound as if you are aware of instances of artists posting one piece in the whole month of October and tagging it "kinktober" because it happens to feature a kink of some kind? The purpose of the kinktober tag is to find artists who are doing the challenge, using e621's closest equivalent to Twitter hashtags. Of course, one advantage e621 has over Twitter is that you can forcibly remove the tag from anyone attempting to spam it, but that too is not an argument against the tag's very existence. (You could say it's lore, but frankly so are many other things not in the lore section, and copyright has always been the lore-iest category anyway.)

watsit said:
When considering such hashtags are created almost constantly by random people on a whim, who's to say what's allowed? They can overlap too, with the one to apply being random because it's the word the artist happened to think of that day. Where would it end?

Once again, the existence of the Kinktober challenge is not up for debate. The wiki says it has existed since 2016, and today the tag contains over 700 posts on this site alone, most of which have accompanying explicit justifications for that tag's presence either in the image itself or in the description. A tag which is independently contributed to by this many artists cannot be a vanity tag by definition.

(Yes, yes, I know it's bandwagon jumping. In fact, part of the entire point of the hashtag is that it gives lesser-known artists a chance to promote themselves if they can keep up with the gruelling schedule. But we do not and have never condemned tags simply for being popular.)

watsit said:
What makes post #3026801 "kinktober"? Especially since it names "sextober" as the... meme? ... it belongs to, not kinktober. There's like a million different hashtags for these... challenges? ... which we often already have tags for indicating their intended content (inktober -> ink, smaugust -> smaug, sextober -> sex, moovember -> cow, etc), making these at best redundant.

Congratulations, you found an actual example of a vanity tag. sextober has only ever been used by one artist. Change it to kinktober (or put in an alias request if you want to nuke it from orbit), same as Original Species Donut Steels typically don't last long.

watsit said:
In some ways, it even feels like its stepping around invalid tags or tag definitions. Kinky was aliased to invalid_tag for being "Too subjective", yet "kinktober", which is kinky art made maybe in October, can still be tagged.

Because it isn't subjective. There is literally a list of what counts as a "kink" for the purposes of Kinktober. Sometimes artists reject it and draw up their own lists, but otherwise remain in the spirit of the challenge, so kinktober will suffice as a replacement for a million redundant tags. Once again, the point of Kinktober (both as a challenge and as a tag) has never been the fact that a kink gets featured.

watsit said:
Then of course there's the issue of uploaders or taggers adding these tags on their own, either because the artist posted it at the right time even though they may or may not have mentioned it, or because it was posted on e6 at the right time. Who's to say whether the tag applies or not? Even if we go by the artist's say-so like with lore tags, since the tag doesn't indicate anything in the image, it's not immediately obvious whether it belongs on a given image or not without checking the sources and reading what the artist says, leading to many erroneous and missing uses of tags since few people will do that (and if the sources go down, making it impossible to know).

I have not found any evidence of users adding kinktober to images without justification from either the image itself or the source. Missing uses are another matter, but just today I found a new page of an incredibly popular comic which had still not been added to its pool 12 hours after uploading, and I'm not claiming the pool system is broken. This site has coped with meta-information about images before and will continue to do so. (Also, did you mean to argue that the entire lore tag system should be scrapped there?)

wat8548 said:
The point of Kinktober is that you draw one piece of art themed around a given prompt on every day in October.

That may have been the original intent, but that's definitely not how I see these things used. Much like Iron Artist or the Jack-O' pose challenge, these meme themes may have started out with specific criteria, but as more people bandwagon on, it gets warped by people who misinterpret the challenge, and people seeing that misinterpretation and making more interpretations, people end up saying they're part of the challenge despite not actually doing what it was supposed to be. In cases like this, I see plenty of artists that don't put out a lot of content, they'll pre-plan a one, two, or a few pieces around a given theme to have ready on that month, or they'll hear of one of these themes at the beginning of the month and aim to put out a few relevant pieces by the end of the month if they get time between other things they want to do. They'll tag it inktober, spooktober, smaugust, or whatever, and not even try to have one per day for the whole month.

And if you need to look at what else a given artist may have put out in the month a given image was first posted to work out if the tag is actually relevant to that image, that really comes across as an invalid tag to me.

wat8548 said:
A vanity tag is one created by the poster to apply only to their own work, not an overly broad application of an existing tag.

It can be one created by the poster, but it doesn't have to be. A vanity tag is a tag used for vain purposes. To give the artist/tagger a heightened sense of grandeur or importance without actually saying much or anything about the image. Saying "this image is part of kinktober", for whatever their understanding of what kinktober is, makes the image come across as something a bit more than saying "this image is kinky". This doesn't have to be malicious, the artist or tagger or whoever can just be having fun, want to be part of the crowd, or help increase exposure on social media... but I don't think those are good grounds for having a tag here.

wat8548 said:
The way you're talking about it, you make it sound as if you are aware of instances of artists posting one piece in the whole month of October and tagging it "kinktober" because it happens to feature a kink of some kind? The purpose of the kinktober tag is to find artists who are doing the challenge, using e621's closest equivalent to Twitter hashtags. Of course, one advantage e621 has over Twitter is that you can forcibly remove the tag from anyone attempting to spam it, but that too is not an argument against the tag's very existence. (You could say it's lore, but frankly so are many other things not in the lore section, and copyright has always been the lore-iest category anyway.)

If someone is willing and able to police the tag and ensure it actually fits a well-defined criteria, and keep it clean of posts that just say #kinktober without actually fulfilling the challenge as defined, now and in the future, have at it. But considering it's approaching 1000 uses, not all of which have a valid source to even verify it fits the challenge and not just a themed piece for the month, and given how readily people are to put it on future themed pieces not actually fitting the challenge, I simply consider it a better option to get rid of it instead of trying to dig through sources and work out which posts fit. And don't forget other theme/challenge tags that need similar policing (inktober has over 700 uses too, across its 6 tags, and who knows what other "challenges"/themes are hiding in clever wordplay tag names).

wat8548 said:
Congratulations, you found an actual example of a vanity tag. sextober has only ever been used by one artist. Change it to kinktober (or put in an alias request if you want to nuke it from orbit), same as Original Species Donut Steels typically don't last long.

