The bulk update request #11332 has been rejected.

remove alias gay (0) -> male/male (553069)

Reason: I think it's about time we do this.

Besides the fact that "gay" refers to more than just male on male, I think this alias is the biggest cause of mistags just because people keep tagging their gay characters as such regardless of what's being shown. Now, getting rid of the alias won't fix all the mistags, but it'll at least be easier to spot them instead of having to wade through a densely populated tag. I think the first reason alone is enough to warrant unaliasing it, but the fact that it also causes practical issues is the cherry on top.

EDIT: The bulk update request #11332 (forum #453375) has been rejected by @Rainbow_Dash.

what's the follow-up? are we just going to leave it loose, invalidate it, or what?

dba_afish said:
what's the follow-up? are we just going to leave it loose, invalidate it, or what?

i was gonna enjoy the peace and quiet for a few moments before bringing that up 👉👈

My vote's for invalidation. There's plenty of options for what "gay" could mean, so setting up a disambiguation page is the simplest option.

You might want to include other similarly aliased terms like yaoi, homo, or gay_wrestling as well into the BUR.

I'm also still slightly worried about the users who still use gay as a search term. but there's not really any way to quantify, so...

well, it's not like it'd be that big of a deal to change over, anyway.

thegreatwolfgang said:
You might want to include other similarly aliased terms like yaoi, homo, or gay_wrestling as well into the BUR.

"Yaoi" is explicitly male/male (as opposed to female/female "yuri"), so I think that one's fine as is. The others are worth adding though

thegreatwolfgang said:
You might want to include other similarly aliased terms like yaoi, homo, or gay_wrestling as well into the BUR.

yaoi is much more strictly male/male (or at least guy/guy). "gay" is a much more general term, commonly used for both homosexual male and female couples.

while it potentially could be used for andromorph, maleherm, or gender non-conforming characters, that's kind of a mistag problem we already have with male anyway.

I'd suggest gay -> gay_(disambiguation)

dba_afish said:
I'm also still slightly worried about the users who still use gay as a search term.

This is my primary concern.

In practice, most people who want to find male/male content will search for gay. It is the everyday language term that people are familiar with, including most casual e621 users who are only here to search for content. In a vacuum, yes, it would be fine to unalias this term from male/male due to the listed issues, but I think that doing so is missing the forest for the trees, instead targeting a power user/staff-only issue while ignoring the perspective of the average user.

Convenience and familiarity when searching matters. We should try to balance the expectations of everyday users with absolute correctness, and unaliasing gay from male/male is unexpected behavior for most of our users who expect to find, well, gay porn when searching for gay.

dba_afish said:
what's the follow-up? are we just going to leave it loose, invalidate it, or what?

alias to gay_(lore) and establish sexual orientation lore tags :3 :3

I do have to voice sharp opposition to this.

I feel that most people using our site are casual users, and the casual user's expectation of that tag is how we (and nearly all other sites) currently use it.

Removing that alias would add undue complexity to people who know what they want to see, and aren't getting that immediately. We should be very careful putting any barrier between expected/desired search results, and what we serve the user. If we know they want something, and we know how to give them the best chance of finding that something, why further complicate it?

The tagging benefit to be gained feels minimal. If mistags happen on solo characters that are gay in canon, they that's something we can clean up separate without impacting the main search function.

How often are people using gay in male/male situations? Yes, people tagging gay for a character's sexual orientation (or because it's male-focused porn intended for a male audience) and causing male/male to be mistagged is a problem, but having gay be invalidated or disambiguated could easily cause a different problem, leaving posts to both lack male/male when it's applicable and require manually cleaning gay/gay_(disambiguation).

dba_afish said:
I'm also still slightly worried about the users who still use gay as a search term. but there's not really any way to quantify, so...

The vast majority of mistags for tagging a character as gay because it's their sexual orientation can probably be found with male/male solo (if there's more than one character I imagine there's a much higher chance of male/male being applicable, how often is somebody going to tag a male/female image as gay?) - which also contains a lot of disembodied penises and other mistags. There's also no telling whether the taggers tagged with "gay" or just hit the "male/male" button on the uploader without understanding what it means.

I know a lot of people who just search "gay" when they want male/male content. It would be ideal if we could actually see analytics like this, but I'm going to guess this will do more harm than good in terms of searchability. I would guess that a LOT more people are searching for gay than there are mistakenly adding it to posts - 3400 mistags is quite a backlog, but not awful considering how many posts the site (5,598,294) has and male/male being the 48th most used tag. (552,549)

It would be wonderful if we could have aliases that only applied to searches (and not post tagging) but that's probably never happening.

I'm sympathetic to both sides, but I'll give my POV as a gay dude and a newer user - the way this site uses "male/male" was not intuitive to me, and it took me a little while to get used to it. The alias was probably a useful nudge in the right direction.

Sexuality is a large part of the human experience, and it seems a little harsh to banish some of the most common terms people use to self-identify to the x-zone. I also respect the work janitors do to fix tagging mistakes, and obviously I realize "gay" and "homo" (ugh) are broad terms that don't fit neatly into "male/male", either.

strikerman said:
The bulk update request #11332 has been rejected.

remove alias gay (0) -> male/male (553069)

some stupid shit

but two men fucking is gay, i would know

night_bandit said:
but two men fucking is gay, i would know

Know what's also gay? Lesbians

regsmutt said:
Know what's also gay? Lesbians

LGBT+

Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender

I'm not saying you are wrong, but the separation is practiced already and is common

regsmutt said:
Know what's also gay? Lesbians

Adding on to what Rainbow said, if you talk to the average person, they will overwhelmingly refer to male/male as gay and female/female as lesbian (rather than gay). Even the Wikipedia editors on sexuality make the conscious decision to call gay men just "gay" under the LGBTQ section umbrella, and Wikipedia editors are notoriously anal about correct usage. In the Gay page, they even stress that the term has both historically and currently been used mainly for gay men: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay

I agree that, in general, we should be wary of tags and aliases that have multiple different uses and edge cases. However, as mentioned previously, Joe Shmoe who just wants to find gay porn by searching for gay will leave the site and not come back if gay doesn't return any results. Joe Shmoe will be used to other sites, like Pornhub, that explicitly use gay to refer to male/male, and not finding gay the same way here will just lead to losing that user. That's a sad fact of user experience, and no amount of finger-wagging about absolute correctness will make those users come back and have a good enough experience to learn about our tag system. If they can't find what they want to find with common terms, the site is effectively useless to them.

Keeping average users interested by ensuring they have a good experience is more important to me than the <1% solo gay mistags that only power users or site staff would notice or care about, many of which are in multiple poses art where one pose is duo male/male and another is just solo, so the usage there is still correct, but leads to false positives at a glance.

The bulk update request #11332 (forum #453375) has been rejected by @Rainbow_Dash.

Sorry, this is just one of those that has too large of an impact on user experience for me to feel comfortable approving.

My reasoning is as follows:

This will break or hinder the expected search behavior that casuals have searching for content they would otherwise find elsewhere using the same common term.
It would create more work for users to clean up the disambiguation (if that were implemented) than it would otherwise for the male/male solo group cleanup.
It would not bring much meaningful benefit to the majority of those using more technically correct tags. Worst case scenario with gay remaining in place is that solo images of canonically gay characters show up in results, which I think would not necessarily be outside the scope of the user's interest anyway. If gay were to be removed, the search results would be inconsistent/missing content and fully reliant on knowledged taggers keeping the primary search afloat.

The balance of harm to benefit just doesn't favor this change.