"Rating:Safe" and "Safe for Work"

Alright... That's been annoying the hell out of me for quite some time now.

howto:rate said:

• Rating:Safe: For everything else. Note that rating:safe does not mean safe for work and may still include "sexy" images containing cleavage, panty shots, skimpy bikinis, and so on.

Is there any good reason why at Danbooru rating:safe can't mean "safe for work"?

Incidentally, the choice of words is quite peculiar:

Note also that ratings do not say how "family friendly", "kid safe", or "offensive" a picture may be. This is explicitly not a goal.

Note that it doesn't say "this is not explicitly a goal", which would mean "we don't really strive for that". Instead it says this "is explicitly not a goal" (emphasis mine), which can be understood rather differently. I wonder if that was intentional, or the author just has no understanding of syntax...

Danbooru users are assumed to be responsible adults and the ratings are there only to help them choose the content they wish to see.

So, what exactly being a responsible adult has to do with one's (un)willingness to see a certain kind of images?.. Frankly, that sounds like something a rather infantile person would write.

There also used to be a line basically saying that, if you disagree, "danbooru is probably not for you". Thankfully, one of the staff members got rid of it.

But I digress, so let me ask this once again:

Is there any good reason why at Danbooru rating:safe can't mean "safe for work"?

I agree that the ratings system should be less ambiguous, but I don't know how possible it would be to make changes, or if "safe for work" is what we should aim for.

"Safe for work" is a gray area. Are bikinis safe for work? How about passionate homosexual kisses? If a woman is fully clothed, and also tied up, is the image questionable? Different people, settings, and cultures have different standards when it comes to sexual content. And rating refers only to sexual content: Guro isn't safe for work, but guro images are rated Safe unless they have a sexual element. Changing the definition of Safe wouldn't eliminate the need for a comprehensive blacklist.

Even if we could find consensus on what "safe for work" means, the amount of work involved to adjust post ratings would be enormous. We could perform bulk updates for tags with a built-in sexual element such as covered nipples, cameltoe, and suggestive fluid, but some images would inevitably slip through. Danbooru will always be risky to browse at work because of the possibility of mistagged posts.

fossilnix said:

I agree that the ratings system should be less ambiguous, but I don't know how possible it would be to make changes, or if "safe for work" is what we should aim for.

"Safe for work" is a gray area. Are bikinis safe for work? How about passionate homosexual kisses? If a woman is fully clothed, and also tied up, is the image questionable? Different people, settings, and cultures have different standards when it comes to sexual content. And rating refers only to sexual content: Guro isn't safe for work, but guro images are rated Safe unless they have a sexual element. Changing the definition of Safe wouldn't eliminate the need for a comprehensive blacklist.

Well, there's a "Safebooru" in existence, so obviously, SOMEONE thought it was worth trying.

Saying that there is some sort of judgement involved isn't an excuse not to do anything. After all, that same argument could be used verbatim to say why we shouldn't have a rating system at all. And yes, I'm pretty sure "guro" is on the blacklist of anyone this would apply to in any event.

The problem is, we have a "Safe" rating, but it's a "I think it's fine, so fuck you if it would get you fired" system.

The thing is, it's generally about the intent of the artwork, not its hard-defined content. (Although suggestive fluid or something is a pretty good tipoff.) Kids in swimsuits, with at least one in a bikini, playing in a pool is not necessarily sexual in nature, but a zoom in on the crotch of a swimsuit meant to showcase the cameltoe is.

fossilnix said:

Even if we could find consensus on what "safe for work" means, the amount of work involved to adjust post ratings would be enormous. We could perform bulk updates for tags with a built-in sexual element such as covered nipples, cameltoe, and suggestive fluid, but some images would inevitably slip through. Danbooru will always be risky to browse at work because of the possibility of mistagged posts.

The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. So long as more is prevented from being piled on, at least most of it will eventually be taken care of. It's not like Danbooru will be "complete" at any point. If you just look at the tag changes D'Eye has on his account, some people have been aggressive in trying to re-rate these things, already.

D'Eye said:

Is there any good reason why at Danbooru rating:safe can't mean "safe for work"?

It could if we wanted, but if I remember correctly in previous discussions people generally agreed that we don't really want that and that a rating that can work as a "tag" for the nature of an image which would allow people to search easier for what they want is better to have than a sfw one. What is more, we always want tags to be an objective function of what we see in the image, so it being dependent on culture would be an enormous problem.

D'Eye said:

Instead it says this "is explicitly not a goal" (emphasis mine), which can be understood rather differently. I wonder if that was intentional,

Considering the amount of emphasis it is trying to get trough, I'd say it's most likely intentional.

D'Eye said:

So, what exactly being a responsible adult has to do with one's (un)willingness to see a certain kind of images?..

Blacklists exist. Being a responsible adult means you should be able to swallow accidentally seeing a few explicit images before you set up your blacklist.

