male_child and female_child should imply child

A bit of context: I wanted to improve searchability of omori characters by having the child tag to images that depicts the younger version of the main characters. I added male_child and female_child to applicable images, but as these two tags currently do not implicate child, so as a result omori child doesn't work as a way to search for specific fanarts of this franchise.

From a discussion on Discord, a parallel issue revolving around the adherence of only using non-nsfw images on male_child and female_child was mentioned. However, I do not believe there is a logical basis to prevent those two tags from implicating the child tag.

Thank you for consideration.

The logical basis to deny this implication is that female_child is:nsfw and male_child is:nsfw have hundreds of loli/shota results and other posts that should never be tagged with child, and our users cannot be trusted with accurately tagging this. Just look at the kind of stuff that gets routinely mistagged with these tags.
This is particularly concerning from a site operational standpoint. It's unacceptable to have this kind of content be anywhere near a tag called "child", both for payment processors (if we had any right now) and hosting providers.

It was already bad enough with child, now we have three different tags acting as landmines that need to be routinely cleaned.

I thought it's the job of Approvers to make sure images uploaded by Members are tagged appropriately, especially around the "sensitive" tags aforementioned. I really don't understand the position Danbooru has taken to propagate the misguided oppression of freedom of expression spearheaded by western payment processors against the norms of Eastern arts; it is akin to punish the wrong people when there already is a rigorous system setup to differentiate loli/shota from their sfw counterparts.

I'm trying really hard not to nuke these tags out right, but people aren't making it easy. Danbooru is a porn site in the eyes of most outside observers, and a porn site with a tag for little girls immediately sets off red flags. It's hard to say this tag is for innocent images when so much of it is soft loli content. And it's hard to keep the tag clean when the whole idea of "I want to search specifically for pictures of little girls" inherently attracts people who don't have the purest of intentions.

Usually in anime there's some ambiguity surrounding the actual age of characters. "All characters are above the age of 18" and all that. But it removes all ambiguity when you explicitly say the character is a child. Then you better be sure the image is completely safe, otherwise it's a red flag. And frankly, so many people here are so coombrained by hentai that I don't trust them to recognize what is considered unsafe by normal people standards.

Danbooru is actually banned in multiple countries over content that is considered to be loli by their standards, but not by ours. A female child tag that is less than 100% safe is basically asking to be banned in more places. Just the word "child" on a porn site sets off red flags.

About a month ago, I switched from Amazon to a new email provider for sending Danbooru's emails. The new provider banned me after a few days because they considered Danbooru to be a porn site. Even though our emails don't contain anything remotely NSFW. I switched to another email provider, but it goes to show that when you're considered a porn site, you're constantly at risk of being banned by service providers who don't like what you do. To run a website, you need to deal with a lot of third party service providers, many of whom don't want to deal with porn sites. And of the ones that do, basically none of them are okay with loli, or anything remotely adjacent to it.

The way we (and other sites like Gelbooru and E-Hentai) deal with this is by trying to keep this stuff off the radar. But that's hard to do when we have tags like female child and male child explicitly labeling characters as underage, and being used as backdoor soft-loli and soft-shota tags.

We already have teenage deprecated (I know it used to be for alternate versions of characters, but still), and we don't use an adult tag. Is there a hugely compelling reason not to deprecate these age tags too if they're causing issues as they have? It'd probably be additional development, but alternatively perhaps we could restrict them from being used on anything but rating:g posts?

And frankly, so many people here are so coombrained by hentai that I don't trust them to recognize what is considered unsafe by normal people standards.

I am curious: is the standard in question set by the executives in the payment processor companies, or the standard of an average personal viewing images on Danbooru? Because these are very two different standards, and it's disingenuous to conflate the two. Danbooru could hide all the "nsfw" content behind a login, and for some reason it chooses not. Instead of dwelling on the age of fictional characters, wouldn't it be more conventional (as undertaken by many sites like Pixiv) by having users to attest that they are over age 18 before they can view "bad" content?

I unfortunately am sensing some kind of judgmental disapproval of loli and shota content that is beyond the scope of maintenance. I hope I am wrong tho, as I'd like to see the most innocent and cute male_child images to the most explicit and depraved shota images--and everything else with in the spectrum, to flourish here on Danbooru.

NovelSingularity said:

I am curious: is the standard in question set by the executives in the payment processor companies, or the standard of an average personal viewing images on Danbooru? Because these are very two different standards, and it's disingenuous to conflate the two. Danbooru could hide all the "nsfw" content behind a login, and for some reason it chooses not. Instead of dwelling on the age of fictional characters, wouldn't it be more conventional (as undertaken by many sites like Pixiv) by having users to attest that they are over age 18 before they can view "bad" content?

