Problem:
When I search for, an example, "female renamon" (searching for all female renamon pictures, not just solo), I will get results that include male renamon on another female character.

So, I was thinking, how could this problem be solved, and I've come to several solutions.

1. Some tags could be linked to a gender.
This would work with species or character names. So basically, whenever a picture would have a character name or a species, the user could assign a gender to it. Then I could search for "Rainbow_Dash-Male" to hide all the female versions of the said pony.

But it wouldn't work in cases like "female nude" where you would still get to see a dressed female character, with a nude male next to her.

2. Tags could be split per character
The tags would be split into Character tags and General. In the character tags, there would be a list of characters, and each character would have its own tags. This way I could search for "(female nude)" to say that both tags must appear on the same character.

Looks good! But, still not perfect. What if I want to search for "male female herm threesome" where male is having an intercourse with the herm?

3. Tags split per character + interaction type
We're able to define characters, and interactions between them.

This would be great because now we can search for specific character and the way they interact. Plus, the system could use this logic to deduce a lot more tags on its own.

For example, you have FFM picture (male on female, female licking another female). You select that image has 3 characters, female1+female2+male1. Then you select interactions female1-female2 + female2-male1. And voila! The system itself defines female1=lesbian, female2=bi, male1=straight.
Or, you have pokemon-trainer picture and you define the interaction as sexual. Then system would then infer the tag "pokephilia".
There is so many possibilities.

As for searching, searching for posts that include any male character interacting with female pony: "(male)-(female pony)".

Expanding on the concept we could go as far as:
4. Object Modelling:
-Any number of definable objects with object properties
-Any number of definable interactions with interaction properties
..but I dunno if I want to go that far.

Edit:
End notes:
The way current tagging works is like painting a picture on a single surface. It's like trying to paint a full-color piece without sketching it first. Yeah, some of the best artists are able to do that, but what about the rest? The rest of normal artists can't do that and they use more structured process. Sketching, inking, coloring, shading etc, use several layers and what not. And this is how tagging should work as well. It should be an organized process which anyone can easily use to produce a perfect representation of an image. But currently only taggers with years of experience can do that.

Now users will say "New system would make tagging slower!". Not necesarrily. New system could infer a lot more from the characters and their interactions than it currently can from a simple array of tags, which would mean less work.
Besides this, tagging is as fast as you make it to be. The longer you spend tagging, the better the image is described. The whole purpose of tagging is to try to accurately describe an image so that it can be easily found, right? And if you can quite simply descibe an image better, wouldn't you want to spend a few seconds more to do that?

Edited to make it more clear..

Peekaboo said:
I see, well, I gotta be honest - I don't agree with any of your proposals.

Ok. Would you care to elaborate on your.. personal opinion?

This idea has been proposed time and time again, and the reason was always just "that's just not how we do things here"

Personally I think it hasn't been done because it would be difficult to maintain that kind of tagging

I would really like something like this to be made, but I would prefer it to be a type of tag subset, like a tag type that you add to a tag, similar to species, artist, etc, except it would be male, female, herm, etc applied to a tag. Unfortunately right now our system does not support multiple tag types per single tag, and does not support subsets

Why not make it a la google search? "Female renamon" or Female AND renamon. Now if it worked like that, all this would be unnecessary.

Edit: wow that was a terrible idea. Wouldn't help at all, ignore me, I'm tired!! Where's my wake-up juice...

anon_X said:
Why not make it a la google search? "Female renamon" or Female AND renamon. Now if it worked like that, all this would be unnecessary.

Edit: wow that was a terrible idea. Wouldn't help at all, ignore me, I'm tired!! Where's my wake-up juice...

Actually, no. That would be a really great concept, if only the system could support it; typing in a gender and a tag would return only images where the character is that gender, identified via some sort of tag subset as RD noted- something that linked the gender tags to specific characters in the image.