I think it says something if that's a vanity tag and was otherwise completely indistinguishable from the other challenge/theme tags at issue. And ultimately, what's the fundamental difference between kinktober and sextober, other than that one caught on in 2016 and the other didn't in 2021? Who knows, maybe sextober will catch on and be a bigger deal in 2022 than kinktober is, so shouldn't its first use in 2021 remain?

wat8548 said:
I have not found any evidence of users adding kinktober to images without justification from either the image itself or the source.

That's the issue, though. The image or source saying #kinktober doesn't make the kinktober tag valid for the image, according to how you're saying the tag should be applied. A user adding kinktober because the image or source says it can still be an invalid use of the tag that needs someone to go to the source and check if the artist has other drawings to meet the criteria.

wat8548 said:
(Also, did you mean to argue that the entire lore tag system should be scrapped there?)

Considering the current use of the lore tags, I see them as a necessary compromise. It helps artists and character owners to properly convey important information about the characters in the image, and there are other very heavily used tags that people utilize but really skirt the line of TWYS vs TWYK, so it helps clean some things up. But I would definitely be a detractor for using the lore tag system for random unimportant information an artist would want to throw in that's not TWYS. There's a gulf between the utility of tags like trans_(lore), incest_(lore), male_(lore) etc, compared to kinktober, ych_result, inktober, etc.

watsit said:
That may have been the original intent, but that's definitely not how I see these things used. Much like Iron Artist or the Jack-O' pose challenge, these meme themes may have started out with specific criteria, but as more people bandwagon on, it gets warped by people who misinterpret the challenge, and people seeing that misinterpretation and making more interpretations, people end up saying they're part of the challenge despite not actually doing what it was supposed to be.

...Are you now saying that jack-o'_pose should be invalidated?

watsit said:
In cases like this, I see plenty of artists that don't put out a lot of content, they'll pre-plan a one, two, or a few pieces around a given theme to have ready on that month, or they'll hear of one of these themes at the beginning of the month and aim to put out a few relevant pieces by the end of the month if they get time between other things they want to do. They'll tag it inktober, spooktober, smaugust, or whatever, and not even try to have one per day for the whole month.

So to clarify, you're saying that if an artist starts the Kinktober challenge, gets say 15 days in (I found multiple examples of that in my research), but then runs out of time or falls too far behind, they were retroactively never doing Kinktober in the first place? Furthermore, if they prepared in advance for a well-known event that happens every year, it also doesn't count? And you say I'm using lore justifications...

watsit said:
And if you need to look at what else a given artist may have put out in the month a given image was first posted to work out if the tag is actually relevant to that image, that really comes across as an invalid tag to me.

Again, this applies just as much to the pool system. I keep bringing up pools because one of the distinctive elements of kinktober as a tag is that, generally speaking, every image in it should be in a pool for that artist's challenge attempt, although not all of them are. Sometimes this is just because nobody could be bothered organising them, but there are numerous examples of an artist who made a good-faith attempt to complete Kinktober on some other site but only one or a few of the resulting images ever got reposted here. In some cases, most of the images would not be allowed here: post #2972196 is an example of a rare eligible work created by a non-furry artist as part of the challenge. So pools are not a sufficient solution to cover every post that may be part of the challenge.

watsit said:
I think it says something if that's a vanity tag and was otherwise completely indistinguishable from the other challenge/theme tags at issue. And ultimately, what's the fundamental difference between kinktober and sextober, other than that one caught on in 2016 and the other didn't in 2021? Who knows, maybe sextober will catch on and be a bigger deal in 2022 than kinktober is, so shouldn't its first use in 2021 remain?

Once again, you accidentally made an argument against a broader subject than you intended. Every single meme tag has this problem. Kinktober has years of legitimacy behind it and is objectively verifiable as a named trend. Maybe some other tag will one day attain the same, but until then, we are free to treat forced memes and single-person "challenges" as such.

watsit said:
That's the issue, though. The image or source saying #kinktober doesn't make the kinktober tag valid for the image, according to how you're saying the tag should be applied. A user adding kinktober because the image or source says it can still be an invalid use of the tag that needs someone to go to the source and check if the artist has other drawings to meet the criteria.

I'm saying the tag should be applied both ways at once. Both TWYS and TWYK are valid interpretations for a named meta-tag like this. Maybe an artist might draw a piece of commentary about the trend explaining why they refuse to participate in it. I would say that should also be eligible for the tag, as long as it was clearly visible that the image was referring to Kinktober. (The search pokémon -pokémon_(species) is a good reminder of just how meta copyright tags can get.)

wat8548 said:
...Are you now saying that jack-o'_pose should be invalidated?

No, because it's a legitimate pose you can see in the image. I am against it being tagged a meme, since it's so far removed from its roots that it's become just a generic yoga pose, but it is a pose nonetheless. I'm not thrilled with the name being jack-o'_pose and would prefer something a bit less meme-y sounding, but I don't know another name that would fit, so it's as good a term as any in the mean time.

wat8548 said:
So to clarify, you're saying that if an artist starts the Kinktober challenge, gets say 15 days in (I found multiple examples of that in my research), but then runs out of time or falls too far behind, they were retroactively never doing Kinktober in the first place? Furthermore, if they prepared in advance for a well-known event that happens every year, it also doesn't count? And you say I'm using lore justifications...

You're the one that said:

wat8548 said:
The point of Kinktober is that you draw one piece of art themed around a given prompt on every day in October. It is not just "just a kinky piece posted during October". Even a post featuring the correct kink which was coincidentally drawn on the correct day wouldn't count unless the artist was also participating in the challenge.

If someone starts working on a few kinky piece of art in August, knowing it'll take a few months to complete them, and they get finished and posted near the end of October, it would be "just a kinky piece posted during October", and thus not qualify by your definition. And this definition calls to question failed attempts. If someone intends to undertake the challenge, gets one kinky piece out on Oct 1, then something happens and they can't do anymore kinky art for the rest of the month, should that one kinky piece posted during October count as Kinktober? If so, why, how does it help tagging that one kinky piece for kinktober, but not that one other kinky piece posted in October?

wat8548 said:
Again, this applies just as much to the pool system. I keep bringing up pools because one of the distinctive elements of kinktober as a tag is that, generally speaking, every image in it should be in a pool for that artist's challenge attempt, although not all of them are. Sometimes this is just because nobody could be bothered organising them, but there are numerous examples of an artist who made a good-faith attempt to complete Kinktober on some other site but only one or a few of the resulting images ever got reposted here.

