Donmai

Getting Rid of Light/Dark Hair Tags

Posted under Tags

BUR #34158 has been approved by @evazion.

deprecate light_blue_hair
deprecate dark_blue_hair

Okay, now that light brown hair is officially deprecated, it's time to get rid of the rest of these godawful tags and put this all to rest. I'm starting with the blue hair tags, as they both suffer the same problems as all the rest: that no one can agree on what exactly is "light/dark blue". There's nothing wrong with using just plain old blue, especially since people can barely decide on regular colors anyway.

I'm having a hard time finding any more, so let me know if more exist so I can start a BUR for them.

There don't seem to be any more that haven't already been deprecated. Did find a bunch of other strange/superfluous *_hair tags though. Listing them here before I forget they exist.

burnt hair (some ppl are using it as a color i think gardened), castanet hair (?????), checkered hair (covered by patterned hair or screentones), earth hair (bloat tag for earth-chan), energy hair, epic hair, feathered hair, folded hair, greying hair (multicolored hair), growing hair, holographic hair, impossible hair, monochrome hair (almost entirely occupied by someone's deleted dollfie photos with two-tone hair), patchwork hair (patterned hair), spectral hair (bloat tag for Lewis Pepper), tall hair, wood gradient hair (patterned hair)

Updated

Ylimegirl said:

There don't seem to be any more that haven't already been deprecated. Did find a bunch of other strange/superfluous *_hair tags though. Listing them here before I forget they exist.

burnt hair (some ppl are using it as a color i think), castanet hair, checkered hair, earth hair, energy hair, epic hair, feathered hair, folded hair, greying hair, growing hair, holographic hair, impossible hair, monochrome hair, patchwork hair, spectral hair, tall hair, wood gradient hair

Blank_User said:

Facial and pubic hair tags have similar issues. We have magenta pubic hair and silver pubic hair despite the head hair equivalents being deprecated.

I think most of these could be either gardened out (like burnt hair, a tag I legitimately find useful), or just flat out manually nuked (who on earth is searching monochrome hair or checkered hair?).

The only ones I'm unsure about are energy hair and impossible hair. These both sound like legitimately useful hair tags that I can totally imagine people searching for and wanting to see (although energy hair's current occupants don't really fit the description). The rest are either superfluous or are interchangeable with another tag.

As much as i understand the general opinion towards these tags (though the normal hair color tags are already very misused, yet it's not an argument for their deprecation), at the very least, dark blue hair should stay.

There are way too many cases where the hair is depicted with that shade of blue that's too blue to be reasonably tagged black hair but too dark to confidently just tag it blue hair exclusively.
There's already the idea i hold that black hair should be reserved for depictions that don't have that bluish hue, just for clarity's sake, but i think a significant portion of light/dark (especially dark, my stance is less convinced for light hair tags generally) hair color tags could actually work if only there was a collective decision to properly discuss what exact boundaries these should have, then properly edit the wikis accordingly then accept it's inevitably going to take a sustained and collective gardening + messaging effort to get those tags to where they need to be, no matter how useful they may potentially be, because of the current state of things and the site already having an established database with a size matching it's history; Unless the general feeling here is that even potentially useful tags should be dumped if the simple fact of there being a pre-existing status-quo makes it inconvenient to set them up?

For tags as visible and basic as the normal hair color tags, if people instinctively make up simple alternatives/granular versions of it that get the traction dark blue hair has, it at least reveals room for improvement in how we tag things, even when the new tag isn't necessarily viable (but i do think dark blue hair is, and how i envision it with some changes on other hair tags, it would probably grow to about a third of the size of blue hair without being a mess.)
Heck, even in it's current state, dark blue hair seems more consistent than blue hair in what's tagged, the number of times i've seen unambiguously green (not even aqua) hair be tagged Blue exclusively, and i've also seen the opposite with unambiguously blue hair be tagged only green.
And it's not even mentioning the fact that we accept the inevitably partial overlap of some tags like black hair and brown hair, or aqua hair with both green and blue, and yet, dark blue hair should be dumped because there's some black hair in it? come on

I sure do love when I want to see characters with hair similar to #b9a68c but search gives me #3a2508

post #8239793 is not the same color as post #8498502.

Removing light brown wasn't enough dopamine I guess. I don't know what's with this trend of removing information from posts by deprecating descriptive tags, similar to the trend of nuking all useful info from wikis, but it needs to stop. This website is meant to be searchable and tagable. If misuse is seriously the best argument, might as well deprecate half the tags on the site.

Updated

Separate to my earlier reply (which was mostly just me making sure I listed all the things I wanted to make note of while on my phone so I could deal with them at some undetermined point while using danbooru on computer), I'm wondering about the necessity for colored facial hair tags? I imagine similarly to how we have mismatched pubic hair and mismatched armpit hair we could maybe just have mismatched facial hair for when it's notable and otherwise just tag it as regular hair?

For reference, we currently have black facial hair, blonde facial hair, blue facial hair, brown facial hair, green facial hair, grey facial hair, orange facial hair, pink facial hair, purple facial hair, red facial hair, and white facial hair, with the most populated of the tags only having 126 posts.

There's also dyed facial hair and streaked facial hair, which I imagine could maybe be useful but the former has 1 post and the latter has 7, so...