NWSiaCB said:

Well, there's a "Safebooru" in existence,

Safebooru is just Danbooru with rating:s added to each search. Nobody says it's safe for work

Danbooru simply has too much content to safely moderate it for the concept of Safe For Work. People are bad enough already with marking intentionally erotic stuff as safe. The standards for "Safe For Work" are even more extreme. Have fun showing the panties of a schoolgirl in any capacity.

>Safebooru is just Danbooru with rating:s added to each search.

To the best of my knowledge this is no longer true. At least, there was a period of time for which it wasn't. I think they still do mass dumps from danbooru like many other boorus though.

fossilnix said:

"Safe for work" is a gray area.

You are right. I should have been more clear: by "safe for work" I didn't mean the images that are literally safe to view at one's workplace. Rather, I meant the images that aren't suggestive in any way. I.e., images with no visible underwear (unless it's bloomers or the visible upper sides of highleg panties); overly tight, revealing, or suggestively torn clothes; suggestive poses and/or angles; et cetera.

Of course, there might be occasional exceptions. Oh, and I think we could cut official art some slack.

Are bikinis safe for work?

Absolutely - if drawn in a non-suggestive manner. Kisuke's art would be a great example.

How about passionate homosexual kisses?

I sincerely hope you mentioned that only because of possible employment consequences. In any case, if everyone's wearing clothes (and isn't groping each other in the process), then I think it's safe.

If a woman is fully clothed, and also tied up, is the image questionable?

If it involves some sort of shibari or similar BDSM thing, then I'd say yes, it's questionable.

And rating refers only to sexual content: Guro isn't safe for work, but guro images are rated Safe unless they have a sexual element.

Speaking of which, as far as I know, even some of the higher-level members aren't especially fond of this approach. It would be nice to hear more opinions on the matter.

NWSiaCB said:

Well, there's a "Safebooru" in existence, so obviously, SOMEONE thought it was worth trying.

Alas, but Safebooru is, pretty much, just a mirror of those other 'Boorus. As such it also copies all the tags - ratings included.

The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. So long as more is prevented from being piled on, at least most of it will eventually be taken care of. It's not like Danbooru will be "complete" at any point.

This.

Right now it's basically as follows: "explicit" is pr0n, "questionable" is borderline pr0n, "safe" is the rest. Which doesn't make much sense (at least to me). So, in my opinion, the best (and probably easiest) solution would be to make a 4th rating type specifically for "completely safe" images - especially considering that new posts no longer default to "questionable".

Borrator said:

It could if we wanted

Not to sound rude, but who are these mysterious "we"?

Blacklists exist.

My blacklist comprised over 80 lines at some point. It didn't make life much easier. :/

wareya said:

>Safebooru is just Danbooru with rating:s added to each search.

To the best of my knowledge this is no longer true. At least, there was a period of time for which it wasn't. I think they still do mass dumps from danbooru like many other boorus though.

I think you're talking about different safeboorus: there's http://safebooru.org and then there's http://safebooru.donmai.us

>I think you're talking about different safeboorus

I mean, they're called exactly the same thing.

D'Eye said:

Not to sound rude, but who are these mysterious "we"?

The community, yours truly included. The preference of this "we" is expressed in threads like this one, and what I wrote is what I gathered was the most common viewpoint in previous threads.

As for my personal opinion, I feel I can safely say I would never use such rating as it would filter out things worth seeing, i.e. pool #2709. If a lot of people want it though, I don't think it would be too troublesome to tag my uploads as sfw (when it applies) or something - still, it feels like it should be set apart from the current rating system, as the latter is rather useful for searching.

If you're that worried, why not just create a separate division of Danbooru called SFWBooru or completely overhaul Safebooru where all the images are handpicked from the database as acceptable to view at work? No additional uploading, just something like an entire collection pool given its own mirror.

Do you have any idea how much work that would take? If it's a danbooru feature it would at least have uploaders tag it most of the ime

Yes. Like NWSiaCB said, "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." It shouldn't be that hard to code so most of the hard work should come from community performing a few simple steps for each post.

As long as this process doesn't disrupt too much of Danbooru I find it OK. We could stand to move at least a few of the more egregious images that don't belong in the safe category to questionable, and for the ones with explicit tags, the bulk edit as earlier mentioned is fine. Otherwise, manual checking is preferable, but since that's already happening, there is no issue. And since it was already acknowledged that this is a long term project, I don't mind that either.

On a related note, I think most guro should have been marked as at least questionable. Though I pushed in support of protecting guro uploads before, they should be considered in the sense that they depict a gratuitous thing many don't want to see, and should be rated accordingly. That's not an extreme request for uploaders to handle.

I like Borrators idea of keeping it separate, but how to implement that I am unsure. I'll be watching as this thread progresses and see if an idea hits me.

