As has been mentioned (many, many times), there's an ongoing issue with the misuse of the sound_warning tag, where it's often used to tag any old post with sound, making it virtually useless as an actual warning. There's 14K+ .webm files with sound_warning, and 26K+ with just the sound tag. Over 33% of the .webm files with sound have the sound_warning tag.

The entire point of the sound_warning tag was to differentiate it from other posts with just the regular sound tag. To make it clear that there's a loud spike of volume that users are unlikely to expect.

I recently built a tool to automate the addition of the sound and no_sound tags on .webm posts. It works by downloading the file, extracting the .wav, normalising the waveform to a floating point, then calculating the average amplitude. Anything above 0.01 gets a sound tag, and ≤0.01 (or no audio track at all) gets no_sound. My thought was... I could use similar logic to automate and normalise the use of the sound_warning tag!

My proposed solution to this would be:

• Similiar to topic #41399, rename sound_warning to something like sudden_loud_sound_warning.
• It would make it clear to users tagging that it isn't for just "loud sounds" but for when the sound is sudden and may startle users who have the video on a higher volume.
• This should be a tag replacement instead of a new tag entirely. Having another one for sudden sounds would render sound_warning entirely obsolete. Ideally, as others have previously suggested, a new tag category being implemented for this would be great, that is placed above the Artist tag, for tags such as this, epilepsy_warning and maybe even conditional_dnp.

• Normalise some requirements for the tag, based on some set criteria.
• Using the logic of the bot I mentioned earlier, I built a tool that detects if some audio becomes "suddently loud". This works by chopping the audio up into 0.2s segments, then checking for an increase of 15dB between these segments. Additionally, I check the first 0.2s segment's dBFS (decibels relative to full scale) level, and flag it as a loud sound for anything above -5 dBFS. I've done some testing which has worked pretty well. This is easily adjustable for more granular checks, or a higher threshold, etc.
• I could do a full run of the 40K .webm files with sound, to normalise them to these standards (or ones the admins / staff agree on), to hopefully reclaim this tag.
• If we then set some guidelines for the usage of the tag in the future (dos and dont's), it should still allow users to manually tag these posts. I'd be happy to make my solution open source so it could be re-run at any time, too.

• Update the Wiki to make it very clear on the criteria for the tag.
• Should be obvious it isn't just for when there's loud moaning or sex noises, but when there's a large deviation to the regular sound level that users wouldn't expect and may need to adjust their volume for to prevent issues.

I think this is an ideal way to reclaim to sound_warning tag, and make it clearer for users about the main intent of the tag going forwards. Input is always appreciated!

wispthehusky said:
Ideally, as others have previously suggested, a new tag category being implemented for this would be great, that is placed above the Artist tag, for tags such as this, epilepsy_warning and maybe even conditional_dnp.

Do you now know how much of a struggle it was to get the contributor category
I certainly do

donovan_dmc said:
Do you now know how much of a struggle it was to get the contributor category
I certainly do

Totally understand that new categories are a pain to request and add, requiring many frontend and backend changes with regards to the UI, API, etc. I still feel this is a fairly valid reason, especially for tags as important as epilepsy_warning. It appears prominently within the Artist section, but in big projects with many contributors, it could get missed by someone who isn't aware of it.

We've already got a good reason to request it already, I see this as just an extra reason to validate the effort. Once the upfront work is done, not much else should be needed to maintain the useful functionality for users.

Another idea could be to make these tags ignore the alphabetical ordering system and always be placed at the top of the Artist list? How a lot of country dropdowns put their country at the top of the list, out of alphabetical order, for better visibility and practicality. Would still be a pain to code, and any changes to the list of tags needing this would need changing backend (more long-term maintainence) but it would forgo the need for UI and API changes.

It took literal years convincing upper management, sysadmins, and developers that it was a worthwhile change
a whole new category for a handful of tags to show at the top of the tag list is a far cry from a worthwhile change

Would it be a good idea to just... change the category for epilepsy_warning and sound_warning to Invalid?
It would achieve the same thing without creating an entirely new category.

Though the downside is that people would assume the two tags are "invalid" and shouldn't be used, or messing with people searching through invtags:>0 to clear out any actual invalid tags.
However, these problems are already faced by them being in the current Artist category, so it wouldn't be any different.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Though the downside is that people would assume the two tags are "invalid" and shouldn't be used, or messing with people searching through invtags:>0 to clear out any actual invalid tags.

It could also lead to people removing them thinking they shouldn't be there, as that's what should be done with Invalid tags. Messing up invtags:>0 searches I think is also more egregious than having an extra tag or two in the Artist category.

speaking of the visibility of warnings, couldn't we artist tags appear in the page title like we used to before NG?

watsit said:
It could also lead to people removing them thinking they shouldn't be there, as that's what should be done with Invalid tags.