Honestly, pools and sets sound like a way better method to collect and categorize images made for these challenges, and I would certainly be for using them over copyright tags. You can collect them by artist, by year, by artist+year, sort each image chronologically, and don't have to worry about whether the word "Kinktober" appears on the image. That sounds much better than one tag for this purpose. This can even work for any new "challenge" that comes up, including Sextober, without being concerned over whether it will catch on next year or whatever.

wat8548 said:
Once again, you accidentally made an argument against a broader subject than you intended. Every single meme tag has this problem.

Difference is, most meme tags have a unique visual element associated with it. I'll draw your attention to a_cat_is_fine_too. Images fitting that meme have a specific visual reference to the originating comic page. Over time, it became used for generic feline bestiality that either the artist or tagger personally associated with the phrase (however far removed it was from the source comic), and there were constant warnings that if that continued, the tag would be invalidated. It almost was, until some months back some people went through and pulled the reins on it to get it back under control, and act as the visual reference it was intended to be.

Contrast this with kinktober. The only visual element of this is the art needs to have something that's kinky, which itself is an invalid tag for being too subjective. So right here, we're starting off on a bad foot. But still, initially it was intended to be a month-long challenge for drawing a kinky piece every day through October. There's not anything unique you could see in any given image created as a result of being in the challenge, except sometimes the word itself may appear (though not with any consistent look to it, like a shared logo or something; just the printed word in whatever font or style the artist decided to use that day). Even still, over time it's been warped where some artists apply it to any kinky piece with some relation to October (either started, or finished, or just posted in that month), even if they never partook the aforementioned challenge.

That's the difference. The first has some unique visible element to base the tag on, and was almost lost as a result of being used for generic concepts we already had tags for. In the latter, it's based on subjective view of whether the image is kinky, made into a month-long challenge with no other visually distinguishable element, and even the month-long challenge part is being removed by various artists.

wat8548 said:
Kinktober has years of legitimacy behind it and is objectively verifiable as a named trend.

We don't tag trends, we tag what we see, and there's nothing visually unique about pieces produced under kinktober to warrant a tag, IMO (especially since the entire premise the trend is built on, making art that's kinky, is considered an invalid tag to apply to image).

wat8548 said:
I'm saying the tag should be applied both ways at once.

Tags pulling double duty are generally frowned upon. If a tag is used to indicate the artist took part in the challenge, and the tag is also used just because the artist said the word in a description but did not actually take part in the challenge, it becomes less useful at one or both of these uses, so it would be best to separate them.

wat8548 said:
(The search pokémon -pokémon_(species) is a good reminder of just how meta copyright tags can get.)

Pokémon is a trademark, literal IP law along side copyright. pokémon_(species) is a high level species classification; not too dissimilar to mammal. I don't see kinktober or any of these other pseudo-challenges as being at all analogous. Technically maybe Inktober could be classified as a trademark since some people claimed ownership of it, but if I recall there was a really bad blow-up about that a few years back that resulted in people splintering off onto similar-but-different names to avoid associating with the trademark. That would be a nice can of worms to open.

Most of your post is marred by the same two basic misconceptions, so I'll address them here to save space.

Firstly, you're really hung up on the name "Kinktober". The fact that it has the word "kink" in it could not be less relevant, and it certainly wasn't coined on Tumblr in October 2016 in order to pre-emptively spite a tag invalidation on a different site which wasn't proposed until one month later, as you have repeatedly implied. Literally the only reason it's called "Kinktober" is because "Inktober" was already an existing challenge, and the porn artist community, as they are wont to do, took something pure and innocent and produced their own horny version of it. It could, indeed, just as easily have been "Sextober" (although "Sextember" is a better pun).

There is literally no argument here over what counts as a "kink" and what doesn't. The only unifying factor is that all prompts must be lewd in some way. Heck, one common prompt is frottage, which even vanilla people complain is too vanilla.

Secondly, you keep throwing out this hypothetical scenario of dastardly artists scamming the system by drawing one piece of art during the month of October and tagging it #kinktober for bonus clout, but you still have not produced a single actual example of such a thing happening. The most dubious example I could find during my extensive research was one artist who apparently thought the full challenge was too much and drew one numbered piece for each week in October instead, but even so, the art's publication date could hardly be called coincidental.

watsit said:
Honestly, pools and sets sound like a way better method to collect and categorize images made for these challenges, and I would certainly be for using them over copyright tags. You can collect them by artist, by year, by artist+year, sort each image chronologically, and don't have to worry about whether the word "Kinktober" appears on the image. That sounds much better than one tag for this purpose. This can even work for any new "challenge" that comes up, including Sextober, without being concerned over whether it will catch on next year or whatever.

Pools and sets are an incomplete solution. There would be no way to organise every drawing made as part of Kinktober (pools of pools don't exist and combined pools are a nightmare), and this opens up a whole new can of worms over whether posts that are part of Kinktober but don't meet the uploading guidelines should be uploaded, since posts that are in pools with other eligible posts have a certain amount of leeway over those.

As I said at the beginning, a possible compromise might be to mandate that the word "Kinktober" must appear somewhere on the images (or be reasonably deduced from the presence of a day number and a prompt). I don't like that because it would remove a lot of works that are still unambiguously part of the challenge (spicedpopsicle's successful run this year, for example), but it would stick rigidly within the bounds of TWYS. The fact that that option exists is a firm negative answer to the question of whether the tag should be invalidated. Compare it to a_cat_is_fine_too if you want, but kinktober has never suffered anything like the bad faith and trolling that tag did - according to available evidence, anyway, wild insinuations to the contrary aside.

wat8548 said:
it certainly wasn't coined on Tumblr in October 2016 in order to pre-emptively spite a tag invalidation on a different site which wasn't proposed until one month later, as you have repeatedly implied.

I never said anything about the intent of the tag name, just what it results in. I said it effectively steps around an invalid tag, not that the reason it was named this way was specifically to spite e6's alias to invalid tag.

wat8548 said:
Secondly, you keep throwing out this hypothetical scenario of dastardly artists scamming the system by drawing one piece of art during the month of October and tagging it #kinktober for bonus clout, but you still have not produced a single actual example of such a thing happening.

Again, you're attributing intent where I didn't. I even said it doesn't have to be malicious. But regardless of the intent, the result is the same. A vanity tag that doesn't say much about what's in the image beyond the other tags we already have.

wat8548 said:
Pools and sets are an incomplete solution. There would be no way to organise every drawing made as part of Kinktober (pools of pools don't exist and combined pools are a nightmare), and this opens up a whole new can of worms over whether posts that are part of Kinktober but don't meet the uploading guidelines should be uploaded, since posts that are in pools with other eligible posts have a certain amount of leeway over those.