Is the rating function even useful, with as subjective as it can be? If posts are tagged properly, then blacklists can filter out posts you don't want to see. If you find a picture that slipped through the cracks, do us all a favor and tag it properly. Does it really need to be harder than that?

So the idea "safe" should roughly mean "safe for work" is more in line with the way the ratings originally worked, but there was a point at which the policy changed to use safe/explicit more as a means to separate pornography/sexual images from non-pornography. Most of the safe posts that are not safe for work are meant to be nudes that may reasonably have some venue for which they are appropriate in public (say an art gallery for example). The newer policy was discussed and implemented way back in forum #19183. What's proposed here would more or less be a reversion of that decision. Someone correct me if there was a more recent change to these rules.

EDIT: Rereading that thread, the decision wasn't unanimous but it stuck. I always sort of liked the old rules better myself, but I'm sort of ambivalent about it. As with most rule changes it'd be somewhat hard to enforce retroactively.

The rating tagging guidelines give me the impression that "safe" is for non-erotic stuff, "questionable" is for erotic or questionable stuff, and "explicit" for sexual and obscene stuff. Something that's obviously meant to be erotic should fall under questionable, something with exposed genitals should fall under questionable, and something that's seen poorly (like untasteful schoolgirl pantyshots or non-artistic depictions of bottomlessness) should usually be questionable (though it marks judgment calls).

The list of stuff that qualifies something as questionable under "Wiki - howto:rate" is actually pretty good.

Of course, grotesque stuff is exception to the above.

In any case, the burden of making even a reasonable amount of the database align with "safe = safe for work" is absurd. It's not actually going to happen, even if someone tries.

If any of the coding mods here actually go through with the idea, how should sfw images be recognized, through a tag or through a pool?

tapnek said:

If any of the coding mods here actually go through with the idea, how should sfw images be recognized, through a tag or through a pool?

I don't actually support the idea (neither do I code), but since majority of rating:s images are actually sfw, it would make much more sense to exclude certain posts manually, either via tag or new parameter. But it would be much simpler if you were to decide what tags guarantee NSFW and list them - safebooru already filters not only on rating, but on small list of tags, like penis, pussy, bestiality and all censored tags.

That may be a good idea but there's a possibility of some posts considered nsfw slipping through the parameters of the blacklist.

fossilnix said:

And rating refers only to sexual content: Guro isn't safe for work, but guro images are rated Safe unless they have a sexual element. Changing the definition of Safe wouldn't eliminate the need for a comprehensive blacklist.

D'Eye said:

Speaking of which, as far as I know, even some of the higher-level members aren't especially fond of this approach. It would be nice to hear more opinions on the matter.

I know I never liked it myself, personally. To me, I'd like to approximately be able to use the different ratings as what I'd show others; If something's rated safe, to me that means it should be something I wouldn't hesitate to show to acquaintances, relatives, or share on social media. And certainly the amount of sexuality isn't the only factor there; I'm not going to post a [decapitation] pic on Facebook. To me, that makes a lot more sense than just some sexual gradient.

Yeah, it would be a judgement call, but isn't it already? There's certainly never been 100% agreement on every image's rating, and I trust people enough to be able to tell the difference between a swimsuit picture and a suggestive swimsuit picture. And frankly I see little issue just being overly cautious and erring towards questionable when in doubt.

D'Eye said:

Right now it's basically as follows: "explicit" is pr0n, "questionable" is borderline pr0n, "safe" is the rest. Which doesn't make much sense (at least to me). So, in my opinion, the best (and probably easiest) solution would be to make a 4th rating type specifically for "completely safe" images - especially considering that new posts no longer default to "questionable".

I also like the idea of 4 ratings; Safe would be suitable for all ages stuff... IE stuff you could share with relatives or on Facebook without worry. After that, the second rating up could be PG-13 kind of stuff: fan service, ecchi art, mild violence, etc. In this case stuff one might be able to show other anime/manga loving adults without things getting too awkward. The third rating could be rated R material: tasteful nudity, non-explicit sex, harder violence, etc. That would leave explicit for hardcore stuff: Vore, sexual fluids, rape, guro, etc.

Obviously we can make due with three ratings, and I can see the trouble that would be. Just the way I've usually seen it, and it makes a little sense if we'd be splitting up the fanservice stuff off from the SFW stuff. If anything I'd rather combine the tasteful nudity stuff in with the explicit stuff, rather than those in with the fanservice; It's much more often I'll be looking for PG-13 images and not want rated R stuff than I'll be looking for rated R images and not want NC-17 stuff.

wareya said:

In any case, the burden of making even a reasonable amount of the database align with "safe = safe for work" is absurd. It's not actually going to happen, even if someone tries.

But yeah, this; Frankly, I have to agree with what someone said above and say there's just always going to be a risk browsing Danbooru at work; Ratings will be mislabeled, tags will be forgotten... it's not something I'd do personally, no matter the rating system or my blacklist.