blindVigil said:
That last sentence doesn't feel like it needed to be worded like that, but leaving that aside, I have no problems rating any of those posts as G, and of the original six linked, post #5343100 is the only one I wouldn't rate S.
You have no idea how frustrating it is to have every single sentence in every single rule nitpicked and rule-lawyered to the point where the result makes no sense anymore.
The reason for this split, at the end of the day, no matter how we want to embellish it, was to appease payment processors, and remove anything that could be interpreted as porn or porn-adjacent or remotely problematic from safebooru. But a lot of our users are just uncontrollably autistic about these things, constantly laser-focused on irrelevant background details nobody cares about, so we have to phrase the rules so that they can be followed like a checklist and can leave no doubt or way to rule lawyer some nonsense out of nowhere, and even then somehow we end up with situations like these with absurd conclusions nobody would ever reach.
This is the exact same reason why we had to split S, people took "exposed nipples or genitals" from Q and decided it meant that S could have any kind of covered nipple or wet cameltoe no matter how blatant as long as it was not exposed. Now we say that breasts are S, and people are taking this to mean that posts with women are automatically S (actual discussions by actual builders on discord).
It's just that the ratings have been extremely strict on this for a while, with insistence on rating some "adult women in normal clothes" as S just because one character's breasts were a little big, or her shoulders were showing, or some other minute, inoffensive thing in an otherwise perfectly non-sexual image, even though those things weren't focused on or particularly prominent within the composition.
They are strict to avoid falling into the usual slippery slope of tagging cameltoes or covered nipples as G because they're "barely there". I invite you to reread forum #215101. The most important part of this post is this:
The exceptions would be when it's barely visible and in a context with zero fanservice or sex appeal. This is rare because anime is filled with fanservice and sex appeal. Frankly I don't trust most users to be a good judge of this, since most users here are so desensitized to sexiness in anime they don't recognize it when they see it. That's why the default assumption should be that it's rated S.
We have never said breasts or cleavage are always S, it's just that we cannot trust our users with being able to tell whether something is sexual, so we just say to fall back to S in all but the most safe for work cases, and we'll fix the rest ourselves.
"If you're not sure, tag it S" is not a statement on the ratings themselves. It's better for a post to be on S than on G not because of rating accuracy, but because it would cause less legal problems for the site. If you're not sure, just leave a post on S unless evazion or I changed it and it's not an obvious mistake.
When you want to change the rating of a "borderline" post to G, the correct way to do this is not to go through the rating guidelines like a mindless robot and check boxes until you reach the end. You should instead be asking yourself: "would someone, who works for a payment processor with a strict no-porn policy and strict western values and who has the power to ban danbooru from their payment processor, see this post and decide it's porn, problematic, controversial, or any cause for concern?" This is why drugs, profanity and extreme violence are not G. This is why two male wrestlers in front of each other while shirtless are G, unless the picture is bara or has any hint of fetishism.
I hope you can see why we can't just stick this sentence in the rating guidelines: anime porn addicts are not known for their common sense. I've seen people genuinely confused why some half naked Astolfoesque femboy was S while shirtless Goku was G. If someone is confused about something like this, then there's nothing we can do to help them understand our ratings, they're already too far gone.
I trust however that someone who has gone through tens of thousands of reratings should be able to appreciate the nuances of such a thought process, and be able to rate things based not on technicalities, but on what makes sense for the health of the site.