Rainbow_Dash said:
This idea has been proposed time and time again, and the reason was always just "that's just not how we do things here"

Thank you for a simple answer but I'm not a very simple person hehe. However let me do the thinking and explaining for you!

The 3 main reasons that I see, as to why this hasn't been done in the past are:

1. People are lazy.
Why do it themselves instead of waiting for others to do it for them and then copy it?

2. Difficulty of implementation.
I'm not really familiar with your current database design but, I'm guessing you'd have to add at least one extra column to the tags table in the database, plus a whole lot of other logic to display tags in groups. It's not a minor change and unless you're a software developer, you'll have no clue how to modify Ouroboros. And even if you were, you'll still have a several problems because of (3).

3. Backwards compatibility.
To have backwards compatibility, you'd need to run the leagacy and the new system both at the same time. But one thing's for sure, if you'd want the character-based search to work on every post, then you'd need to fix the tags on most of existing posts. At least if there's more than 1 character depicted. I'd guess that small boards don't care about more powerful search, and big boards can't be arsed into retagging everything. I'm sure e621 was cutting edge at the beginning, but now it's reached a point of stagnation.

So I'll say it like this. The suggestions which I listed here are the steps which e621 has to take to reach the next level of tag-based image board websites. The question is just, does e621 ever want to reach the next level (or stagnate like FA) and if so, when?

Rainbow_Dash said:
Personally I think it hasn't been done because it would be difficult to maintain that kind of tagging

Actually, that kind of tagging would in fact be much easier to maintain. I can provide you with a few examples from the forums:

forum #118116
Remove horse from unicorn. Instead of having users manually fix tags one by one, you can just run a script.
1. Find posts that contain a character that's tagged (unicorn and horse).
2. For each character in each of these posts, remove "horse" if the character contains both (unicorn and horse)

forum #120123
remove "gay" tag from "solo" "male" characters.
1. Find posts that contain a character that's tagged ("male and solo")
2. For each character in each of these posts, remove "gay" if the character has no interactions with any other male characters.

Actually, in this case, such characters shouldn't even be tagged "gay" to begin with, because the system wouldn't allow it => the system would automatically assign "gay" to male charaters that sexually interact with other male characters.

So you see, due to the fact that you can identify characters and their interactions, maintenance becomes much easier, and a lot more implicit tagging can be done also.

Rainbow_Dash said:
I would really like something like this to be made, but I would prefer it to be a type of tag subset

That's similar to what I proposed under the 1st point of OP. It's simple, and it would work. But sooner or later you'd come to the conclusion that, it's not powerful enough.

We should have separate tags for each pixel in an image.
That way we can be truly accurate as to the contents of all images.

When I say difficult to maintain, I mean that I know people would not be tagging tags and therefor it would be hard to keep it working

We need to tag image and filesizes too because it's more cutting edge and I'd hate for us to stagnate.

Sorry but, I don't see how "tagging per character" is any harder than current way of tagging. If you ask me, the current way is actually harder (needs more thinking and general pre-knowledge) and more confusing O_o

Delian said:
Sorry but, I don't see how "tagging per character" is any harder than current way of tagging. If you ask me, the current way is actually harder (needs more thinking and general pre-knowledge) and more confusing O_o

Because you don't need what characters are shown in an image and what gender each of them are in that specific image, merely what genders are shown in the image and what characters are shown. Many characters have alternate gender forms, or are commonly drawn as multiple genders, or are even morphic in nature and have no one set gender, but appear as all equally. Try sussing out a format that allows tagging per character while taking all that into account that is not vastly more complex and would take vastly more time and effort on the parts of those tagging, compared to the current system.

Tagging them by character would massively increase our workload.
Instead of just tagging everything once, there'd be multiple repeats. The thought of tagging the orgy images under that system makes me cringe.

And there's already far too many things to tag. Some of my projects (fe. missing genders and orientations) keep accumulating more images, even when I spend all of my spare time working on them...

People are stupid. They have enough trouble tagging as it is.

