Deprecate oekaki

BUR #27947 has been rejected.

deprecate oekaki

So, I really wanted to bring up a discussion on this topic. I'm on the fence about it, but I wanted to hear people's thoughts. For all I know, there could be a dozen diehard oekaki fans. It's hard to know without an open conversation.

I'll brush up on what oekaki is, though I'm sure a lot of you know. The Danbooru tag was created in 2006, but the concept itself dates back to the late 90s:
"A drawing-based message board system, sometimes allowing users to replay a stroke-by-stroke animation of the picture being drawn." src.
It grew into fruition when BBS (bulletin board systems) were the norm for talking on message boards.
Here are some (probably) authentic examples:
post #19548
post #20536
post #19385

(And here's a fun archived webpage of Loish's oekaki forum back in 2004: link)

So, here's my points for deprecating the oekaki tag:

- It's obsolete
Back when digital art software was not nearly as advanced as it is now, oekaki art tools thrived as an accessible means for people to dip into digital art for the first time. Now, a majority of oekaki forums have shut down.
Some noteable oekaki software includes:
- Chibi Paint
- PaintBBS
- Shi-Painter (site)
- Then there's PaintBBS NEO, tegaki.js, ChickenPaint, and Klecks, all accessible with this port

- The oekaki tag is almost solely used for posts that can be filtered into jaggy lines and/or sketch

- A meta software tag can suffice instead
I personally think having oekaki as 'online_software_(medium)' instead, would be appropriate. This could be used as an umbrella term to cover a variety of art software that is originally built for web-browser use. This includes aforementioned software like Shi-Painter, Klecks, etc- but also more modern offshoots, such as Hellopaint (formerly iscribble), Aggie.io, MagicalDraw, DrawPile, Anondraw, and so on. (And as such, iscribble (medium) could be aliased to this tag)

My points for oekaki:

- Oekaki boards are rare, but they still exist
This is the most popular oekaki board I can find, hosted by the users who ported a majority of the aforementioned art software, helping to make it a more accessible medium again:
https://paintbbs.sakura.ne.jp/petit/

-

What are your thoughts? It seems whenever I see people discussing the oekaki tag, it means something different to each person, so I'm interested in seeing people's perspectives.

Replacing oekaki with 'online_software_(medium)' won't work because oekaki is more like a style, and the medium tag is too broad. I've looked at the online drawing software you mentioned and I don't think all of them should be lumped together with oekaki posts.

The oekaki tag is almost solely used for posts that can be filtered into jaggy lines and/or sketch

I disagree. Compare jaggy_lines -oekaki and jaggy_lines oekaki. There is a noticeable style difference.

It's obsolete

Keep in mind we are an archive site with more than a decade of art with the oekaki tag. We shouldn't later remove the tag from those posts just because we deem them 'obsolete'.

@HyphenSam Yeah, I definitely agree with the take on how this site is archival. I noticed Shinjidude posted some oekaki just a couple days ago from an old site (which my browser won't let me view OTL)

When you say style difference though, the only thing that jumps out at me is that oekaki often has a 2000s style, if that's what you mean?

Also -- I can see people are adamantly against the idea (lol), but if anyone has any other opinions/takes I overlooked, I'd love to hear them.

On this one, I strongly believe the mere suggestion contradicts the purpose of the site. Since the purpose is that of a library, artworks get to be classified with a more specific tag, therefore oekaki already is good. And although the term is coming from a rather dated system, over time it came to mean the drawing style itself, not the medium it was originally created with. So the tag might fall into disuse from time to time, then again, it rises in popularity due to a rediscovery, therefore is not obsolete at all.

To add a bit of insight about its usefulness, actually at the time of writing, I noticed a rather bizarre drawing style by dreamer_tapir which, I've never seen before and wasn't to my taste. Luckily it had oekaki tag on them, which allowed me to filter them out.

Krylov said:

On this one, I strongly believe the mere suggestion contradicts the purpose of the site. Since the purpose is that of a library, artworks get to be classified with a more specific tag, therefore oekaki already is good. And although the term is coming from a rather dated system, over time it came to mean the drawing style itself, not the medium it was originally created with. So the tag might fall into disuse from time to time, then again, it rises in popularity due to a rediscovery, therefore is not obsolete at all.

To add a bit of insight about its usefulness, actually at the time of writing, I noticed a rather bizarre drawing style by dreamer_tapir which, I've never seen before and wasn't to my taste. Luckily it had oekaki tag on them, which allowed me to filter them out.

Seconding this reasoning.
I mean, look at other mediums for comparison. The animation programm flash has long be renamed and been largely replaced by other animation styles and programms, but the term "flash animation" still refers to a very specific style of animation.

The bulk update request #27947 (forum #288892) has been rejected by @nonamethanks.