Reevaluating un-safe furry content

Danbooru appears to be having somewhat of an identity crisis when it comes to furry content at the moment. On the one hand, we have help:upload rules outright calling western furry content off-topic, explicit furry content generally as being borderline, and the default blacklist blocking unsafe furries. On the other hand, we increasingly have unrestricted users uploading erotic furry content such as Disney and My Little Pony with the traditional long snouts, wet noses, and wide muzzles, with some approvers similarly approving it. These same users are also openly raising concern when they get flagged.

Judging from conversations on the forum here, and discussions on Discord, there appears to be a conflict between the users that want this kind of content on Danbooru and those that don't. Currently, evazion has stated in forum #191074 that the line for what consistutes bad furry content is left up to the approvers. As a stance, this does however raise the issue in a a small minority of approvers ending up encouraging content that a vast majority of users would prefer not be active. This especially being the case when concerns are raised over flags from those who put this content into question, leaving checks called into debate.

Danbooru is primarily an anime image board, but very high quality content that falls outside of this curfew occasionally gets uploaded. This includes catagories such as scenery, food focus, or even the lord of the rings. You'll notice there's a big difference with those exceptions, however, and that's that the majority of content under those catagories are rating:safe, and therefore draw a lot less contention.

With that being said, I'm opening this thread so that we can discuss to what extent we want Danbooru's identity to include being a furry porn site.

Those are the facts, now it's opinion time: I personally don't think Danbooru's indentity should include unsafe furry content. I'm in favor of banning all posts under furry -rating:safe and disallowing future uploads under that umbrella. If people enjoy that kind of content, they're free to continue browsing and uploading on the many sites that support it more directly, such as e621. Existing posts will also not be gone forever, being viewable with status:deleted.

No.

Can I also motion to ban all Overwatch posts? Because for me, I personally don't like those very much.

I couldn't disagree more.

I wouldn't mind, but I doubt it will happen since the furries are gonna scream about it.

I don't like western furry, but that's what the tag blacklist is for, also most of the low quality garbage doesn't make it past the queue and/or gets flagged quickly, so this looks like a non-issue.

Why don't we just ban all scat and guro art while we're at it? Those things are way more contentious imo

blindVigil said:

Why don't we just ban all scat and guro art while we're at it? Those things are way more contentious imo

Don't forget loli and shota.

Traditionally we had not allowed furry content on the site. I personally don't like it and believe it also shouldn't be on the site.

To be clear, I'm mainly talking about explicit furry. And I'm not for a straight up ban, since I know it would never go trough. But the bar should be very high and the furry scale towards the barely furry.

Essentially post #4417870 versus post #4636308

.Dank said:

Traditionally we had not allowed furry content on the site.

Is that so? Furry goes back 16 years, even furry rating:e has active posts going back that far.

I'm fine with western furry being banned, but I think anime style/kemono art still has a place on the site.

blindVigil said:

Is that so? Furry goes back 16 years, even furry rating:e has active posts going back that far.

Did you look at those posts? Not exactly what OP was talking about, with the long snouts, typical western furry. The compromise had always seemed to be Japanese styled furry.

.Dank said:

Did you look at those posts? Not exactly what OP was talking about, with the long snouts, typical western furry. The compromise had always seemed to be Japanese styled furry.

This discussion stems from the reapproval of posts like post #3981964 or post #4613597 or post #4641576, which were flagged in batch for being "western furry", when they are the perfect example of japanese kemono.

.Dank said:

Did you look at those posts? Not exactly what OP was talking about, with the long snouts, typical western furry. The compromise had always seemed to be Japanese styled furry.

Does it even make a difference? The proposal being made here is banning "unsafe furry" not "unsafe furry with long snouts." Those old posts would be equally as subject to the ban as anything else.

It's unfortunate that we started off with a way-too-extreme solution that will piss people off and never go through, but I think the problem Obs is trying to solve is a real one. Several users, myself included, are very annoyed about recent waves of furry posts that we think are not Danbooru-worthy.