123easy said:
Because you don't need what characters are shown in an image and what gender each of them are in that specific image, merely what genders are shown in the image and what characters are shown.

Which characters are shown, and which genders are shown is pretty much the same thing as defining characters and setting a gender to each one of them. Except that in my case it's much better organized, accurate and searchable.

Also I don't care if a character can change a gender or not. What matters is what's displayed on the picture at that moment. And that's what people are searching for. If the character has no gender then set him as ambiguous_gender.

But I can tell you this. It's easier to select a gender from a drop-down menu instead of writing it and there's also less mistakes

Genjar said:
Tagging them by character would massively increase our workload.
Instead of just tagging everything once, there'd be multiple repeats. The thought of tagging the orgy images under that system makes me cringe.

And there's already far too many things to tag. Some of my projects (fe. missing genders and orientations) keep accumulating more images, even when I spend all of my spare time working on them...

First of all, there would be no missing genders and orientations if a proper tagging system would be in place. Example in OP, 3rd point.

Secondly, it wouldn't increase your workload at all. You would simply be tagging in a different way. A better and more interactive way that would produce much less mistakes. Orgies are rare cases that, you would simply need to put more work into. But putting more work also means describing the image more thoroughly, which is the whole purpose of tagging. And then someone searching for a specific character pairing could then find it exactly out of all the characters in the orgy. The multiple repeats that you speak of are not redundant in any way.
As for cases with too many characters, we could simply add a separate section "side characters" for characters that appear but don't otherwise interact in any way.

Think of it like this:

Current way:
System: Tags plz!
Me: Hmm, I see Ash doing it with a Pikachu. So I guess I gotta add tags Ash and Pikachu. My work is done!

New way:
System: How many characters you see?
Me: 2 characters.
System: Tell me their names, species and select their genders.
Me: Ash, male, human. Pikachu, male, pokemon.
System: Tell me how they're interacting.
Me: 1st character is sucking balls of the 2nd character
System: I've added the following tags: Ash, Pikachu, human, pokemon, male, gay, pokephilia, ball_sucking.. etc
System: Please describe what is seen on each character and additional character traits.
Me: Well, Pikachu has a giant dong and balls and a tatoo on his butt and Ash is wearing diapers and an eye-patch.
System: Added tags balls, hyper, hyper_penis, tatoo to Pikachu and diapers, eye_patch to Ash
System: Please describe enviroment.
Me: There's a sun and they're in a public swimming pool.
System: Added tags sun, water, pool, public, exhibitionism..
System: Describe other image properties, artist, source..
Me: Year 2015, sketch, absurd_res, artist, bla bla

My point is, the more interactive the tagging system, the easier it is for an inexperienced tagger to do proper tagging, which means much less work for the seasoned taggers like you. But even for you, tagging this way would be simpler and faster and much more accurate.

Spess_Muhreen said:
People are stupid. They have enough trouble tagging as it is.

They definetly have trouble tagging, and the reasons why I already wrote above ;)

Far more work under what you are describing than it takes now. As for the gender changing- the way you were noting it lead me to believe you were meaning as if each character gets a defined specific gender associated with the tag, which causes said problem with gender changing between images.

123easy said:
Far more work under what you are describing than it takes now. As for the gender changing- the way you were noting it lead me to believe you were meaning as if each character gets a defined specific gender associated with the tag, which causes said problem with gender changing between images.

Sorry, I did not mean setting a fixed gender to character tags. However, I have updated OP to include an end note about your "more work" argument.

It's still something we should look towards doing at some point as it's getting annoying trying to find male rainbow dash images i a sea of male on rainbow dash images

Rainbow_Dash said:
It's still something we should look towards doing at some point as it's getting annoying trying to find male rainbow dash images i a sea of male on rainbow dash images

For once, ponies working in the rest of our favour? MADNESS!

Is there any interest in this today?

clespenuv said:
Is there any interest in this today?

no.