So, we already deprecate one tag with 83,000 posts, but now we also have to deprecate 16,000+31,000=47,000 posts (130,000 in total)

I've never understood the trend of killing off more subtle and clarifying tags on a site that prides itself on its wide range of tags, each time with the reason not being "the tag is useless" but "people are using it incorrectly.".
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To give an example, I don't even have to think long: colored collar tags according to the wiki should not be used if they are part of a shirt, but the first page is full of errors: choker, belt collar and shirt collars are marked as a tag created for a separate collar. So we should destroy this tag too?
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Some people like to snidely point out mistakes, catching some posts with incorrect use of this tag, but they don't pay attention to the fact that these mistakes are ubiquitous and occur WITH ALL tags, but if you look at the majority of posts and the average picture, it turns out that the tag is MOSTLY used correctly.
Until I see at least one tag that is used perfectly and without errors (impossible), for me this reason will remain unfounded nonsense.

post #8096951 - Does anyone really get offended by the fact that we have a clarification of the difference between these two colors?

I agree with what was said above: as long as the tag is useful and allows us to do more precise searches (with human error of course) it should definitely remain active, and mistakes in its use should not be singled out as something special: it is as default a mistake as if someone tagged cardigan as jacket and it should also be simply fixed.

I could see the argument for getting rid of something like silver_hair back then, but I don't see the benefit in getting rid of proper hair colour searchability, and I completely disagree with the idea that we only need basic colour tags and no other nuance whatsoever. There is a world of difference between things like post #8506515 post #8496045 and things like post #8499249 post #8462204 (the same could be applied to green, or other colours).

I can understand that hair colour tags have too much granularity in some ways, and can be very subjective/prone to mistags, but completely getting rid of tag granularity in favour of just having completely basic blue/green/red/orange/whatever_hair tags with no nuance whatsoever isn't a solution, it's just the opposite end of the same problem: zero granularity beyond basic colours, and effectively pointless tags when you're searching for a nuance of a colour, even more so than granular tags with some mistags.

Half of dark_blue_hair is unambiguously purple and I wouldn't call it "A few mistags." post #8503338, post #8490627, and post #8489814 are a few egregious ones off the first two pages. You also have the "What constitutes dark?" Question. Is post #8488492 dark? What about post #8465674?

I see the desire to seperate shades of a color, but in practice I don't think that fragmentation works. Dark_red_hair was largely brown, this one seems to mostly be purple. I think if people are forced to pick between the larger primary color tags there'll be less mistags than selecting shades.

zetsubousensei said:

Half of dark_blue_hair is unambiguously purple and I wouldn't call it "A few mistags." post #8503338, post #8490627, and post #8489814 are a few egregious ones off the first two pages. You also have the "What constitutes dark?" Question. Is post #8488492 dark? What about post #8465674?

I see the desire to seperate shades of a color, but in practice I don't think that fragmentation works. Dark_red_hair was largely brown, this one seems to mostly be purple. I think if people are forced to pick between the larger primary color tags there'll be less mistags than selecting shades.

post #8503338, post #8490627, and post #8489814 are "unambiguously purple" to you? i would understand seeing some part of purple hue since it is there, but saying it is unambiguously purple is really pushing it, no wonder you think half of the posts in there are mistags; just check where purple is on a color wheel and tell be where those posts would be placed on it.

Asking questions like "what constitutes dark?" isn't an argument when the same kind of issue is present for primary colors too; where's the line between red hair and orange hair? between black hair and brown hair/blue hair (the ones that would fall under dark blue hair)? or of course blue hair and purple hair since you had trouble with it.
I feel like part of the issue comes from many people subconsciously thinking that you are only allowed to tag 1 hair color regardless of context for each instance, when even in some wikis it's already acknowledged that there's overlap between some colors, meaning there are cases where more than 1 hair color tag is applicable/correct = you can tag more than 1 for a single shade of hair if need be.
post #8489814 can keep dark blue hair while having purple hair added.
post #8503338 and post #8490627 should stay under dark blue hair exclusively imo as i doubt most people searching for purple hair would want to see those (especially the Yuuka one)

And no, there won't be less mistags if people are forced to choose between primary color tags because there are already a daily mass of mistags between primary color tags too (much bigger than what's happening in the more granular ones), at best it will just migrate mistags overall, and at worst it will easily worsen it by increasing the number of users that just don't bother tagging hair color at all, among other things.

Light blue hair and dark blue hair only get 100-200 searches per week. This is almost nothing. In comparison blue hair gets 3.6k searches per week, and this is still low relative to how large the tag is. Meanwhile a popular character, copyright, or artist tag can get 50k-200k+ searches per week. Even a niche tag like yandere can get 10k+ searches per week. We need more tags like yandere and less like light blue hair.

People vastly overestimate how much tags like this are actually used. In general, if it's just a minor aspect of a character's appearance, it's going to get next to no searches. People just don't search for things this granular. They search for high level things that tell you what the overall image is about, not low level things like the precise shade of a character's hair.

evazion said:

People just don't search for things this granular.

Well some people did, and now they won't be able to anymore. I just don't see what is gained by getting rid of these and making people unable to search something that is an objectively taggable concept; even if it's just 100-200 times a week, it's now 100-200 times a week that won't be able to search for something they want to search, and used to be able to search, on a site that is often recommended for having comprehensive tagging.

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