I unfortunately am sensing some kind of judgmental disapproval of loli and shota content that is beyond the scope of maintenance. I hope I am wrong tho, as I'd like to see the most innocent and cute male_child images to the most explicit and depraved shota images--and everything else with in the spectrum, to flourish here on Danbooru.

Evazion is talking about how posts such as post #5898549, post #4769369, post #4733387 and post #2518611 are routinely misrated, tagged with female_child/child or not tagged loli. Any normal person would immediately see their suggestive nature, but for Danbooru users who've been playing the game of "let's see what we can get away with marking as S" for over a decade, it's second nature to see such posts and think "well, their nipples and/or genitals aren't visible so it seems safe to me".

An age gate would do literally nothing to stop a potential payment processor or email provider from checking "yes I am adult" and bypassing it immediately. In any case, loli/shota content isn't going away anytime soon; accessing it is (or was) one of the main motivators behind buying an account upgrade.

Do excuse me for pointing out two obvious things for the short duration that I noticed on Danbooru: 1) Currently is still not possible to buy an account upgrade to legit view what's behind the paywall, and 2) having such a wall further incentivize people to skirt around it, even they don't need to (which is somewhat a surprise to me tbh).

I think everyone should be entitled to their taste and distaste. I can definitely understand loli and shota content doesn't appeal to everyone, and I can respect that. As a fan of 2D drawings of fictional shotas, however, I think some people (including on the Discord) with fancy colored names are letting distaste to get into the way of obstructing others from enjoying their own niche.

It is an enforcement problem. Mistagging should be corrected by approvers and chronicle abusers should be banned. Unless of course the desire to proverbially flog the pedophilic "coombrains" is too great and is preventing a stricter ruleset for these sensitive tags being implemented.

An approver's responsibility is approving uploads. Proper tagging is everyone's responsibility, approvers are not obligated to make sure every single image they approve is fully and accurately tagged. Nobody is getting paid for their contributions to the site, everyone is doing what they can in their spare time.

No one is trying to make sure others are unable to enjoy their lolis and shotas (besides payment processors). For every one person that works to clean the site up, there are hundreds of people making a mess. Accusing staff of not working hard enough, or oppressing certain groups of people, isn't helping any of this.

I'm trying really hard not to nuke these tags out right, but people aren't making it easy.

Except statements like this reads more like a thinly veiled blackmail and attempt to gaslight people who are correctly tagging their uploads just happen to be the topic of distaste for certain higher-ups. Approvers should be moderators as much as they are curators, and the sooner proper people take up the proper responsibility to moderate potentially problematic content, the sooner we can move past the core problem.

I started this thread because I saw an illogical refusal to implicate tags that should be implicated, and I still stand by this assessment. This refusal is seemingly stemmed from the unwillingness to deal with moderation responsibility, and to kick the bucket of burden and shame to everyone else who enjoy the content under these tags.

I would also like to remind people that removing the three tags containing the word "child" would be beyond absurd, and would be an act of self-sabotage of the rigorous tagging system that makes Danbooru rise above similar sites.

Let me put it this way: A few years ago, E-Hentai nearly shut down entirely over fears over the legality of loli/shota content ([1]). That was after they were already forced to hide everything behind Sad Panda a decade ago because of pressure from advertisers. A couple years ago, Gelbooru had their server seized over a single image their hosting provider found questionable ([2]). As a result they were forced to hide this type of content by default, despite resisting having any kind of content restrictions before.

These are the kinds of risks we face. None of us want to censor content. But none of us want to get shut down either. Which is why every site is eventually forced to either ban risky content entirely, or implement restrictions to keep it under control. Even 4chan has long banned all loli/shota content outside of /b/.

The female child and male child tags didn't exist up until about six months ago. Before then, things were usually either tagged loli/shota, or they weren't tagged at all. That was safer in many ways because things were either out of sight, or they weren't labeled as children. Explicitly labeling content as underage is what gets us into trouble. There's no way around that.

Anything labeled as child that's not 100% safe is a risk. And my definition of safe is going to be much stricter than most people's. There's tons of stuff like post #5898241 or post #5856671 that are currently rated G and that aren't overtly lewd, but that I just know are lowkey lolicon or shotacon bait and that people are going "Uohhhhhhhhh! 😭😭😭" over it on Twitter.