If it's part of a legitimate series of images that are intended to be together, some otherwise irrelevant posts are allowed to keep the series complete. That seems like a good argument for using pools, since it means the image series can remain intact. But even if it doesn't count, it wouldn't change anything since an irrelevant-to-site image is irrelevant-to-site regardless if it uses a tag or not, so I don't see why that should factor into anything.

Posts can belong to multiple pools at once. So a post can be in a "Kinktober" pool along with a "Kinktober 2021" pool along with a "Kinktober 2021 - spicedpopsicle" pool. The Kinktober pool itself can have a description linking to the Kinktober 2021, Kinktober 2020, etc, pools, and Kinktober 2021 can link to Kinktober 2021 - spicedpopsicle, Kinktober 2021 - crownedvictory, etc. This seems far superior to me than a single kinktober tag that can't even cover all Kinktober images that are otherwise here.

wat8548 said:
As I said at the beginning, a possible compromise might be to mandate that the word "Kinktober" must appear somewhere on the images (or be reasonably deduced from the presence of a day number and a prompt). I don't like that because it would remove a lot of works that are still unambiguously part of the challenge (spicedpopsicle's successful run this year, for example), but it would stick rigidly within the bounds of TWYS.

That's why I see it as an issue to do this way. You can have a series of images that are part of the challenge, but the artist neglects to put "kinktober" on half of them and it can't otherwise be inferred from other text, so half the posts of the challenge can't be tagged with the others. Pools solve this problem, without needing a tag that can't return what people expect it to.

watsit said:
I never said anything about the intent of the tag name, just what it results in.

Go on then, what does it "result in"? A Banned Word appearing in the near vicinity of the tag list? Should we invalidate all of these too?

watsit said:
Again, you're attributing intent where I didn't. I even said it doesn't have to be malicious.

No, you only repeatedly implied it. Once again, there is no evidence of scope creep in this tag. I have not found a single inappropriately tagged post in it, and you certainly haven't supplied one.

Specifically, you said:

watsit said:
Even still, over time it's been warped where some artists apply it to any kinky piece with some relation to October (either started, or finished, or just posted in that month), even if they never partook the aforementioned challenge.

To quote the old adage, pics or it didn't happen.

watsit said:
If it's part of a legitimate series of images that are intended to be together, some otherwise irrelevant posts are allowed to keep the series complete. That seems like a good argument for using pools, since it means the image series can remain intact. But even if it doesn't count, it wouldn't change anything since an irrelevant-to-site image is irrelevant-to-site regardless if it uses a tag or not, so I don't see why that should factor into anything.

That's not the scenario I was talking about, though: I linked to a post which was the only eligible image out of that artist's entire human-only Kinktober challenge, and then only by the technicality of venom_(marvel) meeting this site's absurdly broad definition of "furry". Where does that fit into your pool system?

watsit said:
Posts can belong to multiple pools at once. So a post can be in a "Kinktober" pool along with a "Kinktober 2021" pool along with a "Kinktober 2021 - spicedpopsicle" pool. The Kinktober pool itself can have a description linking to the Kinktober 2021, Kinktober 2020, etc, pools, and Kinktober 2021 can link to Kinktober 2021 - spicedpopsicle, Kinktober 2021 - crownedvictory, etc. This seems far superior to me than a single kinktober tag that can't even cover all Kinktober images that are otherwise here.

I am looking at the 795 posts currently tagged kinktober and contemplating the horrific job of wrangling this site's userbase - well-meaning newbies, technologically challenged artists, and all - into collaboratively maintaining them all in one mega-pool, split into an uncountably large number of overlapping sub-pools, making sure nothing gets lost along the way, accounting for artists who abandon the challenge or do a reduced version, meticulously going back and filling in the gaps for lesser known artists whose catalogue is uploaded only spottily, and presumably spilling over into "Kinktober II: Electric Poolgaloo" when the number of posts surpasses 1000 next year. Will posts be sorted by theme date or upload date? If the former, will artists who fall behind have to have their posts manually moved backwards in the pool order? Are we going with the terrible bodge of making pools which contain only the first post of assorted other pools? If so, how do you search for Kinktober posts in general?

wat8548 said:
Go on then, what does it "result in"?

Just what I said. Effectively a side-step of an invalid tag.

wat8548 said:
A Banned Word appearing in the near vicinity of the tag list? Should we invalidate all of these too?

The word "kink" isn't at issue. It's essentially a synonym for fetish. Either way, of the tags listed there that have over 100 uses, there's only 2 that aren't a character name, species, or artist name: mommy_kink and daddy_kink, and I hope it's obvious to you why they have a more specific and less subjective use than something merely being "kinky" (or "kinky in october", as may be the case here).

wat8548 said:
Once again, there is no evidence of scope creep in this tag. I have not found a single inappropriately tagged post in it, and you certainly haven't supplied one.

Well, this series specifically names being for Sextober in the image. Yet because it's kinky october stuff and because it's in the FA tags (which is a great source for e6 tags /s), it's also got kinktober. For bonus points, it's also got inktober in both on FA and here, even though it's not an ink drawing as it's intended to be (it is digitally inked, though, so close enough? no scope creep here, nope).

wat8548 said:
Specifically, you said:

watsit said:
Even still, over time it's been warped where some artists apply it to any kinky piece with some relation to October (either started, or finished, or just posted in that month), even if they never partook the aforementioned challenge.

To quote the old adage, pics or it didn't happen.

Well, here's a few:
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/44237395/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/44452711/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/44589347/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/44604535/
A few commissions someone did in October (maybe; some were posted in November, I can only presume they were done in October and just posted later). No apparent attempt to it being a daily challenge, but it's kinky stuff in October, so it's part of Kinktober.

Some more:
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/44201354/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/44260597/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/44300116/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/44429483/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/44603935/
A few commissions someone did in October (maybe; some were posted in November, I can only presume they were done in October and just posted later). No apparent attempt to it being a daily challenge, but it's kinky stuff in October, so it's part of Kinktober.

More?
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/44543868/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/44648028/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/44689015/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/44689120/
A few commissions someone did in October (maybe; some all were posted in November, I can only presume they were done in October and just posted later). No apparent attempt to it being a daily challenge, but it's kinky stuff in October, so it's part of Kinktober.