We could add a disclaimer to not remove them as if they were an invalid_tag.

Another more drastic solution is to make it autolock when tagged, like with avoid_posting.
Though that would probably create more problems than if we had just left it as is.

Then again, I could imagine another scenario where someone removes the tags in bulk because they think it's invalid or that the post is not "flashy" or "loud" enough, then gets themselves reported for Tagging Abuse, just to counter the ticket by saying that they technically did not remove any "valid" tags.

Messing up invtags:>0 searches I think is also more egregious than having an extra tag or two in the Artist category.

I think you can hypothetically use invtags:>0 -epilepsy_warning -sound_warning to exclude them from your search.

dba_afish said:
speaking of the visibility of warnings, couldn't we artist tags appear in the page title like we used to before NG?

They do, but specific tags are excluded

donovan_dmc said:
They do, but specific tags are excluded

that's not used in the page title, that's only used in, like, the Twitter card, or whatever. I meant having the name show up in the text visible on the tab or the title bar of your browser (if you have the title bar enabled).

in the post used as your avi, for example:
the page title's data is just:

<title>  #3405794
 - e621</title>

the only places where the artist name is used is used are two meta elements:

<meta property="og:title" content="donovan dmc created by broitscody - e621">

<meta name="twitter:title" content="donovan dmc created by broitscody - e621">

both of these are just used for making embed cards, I believe.

if we look at an archive taken a few months before the update of this random post _{(don't worry, it was after CBee did the takedown)} we can see that the pages title data is:

<title>#6268: avoid_posting, cbee - e621</title>

so both the artists' names and warnings would appear in the tab title, they don't anymore, now it's just the post ID.

I mean... either way, it's not like any of this is useful for me on mobile since I can't see the page title, like, at all anyway.

Just change it to loud_(warning). However I still think any post with sound should have a warning.

Also, a post can be loud without a sudden increase in dB.

kyiiel said:
Just change it to loud_(warning). However I still think any post with sound should have a warning.

why would every post with sound need a warning?

dba_afish said:
why would every post with sound need a warning?

Honestly, So nobody can hear what I'm gooning to. Audio levels between posts vary wildly. If I see sound warning, I know to set the volume to 0 and slowly increase.

kyiiel said:
Honestly, So nobody can hear what I'm gooning to. Audio levels between posts vary wildly. If I see sound warning, I know to set the volume to 0 and slowly increase.

what if you just, like, knew of there was sound before even clicking on the thumbnail?

I mean, we could do something like:

.thumbnail[data-tags~=sound] > a::before { content: "SOUND";  }
.thumbnail[data-tags~=sound_warning] > a::before { content: "!SOUND!";  }

kyiiel said:
However I still think any post with sound should have a warning.

You mean like a sound tag? :P

kyiiel said:
Just change it to loud_(warning). However I still think any post with sound should have a warning.

As has been said, the sound tag exists for this reason...

kyiiel said:
Also, a post can be loud without a sudden increase in dB.

This is why I also referred to and included a check of dBFS. This would include generally loud audio, not just an increase in dB. I could consider using LUFS instead of dBFS. Let me have a play with that idea.

dba_afish said:
what if you just, like, knew of there was sound before even clicking on the thumbnail?

I like this idea quite a bit actually, although I think we'll still run into the issue Donovan mentioned of convincing the higher-ups to code in this solution... Another viable option though!

dba_afish said:
what if you just, like, knew of there was sound before even clicking on the thumbnail?

I definitely remember a gallery site that had a speaker icon on all thumbnails of posts with audio but I can't put my finger on it.
Video with audio just had the "VIDEO" text, the speaker icon would appear next to it

wispthehusky said:
I like this idea quite a bit actually, although I think we'll still run into the issue Donovan mentioned of convincing the higher-ups to code in this solution... Another viable option though!

I mean, it's literally just the CSS, all of it is just the stuff I posted above, you can already do it on the user end using your custom CSS sheet, but it shouldn't be any more difficult to add it to the site proper.

you could actually add those little corner tags for any tag, if you wanted.

devourer_ita said:
I definitely remember a gallery site that had a speaker icon on all thumbnails of posts with audio but I can't put my finger on it.
Video with audio just had the "VIDEO" text, the speaker icon would appear next to it

yeah, you can just use emojis for that: like 🔈 for sound, 🔈🗯️ for sound_warning, and maybe 🔇 for no_sound.

the main problem is that I feel like emojis just kinda clash with the site's design style. and also, since you can't control their color, you can't guarantee that they don't blend with the image their on or the background color.

I like the idea of adding a little ribbon watermark over thumbnails that contain sound, like in the top-right