Posted under Site Bug Reports & Feature Requests
Apologies if this has been discussed before, but it would be great to be able to group tags together when using ~
For example:
[~pokemon ~palworld] [~feral ~human] meaning (pokemon OR palworld) AND (feral or human)
could return posts tagged with pokemon feral, palworld feral, pokemon human, or palworld feral
That's been requested countless times over the last decade, and it's always been met with the same answer
It isn't possible without significant development time, time that we almost certainly don't have
Our developer "team" is one guy, it's next to impossible for him to entirely overhaul post searching on his own
dirtyderg said:
Apologies if this has been discussed before, but it would be great to be able to group tags together when using ~For example:
[~pokemon ~palworld] [~feral ~human] meaning (pokemon OR palworld) AND (feral or human)
could return posts tagged with pokemon feral, palworld feral, pokemon human, or palworld feral
I made a userscript that allows for this, but it's buggy and doesn't work with re621 really well, so I would love to see this added to the site (honestly along with my other stuff too, but this is the most important). However, it's not a difficult thing to make and is more than possible to do.
However, in the meantime, if you'd like to try it out, it's here: https://e621.net/forum_topics/40732. Though like I mentioned, it has some bugs, and a bunch of caveats due to having to mirror the database which doesn't include stuff like favorites or upvote/downvote status, so plenty of things are missing, but to me the grouped OR search (and grouping in general) makes up for it more than enough. I also have a bunch of little projects that use it as a backend as well that I link to on my profile, all of which are free and open source along with the advanced search itself.
I've considered opening a PR for this, but it radically changes the search syntax which is more than likely unacceptable to be merged into the main site. Along with this, the 30 tag limit with grouped or searching also becomes an actual problem since you can do more advanced queries, I'd recommend 100 at least, but I allow for 4000 in my own version, but then again my database isn't being hit by thousands of people at the same time so allowing those kinds of queries is an option I have since there's almost never more than 1 query happening at the same time.
Perhaps a forum topic on the possibility of a new syntax is doable, but it would break every program that is using it right now, and for ones that don't update anymore, I could see that being a legitimate problem.
Updated
dirtyderg said:
Apologies if this has been discussed before, but it would be great to be able to group tags together when using ~For example:
[~pokemon ~palworld] [~feral ~human] meaning (pokemon OR palworld) AND (feral or human)
could return posts tagged with pokemon feral, palworld feral, pokemon human, or palworld feral
As mentioned, this has been requested before, and there's been some discussion around it and why it's difficult, which you can find here: https://github.com/e621ng/e621ng/issues/559
I've started work on this feature: https://github.com/DontTalkToMeThx/e621ng/tree/tag-syntax
I am not a ruby dev, this is more of a proof of concept. I've commented on the FR on the repo with a bit more info: https://github.com/e621ng/e621ng/issues/559#issuecomment-2000481104
I've implemented almost all meta tags as well as opened a draft PR for discussion: https://github.com/e621ng/e621ng/pull/625
I finished the PR and have full feature parity with the normal syntax and marked the PR as ready for review. Some things may still need to be moved around and optimized, but it is simple to enable now, it'll be in advanced user settings and it's under "Use New Search Syntax"
definitelynotafurry4 said:
I finished the PR and have full feature parity with the normal syntax and marked the PR as ready for review. Some things may still need to be moved around and optimized, but it is simple to enable now, it'll be in advanced user settings and it's under "Use New Search Syntax"
o7 You are a goddamn hero for this, my experience with this site would be VASTLY improved with this functionality.
In case any archeologists stumble across this, that prior PR ended up falling through. There is a new one up trying to do the same thing that's already addressed the largest point of contention with the original effort, but it's not like the maintainers don't already have a lot on their plate; only time will tell if this one can go the distance.
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aacafah said:
In case any archeologists stumble across this, that prior PR ended up falling through. There is a [new one](https://github.com/e621ng/e621ng/pull/819) up trying to do the same thing that's already addressed the largest point of contention with the original effort, but it's not like the maintainers don't already have a lot on their plate; only time will tell if this one can go the distance.
I sure hope so, it's such a GREAT feature to broaden searches without needing to do more than one and ignore the overlap
IT'S HERE! This feature is now live! The search cheatsheet hasn't been updated yet, but you can check the syntax here and, if it isn't clear enough there, play with a live demo for it here (just change the "Test String" to the query you want, & hover over the colored text; the "Group" names tell you what the server will view it as, with "subquery" being the subsearch. Nested groups work (e.g. ~( aaa -( ~bbb ~ccc ) ) ~( ddd eee ) ), but the demo won't highlight elements inside a subquery). A huge thank you to Tarrgon for their extremely instructive earlier attempt at this.
The tl;dr is to place the grouped search inside parentheses separated by a space (the space is required) with an optional ~/- prefix.
~( aaa -( ~bbb ~ccc ) ) ~( ddd eee ) = Group 1 OR Group 2
Group 1 = aaa AND NOT Group 1A
Group 1A = bbb OR ccc
Group 2 = ddd AND eee
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