I'm starting to notice a trend...

wat8548 said:
That's not the scenario I was talking about, though: I linked to a post which was the only eligible image out of that artist's entire human-only Kinktober challenge, and then only by the technicality of venom_(marvel) meeting this site's absurdly broad definition of "furry". Where does that fit into your pool system?

As far as I know, there's no rule against having a pool with just one entry. But even if that's not allowed, it would still fit in fine with the Kinktober and Kinktober <year> pools where it wouldn't be the only one.

wat8548 said:
I am looking at the 795 posts currently tagged kinktober and contemplating the horrific job of wrangling this site's userbase - well-meaning newbies, technologically challenged artists, and all - into collaboratively maintaining them all in one mega-pool, split into an uncountably large number of overlapping sub-pools, making sure nothing gets lost along the way, accounting for artists who abandon the challenge or do a reduced version, meticulously going back and filling in the gaps for lesser known artists whose catalogue is uploaded only spottily, and presumably spilling over into "Kinktober II: Electric Poolgaloo" when the number of posts surpasses 1000 next year.

Well, the main overarching Kinktober pool can be added to simply enough. Tag pool:kinktober instead of kinktober. You get the same categorization as you do now, with everything artists say is for Kinktober in the Kinktober pool. You then have the option to categorize them into more specific yearly and artist pools, something that's not currently done (aside from a few kinktober artist pools that seem to exist). Move the tag to the Invalid category, and rewrite the wiki to explain to tag pool:kinktober instead.

As the main Kinktober pool gets filled up and nears the limit, some time during the intermediary 11 months it can be renamed to something like "Kinktober (archive)", and create a new Kinktober pool so tagging pool:kinktober will continue working.

Admittedly, there is a bit of an issue here. Searching pool:kinktober works fine to find all posts in the Kinktober pool (just as if they used a kinktober tag). However, when dealing with the spillover "archive" pools, pool:kinktober* doesn't work. Maybe a feature request to allow wildcards in pool name searches like that (wildcards work on tag searches, and when searching by name in the pool gallery, so it seems like it should be possible).

watsit said:
Just what I said. Effectively a side-step of an invalid tag.

To clarify, I was asking you to elaborate upon your meaningless platitude, not repeat it.

watsit said:
The word "kink" isn't at issue. It's essentially a synonym for fetish. Either way, of the tags listed there that have over 100 uses, there's only 2 that aren't a character name, species, or artist name: mommy_kink and daddy_kink, and I hope it's obvious to you why they have a more specific and less subjective use than something merely being "kinky" (or "kinky in october", as may be the case here).

How is it possible to miss the point this hard? I literally showed you a list full of frequently-used character and artist names that happened to contain the substring you were objecting to, and you breezed right past all of them and zeroed in on the only two tags that actually were attempting to classify something as a "kink".

Kinktober is a name. Nothing more, nothing less. It has that name for the sole reason that Inktober already existed. Nobody is trying to "sidestep" anything here.

watsit said:
Well, this series specifically names being for Sextober in the image. Yet because it's kinky october stuff and because it's in the FA tags (which is a great source for e6 tags /s), it's also got kinktober. For bonus points, it's also got inktober in both on FA and here, even though it's not an ink drawing as it's intended to be (it is digitally inked, though, so close enough? no scope creep here, nope).

The artist's single-person "Sextober" challenge is clearly intended to mirror Kinktober. In fact there's literally zero difference in substance between the two (because Kinktober isn't about "kink" any more than you observed Sextober is about "sex" as we define it), so especially considering the artist themselves acknowledges the parallels, by TWYS we can call a spade a spade (or a cookie a cookie, according to preferred terminology). We make judgement calls like that all the time. You'll have to ask the artist why they apparently took exception to the branding of the challenge, but if I'm clearly riding a skateboard, it doesn't matter how loudly I insist I'm a cyclist.

Fun bonus fact: because all of that artist's challenge posts include the "Sextober" branding in the image, they will still be eligible to be tagged kinktober even if the tag is culled to visible uses only!

The inktober tag was clearly applied in error, but we weren't talking about scope creep of that tag. But just to humour you, let's have a look at the search inktober kinktober. Of the three categories of non-legitimate uses, we have: one artist who didn't apply the kinktober tag to any of their own posts, and may have assumed inktober was the only valid tag for October challenges for whatever reason; the artist you found, who also uploads their own works and whose tagging is generally godawful (they never tag themselves, and other Kinktober variations you may wish to denounce include "sextyober" and "sextiber"); and one shitpost which is clearly ineligible for Inktober but does actually mention Kinktober by name, and was also uploaded by its artist.

So in summary, native users of this site do not appear to have any problem whatsoever with recognising the correct uses of the two tags, and the vast majority of incorrectly tagged posts are attributable to incompetence more generally rather than any specific instance of "scope creep". Personally, I think artists who persistently refuse to abide by this site's rules about tagging themselves are much more disruptive.

[snip FA links]

Gosh, it's almost as if, like you literally just said, FA tags are useless and never to be used as a baseline on this site without supporting evidence. Any examples of that happening, perchance?

watsit said:
Well, the main overarching Kinktober pool can be added to simply enough. Tag pool:kinktober instead of kinktober. You get the same categorization as you do now, with everything artists say is for Kinktober in the Kinktober pool. You then have the option to categorize them into more specific yearly and artist pools, something that's not currently done (aside from a few kinktober artist pools that seem to exist). Move the tag to the Invalid category, and rewrite the wiki to explain to tag pool:kinktober instead.

If you thought persuading artists to apply the kinktober tag correctly was difficult, I have news for you about training them to use the pool system.

wat8548 said:
How is it possible to miss the point this hard? I literally showed you a list full of frequently-used character and artist names that happened to contain the substring you were objecting to, and you breezed right past all of them and zeroed in on the only two tags that actually were attempting to classify something as a "kink".

Where did I say the specific letter combination k-i-n-k was inherently bad? What I said was:

> Kinky was aliased to invalid_tag for being "Too subjective", yet "kinktober", which is kinky art made maybe in October, can still be tagged.

I even gave the hypotheticals "Cutember or Dawwcember" as a similar issue to show what I was pointing out. Nowhere is the specific letters "kink" a problem, it's about being able to apply a subjective descriptor, which isn't the purpose of artist, character, and species tags. If someone tries to make a subjective species... well, there was quite some "fun" going on with Mimiff and co.

wat8548 said:
Kinktober is a name. Nothing more, nothing less. It has that name for the sole reason that Inktober already existed. Nobody is trying to "sidestep" anything here.

