The "need" to rewrite rules

7HS said:

Some searches I did on the shrinemaiden.org archive (the most prominent English-language Touhou webforum from roughly 2004-2019) -

[...]

It's certainly less popular (except in Marisa's case, who has very few results with either ordering for some reason) but the Japanese name order is factually used a lot more than zero times, seemingly a third to a fifth of the Western order on average.

I'd say that shrinemaiden.org is a group with very few "casual" fans. I'm mainly referring to the Touhou Project discord, or other big ones like the Hisouten one. Plus, you have searched the most well-known characters. Usually "rarer" characters are only referred by name.
I never visited it myself, so i'm sorry if i couldn't add it to my personal experience.
I feel worth mentioning that en.touhouwiki.net uses western naming convention over japanese, and searching with japanese convention will redirect to the corresponding character's wiki page.

This is untrue if the Western-ordered name is aliased to the Japanese-ordered name, as it should be unless the character is obscure and never shows up on missed searches or inspires anyone to submit a BUR of their own initiative. I'm pretty sure all Touhou characters have aliases in place already.

Most of them don't have their names aliased. Also, there are rarely characters like mystia_lorelei who are using western convention for more than a decade now.

Mysterious_Uploader said:

Most of them don't have their names aliased. Also, there are rarely characters like mystia_lorelei who are using western convention for more than a decade now.

That's because Mystia Lorelei is her proper name. Same with Alice Margatroid, the Prismriver sisters, and all of the other characters that use western based names. It's not exactly rare, their names were like that from the start.

skylightcrystal said:

Given that there have been cases in the past of people blanket nuking the tagme tag just to get the numbers down, without actually tagging up the posts in question, I'd be very sceptical of any attempt to "reward" the removal of these tags.

Or they add loads and loads of excess tags to posts without bothering to verify that they're using tags correctly. I can think of a few now-inactive users who received positive feedback for their tagging in spite of having an alarmingly high rate of tag misuse, including one who was even promoted for it. People should be rewarded for their efforts, but we have to make sure they're actually putting in the work instead of just creating the illusion of doing something useful.

blindVigil said:

That's because Mystia Lorelei is her proper name. Same with Alice Margatroid, the Prismriver sisters, and all of the other characters that use western based names. It's not exactly rare, their names were like that from the start.

Whoops, my bad.

Or they add loads and loads of excess tags to posts without bothering to verify that they're using tags correctly. I can think of a few now-inactive users who received positive feedback for their tagging in spite of having an alarmingly high rate of tag misuse, including one who was even promoted for it. People should be rewarded for their efforts, but we have to make sure they're actually putting in the work instead of just creating the illusion of doing something useful.

My idea was that as there should be people that should work on these tags, there should also be people checking that those people are doing a good job.

Mysterious_Uploader said:

There's also the "original names over english" thing which is closely correlated. That rule was made more than 10 years, ago, back when games came out two years after the japanese release (if they did come out), and the site was mainly focused on anime (which americans have the not unique experience of having them sound very different from the original ones, and to set a standard they decided to use japanese names over english (and in that i agree).
The reason why fire emblem tags are in english and not in japanese now is because there's no official romanization (forum #157684). Other than the verdict itself opening up an enormous can of worms, it's still not satisfying for me since it doesn't cover usage. Again, Danbooru is a western site. So i don't see why names of characters of games that came out the same day both in the west and in jp should use japanese names, when only a very small, very passionate fraction of said community would know both names.
Choosing between jp and en should be on a case-by-case basis, it is possible to (and we should) default to the original names, but if evidence is provided that shows that only a small fraction of western people know japanese names, we should change them to english.

Can I add this is pretty Americentric? For instance, my parents are from Hungary, in that country they also use "Japanese" name order despite being a Western country by most definitions.

There are a number of other hasty assumptions you're making here:

1) Danbooru users are from a Western/English-speaking country (some could just have learned English despite it not being their country's official or main language, some could be using translated third-party clients and not know English at all)
2) The localization of a Japanese work in a country any given Danbooru user is from uses English-style names (not necessarily true in SEA countries, i.e. Singapore where English translations of Japanese works are common)
3) The American localization of a Japanese work is the most predominant/popular international localization (not true for many NHK anime, which are far more popular in SEA and Latin America, and some older and lesser known manga, which are most popular in Europe)
4) Localizations come out in all Western countries at the same time (often the US is earlier than anywhere else, sometimes they only ever come out on the US (meaning fans in other countries may know the Japanese names better,) and sometimes they only ever come out in other countries)
5) Localizations in all Western countries all use the same names (not true for Fire Emblem, see Shiida/Sheeda/Caeda among other names, and probably many more franchises)

In summary, I think it's factually incorrect to state that "For the average anime-adjacent franchise, Western names are better known than Japanese ones worldwide" for several reasons and it's going to be a big, unnecessary hassle to determine whether they are the best known names, even on a case-by-case basis.