Here's a few examples of the posts that have triggered the recent backlash: post #4645009, post #4641393, post #4635838, post #4635692, post #4628123, post #4618277, post #4615073, post #4614934, post #4612185, post #4631533

Obviously, there's tons and tons of high-quality, on-topic furry posts on this site, which is why I would be 100% against an outright ban (it's also why blacklisting is not a solution). But it's quite frankly bizarre to see stuff like the posts I linked uploaded by respected users, then approved (sometimes twice) after being flagged. This isn't what people expect to see when they come to Danbooru. People often come to Danbooru precisely to avoid this type of stuff.

Discussions in Discord have made it clear that no one agrees on what constitutes western vs. eastern furry, and that's highly subjective to begin with. But people flag with "western furry" simply because that seems to them to be the best term to describe what they find so unappealing and off-topic about this type of content, only to have approvers save the posts because they don't think "western furry" is the correct flag reason, or because they interpret the flags as just hateful towards their personal taste in porn.

I'm not sure what the better solution is. I've always interpreted the upload rules as meaning that furry is permitted, but should be held to a much higher standard than non-furry art. Perhaps this just needs to be made clearer, and the reference to "western furry" changed to something that is a bit more helpful? Per evazion's last comment on the topic, what's really obviously shit-tier should be deleted, and everything else left to the taste of the approvers. But approvers currently seem to be highly biased towards approving any furry flags without much regard to the quality or relevance of the post, so this is not working with respect to flagged uploads from unrestricted users.

blindVigil said:

Does it even make a difference? The proposal being made here is banning "unsafe furry" not "unsafe furry with long snouts." Those old posts would be equally as subject to the ban as anything else.

Well this whole topic doesn't really matter. It's not going to be banned. And Evazion's stance is to just leave it up to flags and approvers. Nothing is really going to come out of this.

I think the "western furry" clause should just be removed from the help:upload rules off-topic section. It's the off-topic/"grotesque proportions" flags all over again where people use the rules as they're written and not as they're meant to get rid of contents they don't like.

We already know what "e621-tier furry" is. "Explicit furry content" is already in the borderline section, and inflation/terrible furry porn is already covered by "Poorly drawn content". The "western furry" line just begs for people to flag any picture under snout.

Do we ban post #3645048 because it's explicit western-style furry? Or do we make it a rule to only ban female furry characters? Come on.

Just flag the bad posts and move on, there's no need to advocate for the banning of an entire genre of content because you saw a bad post once.

CormacM said:

It's unfortunate that we started off with a way-too-extreme solution that will piss people off and never go through

I kind of agree, I've reworded the OP a little. I want this thread to be a place for discussing furry art broadly. The reason I'm focusing on lewd stuff specifically is because that's where the standards should be highest and where I feel they're not at any longer.

While it would be my ideal solution, I'm obviously in favour of any progress towards the issue as you've described it. Even just getting back some higher standards for the uploading of and approving of furry art would be an improvement. The examples you provided are the kind of posts I don't think people go to Danbooru for.

It's really funny seeing characters like Renamon, literally a character from a japanese franchise, come up as an example of "western furry." We can't seriously be defining this ambiguous phrase as "characters with snouts" right?

I don't disagree that some very questionable things have been uploaded lately, but "all (explicit) furries should be banned" is a hell of a kneejerk reaction.

CormacM said:

But approvers currently seem to be highly biased towards approving any furry flags without much regard to the quality or relevance of the post, so this is not working with respect to flagged uploads from unrestricted users.

I complained about the reason "western furry" being a poor flagging reason, when images that are clearly not western furry, are getting flagged as such. It's like flagging a perfectly anatomical correct image as "bad anatomy" and then shaming any approver for disagreeing on this.
Also, it's wrong to say that every approver approves such stuff out of spite. It's a typical argument made by people who don't get it their way. Not all furries got approved again, only those where approvers said they think it's good enough. Can't talk for everyone, but I know that NNT doesn't approve stuff he think is bad, even if the flagging reason is wrong. So the best thing to do is, not to claim that approvers either have shit taste or are approving out of spite, because right now there were more flaggers being mad about their flags not going through than approvers approving anything out of spite.