Please stop implying intent where I didn't. I never said anyone is purposely trying to sidestep anything, just that it effectively is without a proper TWYS definition.

wat8548 said:
The artist's single-person "Sextober" challenge is clearly intended to mirror Kinktober.

Mirroring it doesn't mean it's identical. You said earlier:

> The point of Kinktober is that you draw one piece of art themed around a given prompt on every day in October. It is not just "just a kinky piece posted during October".

So unless "Sextober" duplicates those specific prompts throughout the month, or unless it is "just a kinky piece posted during October", it is a different challenge.

wat8548 said:
[snip FA links]

Gosh, it's almost as if, like you literally just said, FA tags are useless and never to be used as a baseline on this site without supporting evidence.

Interesting, since you said earlier:

> I have not found any evidence of users adding kinktober to images without justification from either the image itself or the source. ... I'm saying the tag should be applied both ways at once. Both TWYS and TWYK are valid interpretations for a named meta-tag like this.

So which is it? Is TWYK (info from the source, i.e. FA tags) valid or not?

It's getting hard to debate you when you keep moving the goalpost like this and taking us in circles.
1, I say kinktober is a bad tag to use here because people use it for kinky art posted or made during October.
2. You say it's not just kinky art during October, it's a specific challenge and should only be applied to art doing the challenge.
3. I say that would be hell to manage and police, as it would require trawling through an artist's gallery to find out if they were actually doing the challenge.
4. You say it can be applied only to posts that say "kinktober", or can otherwise be inferred from the image or source.
5. I say that makes it subjective again, because an artist can use it even when not doing the challenge.
6. You say that's fine, TWYK/source info is valid for metatags.
7. Goto 1.

If I'm wrong, please let me know where, but that's the take-away I'm getting here.

watsit said:
Where did I say the specific letter combination k-i-n-k was inherently bad?

Several times, including just now:

watsit said:
> Kinky was aliased to invalid_tag for being "Too subjective", yet "kinktober", which is kinky art made maybe in October, can still be tagged.

Regardless of how subjective the boundaries of "kinky" are, do you know anyone who would place masturbation inside them? I feel like we wouldn't even be having this circular conversation if it had been called Sextober after all.

I could repeat the same exercise with c-u-t-e if you like.

watsit said:
Please stop implying intent where I didn't. I never said anyone is purposely trying to sidestep anything, just that it effectively is without a proper TWYS definition.

Ironically, this whole conversation has been nothing but you sidestepping giving me a straight answer as to why "kinktober", even if it had a 100% locked-down TWYS definition, would be a bad name for a tag.

watsit said:
Mirroring it doesn't mean it's identical. You said earlier:

> The point of Kinktober is that you draw one piece of art themed around a given prompt on every day in October. It is not just "just a kinky piece posted during October".

So unless "Sextober" duplicates those specific prompts throughout the month, or unless it is "just a kinky piece posted during October", it is a different challenge.

Whoops, you missed the important part of the quote again. I'm not sure any artist's Kinktober challenge has featured the exact same prompts as any other artist, mainly because every artist has things they don't want to draw and things they would rather be drawing instead, and you don't get fined by the Kinktober Administration Bureau for your choice in prompts (or for not completing the challenge, for that matter). I searched the pools for "Kinktober" and only two of them appeared to be following the same prompt list this year. (pool #25683 and pool #25756, if you're curious, at least until one of them posted something different on day 6 and then stopped altogether.) It's also common, in pre-packaged prompt lists I've seen floating around, for prompt writers to provide multiple options for a given day in case the artists don't like one of them. This sometimes manifests in drawings for that day which feature multiple kinks at once because the artist couldn't decide.

(Also, man, looking up all these examples is really reminding me how bad our upload coverage is outside the popular artists. This is gonna be a major sticking point if all these posts are reorganised into pools.)

In summary, I agree entirely with the definition as written in the last two paragraphs of the kinktober wiki page, which concisely lays out exactly what it does and doesn't apply to:

Since the original event, there have obviously been variations of the used fetishes, especially considering the divisive nature of numbers 17 and 29, not to mention that many of the fetishes most appeal to queer men. The only consistent thing among the participants is the last fetish. There is also a common thing for a general theme each year for the artist in questions pieces, such as an overarching fetish, or repeated use of a certain character or franchise.

This tag should be given to posts that are meant to be part of a series or image set that specifically claim to be for Kinktober.

watsit said:
Interesting, since you said earlier:

> I have not found any evidence of users adding kinktober to images without justification from either the image itself or the source. ... I'm saying the tag should be applied both ways at once. Both TWYS and TWYK are valid interpretations for a named meta-tag like this.

So which is it? Is TWYK (info from the source, i.e. FA tags) valid or not?

It's ironic that you mentioned "subjective species" earlier, because it's this site's dirty little secret that species tags are one of the most TWYK on here. In fact it was you yourself who introduced me to the delight that is post #610271. Faced with something that looks basically like a dog, especially if it has neon fur, you don't really have any choice but to go look at the source to find out if it was supposed to be a wolf or a coyote or a hyena or a thylacine or whatever. (Another example relevant to recent forum drama: most hybrids .)

So the answer is, info from the source is valid as long as it isn't obviously wrong. This is how this site has successfully operated for years.

You producing a list of sources which are, indeed, obviously wrong (at least I assume so - no account, can't check), means nothing unless the wrongness has spread to the tags we can control.

"Supporting evidence", in this case, would be a good-faith attempt on the artist's part to produce "a series or image set that specifically claims to be for Kinktober", which is trivial to prove if you're looking through their gallery already.

watsit said:
1, I say kinktober is a bad tag to use here because people use it for kinky art posted or made during October.

And I said that this appears to be, at worst, a very minor problem on here (the only site under discussion).

watsit said:
2. You say it's not just kinky art during October, it's a specific challenge and should only be applied to art doing the challenge.

Correct.

watsit said:
3. I say that would be hell to manage and police, as it would require trawling through an artist's gallery to find out if they were actually doing the challenge.

First, I can't remember you actually saying that. But also, it seems really easy to me? Particularly because the nature of the challenge requires every image to explain which prompt it is using, either in the image itself or in the accompanying description? And if either are missing at the source it's probably a safe bet that the image doesn't count?