Additionally, while they're rare, there are names like monkey d luffy and roronoa zoro where the original work uses Japanese name order for distinctly non-Japanese names, making it obvious that the author's intent was "even though One Piece's setting isn't Japan, they use Japanese-style name order." Do we flip these around or not? (I think in this particular example, Zoro's name is often flipped to "Zoro Roronoa" while Luffy's never is, which is going to be real fun if the site policy changes.)

And there are even weirder cases like Phantasy Star renaming two characters in the 3rd and 4th game of the series to "Wren," making it appear as if they were the same character, when they had different names and were different characters in Japanese. Would we have them share a character tag?

It's a can of worms. That much is clear. Nothing else is.

7HS said:

Can I add this is pretty Americentric? For instance, my parents are from Hungary, in that country they also use "Japanese" name order despite being a Western country by most definitions.

There are a number of other hasty assumptions you're making here:

1) Danbooru users are from a Western/English-speaking country (some could just have learned English despite it not being their country's official or main language, some could be using translated third-party clients and not know English at all)
2) The localization of a Japanese work in a country any given Danbooru user is from uses English-style names (not necessarily true in SEA countries, i.e. Singapore where English translations of Japanese works are common)
3) The American localization of a Japanese work is the most predominant/popular international localization (not true for many NHK anime, which are far more popular in SEA and Latin America, and some older and lesser known manga, which are most popular in Europe)
4) Localizations come out in all Western countries at the same time (often the US is earlier than anywhere else, sometimes they only ever come out on the US (meaning fans in other countries may know the Japanese names better,) and sometimes they only ever come out in other countries)
5) Localizations in all Western countries all use the same names (not true for Fire Emblem, see Shiida/Sheeda/Caeda among other names, and probably many more franchises)

Whoops, sorry. Wasn't my intention.
I'm italian myself, so i know somewhat well what you're talking about. The problem here is that Danbooru is only available in english, and english is the (current?) lingua franca of the world. This means that people from anglophone countries will be much more prominent than other people who need to go through a language wall first.
There's no reason not to use "western" naming scheme, given only a minority will ever search for the surname first.

In summary, I think it's factually incorrect to state that "For the average anime-adjacent franchise, Western names are better known than Japanese ones worldwide" for several reasons and it's going to be a big, unnecessary hassle to determine whether they are the best known names, even on a case-by-case basis.

Additionally, while they're rare, there are names like monkey d luffy and roronoa zoro where the original work uses Japanese name order for distinctly non-Japanese names, making it obvious that the author's intent was "even though One Piece's setting isn't Japan, they use Japanese-style name order." Do we flip these around or not? (I think in this particular example, Zoro's name is often flipped to "Zoro Roronoa" while Luffy's never is, which is going to be real fun if the site policy changes.)

And there are even weirder cases like Phantasy Star renaming two characters in the 3rd and 4th game of the series to "Wren," making it appear as if they were the same character, when they had different names and were different characters in Japanese. Would we have them share a character tag?

It's a can of worms. That much is clear. Nothing else is.

Again, case-by-case basis. Phantasy Star may be better staying in japanese. I think the monkey d luffy thing is similar to hata no kokoro or other similar names, where you can't really swap the name around because of a particle in the middle.

Well anyways, i guess it's better to take care of the rule rewrite before taking this on again. Might have caused some discussion overlap, please forgive me.

If the name ordering is really an issue for casual users, I personally think that rather than modifying nearly every single chartag on the site, a backend solution like so would be a much easier solution:

1. If someone searches for a two-word tag like sakuya_izayoi that doesn't exist AND
2. If a tag in the reverse order like izayoi_sakuya does exist AND
3. That tag is a character tag

then automatically redirect the user to the reversed tag.

This could potentially result in weird results for some searches that were not intended to return characters (like someone searching for love_chocolate trying to find Valentines' Day art and getting sent to chocolate love,) but nothing super common comes to mind. The main problem would be additional server load, but each tag could be cached permanently after being searched once, which would help.

Tag autocomplete used to suggest japanese name order when the english order was typed in, but in 2018 when autocomplete was rewritten, that functionality didn't get carried over