This puts me in a difficult position, because I don't want to hide more content than I have to, but I don't want people coming to Danbooru and searching child and see hundreds of mildly suggestive images either. This leaves me with the choice of either nuking these tags, hiding these tags, or making the ratings for these tags much, much stricter, which would probably still entail hiding anything rated Sensitive or higher.

Far from the first time we've had a discussion of this nature.

topic #2, topic #206, topic #484, topic #844, topic #1012, topic #1372, topic #1419, topic #21339, & topic #21641

I think it's extremely important to note that a huge number of the images used as examples in those threads are still not tagged loli. There's a noticeable resistance to tagging loli by many people. The number of times we have to clear out copyrights like Blue Archive because people refuse to tag Shun (small) (blue archive) as loli is insane, especially given her original translation of "(child)". Things like post #5853929 not being tagged loli for what I assume to be the dogmatic attachment to not tagging rating:s as loli I talked about in topic #21641 is nutty. post #5456142 is in the first page of results for is:nsfw child.

I think we're well past the breaking point of doing something. I don't know exactly what, but implicating these tags ain't it.

evazion said:
There's tons of stuff like post #5898241 or post #5856671 that are currently rated G and that aren't overtly lewd, but that I just know are lowkey lolicon or shotacon bait and that people are going "Uohhhhhhhhh! 😭😭😭" over it on Twitter.

The second comment to the gura pic.

Veraducks said:

I think it's extremely important to note that a huge number of the images used as examples in those threads are still not tagged loli. There's a noticeable resistance to tagging loli by many people.

That really touches upon the crux of the issue here: the resistance to tagging loli (and shota) and, if they have to tag something, tagging anything other than it, whether it be just straight-up tagging child in sexual contexts, tagging onee-loli/onee-shota/onii-shota on is:nsfw without the corresponding tag, or evading with non-age-specific tags such as flat chest, chibi, or petite (ignoring the wiki in the process), because they want to maintain open access to the art being tagged. Heck, one could even argue that, with the earliest topics on this issue in mind, that the reason why child as a tag exists is explicitly to act as a means of getting soft-loli and soft-shota through the door (alongside flat chest). Even before the tag existed, you had folks questioning and expressing their dislike of the usage of 'child', 'kid' and similar words 15 years ago for all the reasons evazion has mentioned for the last six months, and there was even an apparent controversy with a so-called loli_safe tag.

All of that in mind, it just shows that the tag in question has been poisoned from the very start, with roots rotting away at the website as we speak. It even speaks to how undertagged child as a tag genuinely is, as properly tagging it was never the original focus. And, one could consider this the final kicker, even if we managed to get a scenario where all depiction of children in child/female child/male child/every-other-gentag-with-child were rating:g-tier, we'd still have posts in child is:nsfw due to taggers tagging it on NSFW posts if they appear to the side, as illustrated by post #3410029. There's only one solution, and that's nuking these tags (because I doubt renaming the tags will help).

I'm a bit miffed that we can't have an age tag like we do with old_man, however it's pretty clear that the risks of keeping the tag and it's maintenance overshadow it's usefulness, and I also agree on nuking the tag.

+1 for nuking male child and female child (but sensitive+ posts should be gardened first). It might become a matter regarding the survival of this imageboard.
Indifferent about child but I really don't mind if it will be necessary to nuke it as well.

+1 for nuking

There's also child on child which is perfectly valid for its intended purpose, but the name is bad. It could be renamed or maybe even split into loli with shota, loli with loli and shota with shota.

mongirlfan said:

There's also child on child which is perfectly valid for its intended purpose, but the name is bad. It could be renamed or maybe even split into loli with shota, loli with loli and shota with shota.

+1 this.

I have my reservations about nuking the _child tags because they have potential legit use, but I do agree that they are severely undertagged for their intended purpose and have just become a workaround for getting softcore loli through through the door (I'm looking at you bikini (child or female_child) with stuff like post #5569725 and post #5172272), so perhaps it's better if we just get rid of them as they are just a huge liability.

I too will also favor a +1 on nuking the tags. If that's what's best for the site.

The divide between what counts as loli/shota and what counts as female_child/male_child is probably going to be different for everyone, especially if we're talking lowkey stuff.

Not to mention people who want to skirt around loli by making it female_child instead.

It's just causing too many issues.

mongirlfan said:

There's also child on child which is perfectly valid for its intended purpose, but the name is bad. It could be renamed or maybe even split into loli with shota, loli with loli and shota with shota.

just a reminder, we nuked shota-on-shota with the notion that child_on_child and hetero/yaoi/yuri will work just as well.

If you guys want to bring it back though, you'll get no arguments out of me.