I guess you're probably referring to this quote:

watsit said:
If someone is willing and able to police the tag and ensure it actually fits a well-defined criteria, and keep it clean of posts that just say #kinktober without actually fulfilling the challenge as defined, now and in the future, have at it. But considering it's approaching 1000 uses, not all of which have a valid source to even verify it fits the challenge and not just a themed piece for the month, and given how readily people are to put it on future themed pieces not actually fitting the challenge, I simply consider it a better option to get rid of it instead of trying to dig through sources and work out which posts fit.

To which I said, that sure is a whole lot of wild accusations about the current state of the tag you threw out without any supporting evidence, and until you provide some it seems premature to call for invalidation on that basis alone. Thus far, you have only provided some evidence about the state of the tag on a completely different site.

watsit said:
4. You say it can be applied only to posts that say "kinktober", or can otherwise be inferred from the image

Pretty sure that was the first thing I said, actually. That's my minimum viable compromise position, because I was only arguing against your call to invalidate it completely. I also think it should be maintained as-is, but those two goalposts delineate my range of acceptable positions and always have.

watsit said:
or source.

No, that was a separate point - see above.

watsit said:
5. I say that makes it subjective again, because an artist can use it even when not doing the challenge.

If it's literally written on the image? That's the most objective possible definition. It is not, in my opinion, a complete one, but it would be an option if the situation does eventually prove irreconcilable.

watsit said:
6. You say that's fine, TWYK/source info is valid for metatags.
7. Goto 1.

I believe I have sufficiently addressed that point further up in this post.

wat8548 said:
Several times, including just now:

Regardless of how subjective the boundaries of "kinky" are, do you know anyone who would place masturbation inside them? I feel like we wouldn't even be having this circular conversation if it had been called Sextober after all.

That response of mine doesn't say what you think is says. It doesn't say the word "kink" is bad and that any tag that contains the word "kink" is bad, it says "kinky" itself as a tag is too subjective of a concept, and the issue with "kinktober" specifically was that people would treat it as a "kinky art made maybe in October" tag. None of the other tags in that list you gave have that issue (except for kinktober itself, and kink, which should be aliased away like kinky).

Also, yes, in some contexts mere masturbation could be called "kinky", whereas in other contexts it could be pretty plain, and depend on who's looking at it. That's exactly the problem with the concept of "kinky" for a tag.

wat8548 said:
Ironically, this whole conversation has been nothing but you sidestepping giving me a straight answer as to why "kinktober", even if it had a 100% locked-down TWYS definition, would be a bad name for a tag.

Because I don't trust taggers enough to stick to whatever 100% locked-down TWYS definition we could give it. And particularly since a 100% locked-down TWYS definition would miss many posts that people would expect it to have, along with needing more policing than should be necessary, for it to be worthwhile.

wat8548 said:
Whoops, you missed the important part of the quote again. I'm not sure any artist's Kinktober challenge has featured the exact same prompts as any other artist, mainly because every artist has things they don't want to draw and things they would rather be drawing instead, and you don't get fined by the Kinktober Administration Bureau for your choice in prompts (or for not completing the challenge, for that matter). I searched the pools for "Kinktober" and only two of them appeared to be following the same prompt list this year.

So it's not even following a set of particular prompts, it's just kinky art made or posted in October with any random set of prompts the artist can think up, that some (but not all) take as a month-long daily challenge. So then what about transformation art made or posted on tuesday, that some (but not all) take as a year-long weekly challenge? tftuesday tag, there you go. Images of a werewolf on wednesday maybe every wednesday? werewolfwednesday, why not.

wat8548 said:
So the answer is, info from the source is valid as long as it isn't obviously wrong. This is how this site has successfully operated for years.

For certain tags like characters and species, sure. But for species it still requires a visual element to confirm (e.g. if something looks like an amphibian, it can't be tagged rabbit, even as a hybrid you need to see something mammalian; and that mammalian feature can't be from a non-lagomorph or non-leporid animal). It's when a depiction becomes more ambiguous due to artist styling or lack of anatomical awareness, that more leeway is given, but still has boundaries to keep it within TWYS.

wat8548 said:
First, I can't remember you actually saying that. But also, it seems really easy to me?

It's surprisingly not, since art can be posted late, interspersed with other art not part of the challenge (though could still have themes one could imagine being in the challenge), and not clearly mentioned. First, the picture after or before a particular day's entry doesn't have to be the next or previous day's respectively, which makes it difficult find if they just threw the kinktober tag on a few pieces or if there's more elsewhere in their gallery from attempting the challenge, and second, as weeks and months pass it becomes harder to find where the given year's challenge is (this is especially true of places like twitter), and thirdly, not every artist posts all their work to every gallery, so you can end up having to go through their other galleries and twitter (it's also possible they did the challenge but only posted a few pieces publicly and kept the rest private). It actually took me a while to find those three examples, not because there's so few examples (or because FA's search system is bad, which it is), but because it took a while to determine with some level of certainty that those artists actually only did a few random pieces that they slapped "kinktober" on to. And even now, I'm not 100% sure they weren't attempting the challenge, but given what I could find in their FA galleries, I'm like 80 or 90% sure they weren't.

wat8548 said:
Pretty sure that was the first thing I said, actually. That's my minimum viable compromise position, because I was only arguing against your call to invalidate it completely.

Right, to which I said (or meant to say, if I didn't), while that could make it technically valid from a TWYS stand-point, it's usefulness would be severely hindered, and along with the needed policing, doesn't seem worth keeping.

So as I see it, the way it's currently used shouldn't be valid because it's more like a vanity tag encompassing a subjective theme. You suggest a stricter TWYS alternative, which is better but I say is not useful enough (compared to what people expect out of it and the amount of work to keep it clean) to be worth keeping. To be more worthwhile, we need more considerations, making it more like how it's currently used, which I say shouldn't be valid. And round and round we go.

watsit said:
That response of mine doesn't say what you think is says. It doesn't say the word "kink" is bad and that any tag that contains the word "kink" is bad, it says "kinky" itself as a tag is too subjective of a concept, and the issue with "kinktober" specifically was that people would treat it as a "kinky art made maybe in October" tag. [...]

Because I don't trust taggers enough to stick to whatever 100% locked-down TWYS definition we could give it.

Okay, now we're getting somewhere. So you're saying that you think the presence of the word "kink" will, in and of itself, encourage people to tag works that they subjectively feel is "kinky" that happened to be posted in October, regardless of whether it had any relation to the challenge or not. And so we return to the "but is anybody actually doing that outside of your head?" dilemma.

watsit said:
So it's not even following a set of particular prompts, it's just kinky art made or posted in October with any random set of prompts the artist can think up, that some (but not all) take as a month-long daily challenge. So then what about transformation art made or posted on tuesday, that some (but not all) take as a year-long weekly challenge? tftuesday tag, there you go. Images of a werewolf on wednesday maybe every wednesday? werewolfwednesday, why not.

You're probably not going to like this answer, but: yes, go ahead. If it proves to have both sticking power and wide participation (i.e. it isn't just some nobody's vanity tag), it can make a meaningful contribution to the usability of the site. See above re: meme tags.

watsit said:
It's surprisingly not, since art can be posted late, interspersed with other art not part of the challenge (though could still have themes one could imagine being in the challenge), and not clearly mentioned. First, the picture after or before a particular day's entry doesn't have to be the next or previous day's respectively, which makes it difficult find if they just threw the kinktober tag on a few pieces or if there's more elsewhere in their gallery from attempting the challenge, and second, as weeks and months pass it becomes harder to find where the given year's challenge is (this is especially true of places like twitter), and thirdly, not every artist posts all their work to every gallery, so you can end up having to go through their other galleries and twitter (it's also possible they did the challenge but only posted a few pieces publicly and kept the rest private).

But... descriptions exist. Pools exist. Even on Twitter, if there's no text in the image itself, you will never see a Kinktober image without that hashtag in the tweet text somewhere, together with a day number and prompt. Remember a lot of smaller artists use this challenge for promotion; it's not comparable in any way to the usual issues with disorganised artists, because to a great extent, the details of the challenge are the point of the tweet, and the image itself an afterthought!

If you click on a source link and all you can see is a tag with no further details, and a cursory look through the gallery and timeline does not reveal a sizeable cluster of similar tags, then it's probably safe to remove it. That doesn't describe the vast majority of art that has ever been associated with the word "Kinktober" though.

watsit said:
It actually took me a while to find those three examples, not because there's so few examples (or because FA's search system is bad, which it is), but because it took a while to determine with some level of certainty that those artists actually only did a few random pieces that they slapped "kinktober" on to. And even now, I'm not 100% sure they weren't attempting the challenge, but given what I could find in their FA galleries, I'm like 80 or 90% sure they weren't.

I mean, I'm not surprised, but that's because you were trying to do the opposite of the thing you were actually claiming was difficult. Let me guess, you clicked on a whole lot of pictures which looked like likely candidates only to read the description and immediately see that they were part of the challenge after all?

watsit said:
So as I see it, the way it's currently used shouldn't be valid because it's more like a vanity tag encompassing a subjective theme. You suggest a stricter TWYS alternative, which is better but I say is not useful enough (compared to what people expect out of it and the amount of work to keep it clean) to be worth keeping. To be more worthwhile, we need more considerations, making it more like how it's currently used, which I say shouldn't be valid. And round and round we go.

I say that:
1) The tag, as currently defined, is meeting people's expectations
2) The tag has not suffered any significant amount of vandalism or scope creep
3) Until either 1) or 2) changes, invalidating it would cause a lot more harm than good, especially since:
4) The only alternative to the tag as currently defined which would offer nearly the same functionality would be pools, which would be much more work to set up and maintain
5) and the burden of doing such for hundreds of posts in one month per year would likely fall solely on this site's power users, because the tag appears to have a higher-than-average ratio of being applied by artist-uploaders, and those can't even be trusted to pool their own comics.

gattonero2001 said:
The tag alias #50812 kinktober_2020 -> kinktober has been approved.

Reason: Redundant tag. The exact same results can be obtained with kinktober 2020.

Personally I LIKE the kinktober_YEAR and inktober_YEAR tags,

BUT since kinktober_2020 has been aliased to -> kinktober, THEN for consistency:
1) kinktober_2020 should ALSO alias to 2020 ?
2) inktober_2018 should alias to inktober AND 2018?
3) inktober_2019 should alias to inktober AND 2019?
4) inktober_2020 should alias to inktober AND 2020?
5) inktober_2021 should alias to inktober AND 2021?
6) inktober_2022 should alias to inktober AND 2022?

7) kinktober_2021 should alias to kinktober AND 2021?
8) kinktober2022 should alias to kinktober_2022 (and kinktober_2022 should alias to kinktober AND 2022)?

similar for some other *YEAR* tags such as
artfight2022
(I wrote "some" because ... for example: some 2022_beijing_winter_olympics art can be done in future years)
catober_2020, catober_2021, catober_2022 (catober)
gobtober_2022 (gobtober)
etc etc.

listerthesquirrel said:
BUT since kinktober_2020 has been aliased to -> kinktober, THEN for consistency:
1) kinktober_2020 should ALSO alias to 2020 ?
2) inktober_2018 should alias to inktober AND 2018?
3) inktober_2019 should alias to inktober AND 2019?
4) inktober_2020 should alias to inktober AND 2020?
5) inktober_2021 should alias to inktober AND 2021?
6) inktober_2022 should alias to inktober AND 2022?

7) kinktober_2021 should alias to kinktober AND 2021?
8) kinktober2022 should alias to kinktober_2022 (and kinktober_2022 should alias to kinktober AND 2022)?

similar for some other *YEAR* tags such as
artfight2022
(I wrote "some" because ... for example: some 2022_beijing_winter_olympics art can be done in future years)
catober_2020, catober_2021, catober_2022 (catober)
gobtober_2022 (gobtober)
etc etc.

No, because we can alias a tag to only one other tag. Therefore, we have to choose whichever tag would provide the most benefit for users. In this thread's case, aliasing kinktober_2022 to kinktober is more useful and more specific than aliasing to 2020.

listerthesquirrel said:
Personally I LIKE the kinktober_YEAR and inktober_YEAR tags,

I may or may not have said it during the earlier debate, but these kinds of things seem to be exactly what a Set is for. A collection of images that fit some arbitrary criteria. They can even be set up as a hierarchy, so you have a Set for Kinktober 2022 Day 1/2/3/etc, one for Kinktober 2022 Week 1/2/3/4, one for Kinktober 2022, and one for Kinktober, and the same image can be in all Sets that apply, without a mess of non-TWYS tags on each post. Same goes for Weretober, Inktober, Sextober, Lycanroctober, and whatever else someone dreams up next month, without bloating a tag list just because an artist says an image belongs to some or all of them.