How (Not) To Use Danbooru

With many new people posting images and the community become a bit more public, I wanted to talk a little bit about what to do on Danbooru and what not to.

ON POSTING IMAGES
1. Do not post images that are bad.
2. If you have a million pictures to upload, chances are they are not all good, unless you are albert.
3. Tag things you post, at least somewhat. Other users will likely flesh out the tags if the image is worth seeing.
4. Things unrelated to the "doujin" culture are usually not acceptable posts. Furry images are explicitly not allowed. This is not to say that every picture has to be 'Katanas And Animes', but you probably shouldn't post your Captain Planet x Star Wars fanart.

ON TAGGING
1. Tags are a way for people to find things. Therefore, tags should be useful, and actually categorize the image, preferrably in categories of which there are images already.
2. Series, characters, and artists are some of the best tags, followed by physical traits and clothing like "red_eyes" or "glasses."
3. Tags should contain only pertinent information about the image. For example, post #82715 has the "hair" tag. Why? If you were searching for pictures that were 'about' hair, and you got that, I don't think you'd be satisfied. A better use of the tag would be something like post #39150 or even post #133291.
4. Subjective tags generally contain almost no information. The "cute" tag is useless, for example; the tag might as well be "Some_person_likes_this_picture," which is more like a rating and nobody is going to search for that.
5. Tags can't contain spaces; use an underscore. I recently saw an image posted by a new user with the "Music" tag and the "Notes" tag, when clearly they meant to add the "Music_notes" tag. Which, by the way, isn't an especially good tag because there are no other images with it, and "music" covers about the same area.

ON COMMENTING
1. Post something that other people want to read. The majority of comments are useless and irritating. Don't tell us you like a picture, or that you think it's funny.
2. Useful comments, e.g. "This image is a duplicate this other post" or "I translated this" are good.
3. If you must post something useless, at least invoke discussion or make a joke or something.

I encourage other veteran users to add their advice to this thread.

Reading the help page should be a requirement before any form of participation:

http://miezaru.donmai.us/help

Particularly these subsections:

» Frequently Asked Questions
» Artists
» Cheat Sheet
» Posts
» Ratings
» Tags
» Tag Aliases

This is good advice. Note that once you become an established member I can tolerate a little breaking of the rules, because I break the rules too. But if you're looking to make a good first impression, then you need to do better.

I just want to emphasize "On Tagging" #4.

If you're tagging a physical trait of some sort, or clothing, then it should be prominent. I admit nobody is perfect at this, including myself. But when the thighhighs are visible only for about 3 pixels at the bottom of the screen, it should not be tagged thighhighs. Or when someone is barefoot but their feet are not even remotely prominent or detailed, it's not barefoot or feet or toes.

Also, about PARODIES. My understanding at present is that crossovers/references/parodies/etc work like this, based on how I tag it and how I see others tag it:

Two characters from different shows in the same image - crossover.

>> Tag all series tags, tag all characters - see post #135281

One character parodying/dressing as a character from another show, but no one from the other show is in the image - *parody*

>> Tag both series, but tag only the *visible* character. (This isn't universally done this way, but it's the majority. If Konata is dressing like Haruhi, it's still not actually Haruhi) - see post #134379

Two characters from unrelated series who are linked by the same voice actor/actress (seiyuu) and are in the same image...
OR
A character referencing their role in another - *seiyuu_joke*

>> Tag both series, tag visible characters - see post #134532 for one char, post #135570 for two.

I admit seiyuu_joke is very rarely used, it seemed like it would be for a time, but then sort of stopped. I try to use it though, when I get the joke.

As with #4/prominence, nobody is perfect at this and I don't think there's even complete agreement on what I said, but it seems to reflect how things are tagged generally. If someone thinks I mixed something up, let me know.

> Tag both series, but tag only the *visible* character. (This isn't universally done this way, but it's the majority. If Konata is dressing like Haruhi, it's still not actually Haruhi) - see post #134379

I've always liked to add the tags "cosplay" and the name of the character whose costume is being worn in images like these, since otherwise you actually can't do a reverse lookup -

eg. "hakurei_reimu cosplay -photo" would show all images of other characters wearing Reimu's miko outfit, but a search like that wouldn't show up an image image tagged as "parody touhou ichigo_mashimaro ana_coppola (cosplay)".
I could look up general touhou parodies, or general touhou cosplay tagged images, but I couldn't look up for other characters wearing that specific outfit only. Might be a small hassle, but personally I've felt that it's still worth the "mismatch" to tag the target of the cosplay there, even if that character ('misleadingly') isn't itself present in the image.

On an unrelated note, is there a way to do quotes properly on this thing?

I do add the cosplay sometimes, I meant to mention that.

As for tagging the not-present character too, well like I said we don't all do it the same way, but it's still overwhelmingly not using the other tag on the whole, I think. Not that I don't see where you're coming from.

Ah well, just shows that (almost) no rules are absolute.

In cases of one character parodying another I will personally tag both characters.

If there is a pre-existing tag with a defined type (artist, copyright etc.), will you still need to add other tags of the same name using the artist: prefix, or will that be determined by the ones that came before it?

Like, for example, someone has already made a "copyright:lovely_idol" tag, would I need to tag further images as "lovely_idol" or would I still need to add it as "copyright:lovely_idol"?

You can just use lovely_idol.

I've always found tags that describe specific particularities of an image to be useful in finding them later on. An example of this would be the rabbitman tag:

http://miezaru.donmai.us/post?tags=rabbitman

(Arguably, it could be renamed to rabbit_man, but whatever)

Out of the more than 100 000 images only 2 images actually correspond to it, yet both of them feature said character fairly prominently and in both cases that character adds a certain dynamic to the picture (if the rabbit man wasn't there, they wouldn't look as striking). Thus the rabbit man is well worth pointing out, even if he isn't a popular character.

A good way to find out if a minor tag exists is to do some wildcard searches (bunny* and rabbit* in this example) and tag images accordingly. And if the tag doesn't exist for something very particular, then make a new one, because, as a general rule, having many tags is usually better than having none at all.

(By the way, a search for rabbit* yielded an artist in need of retagging:

http://miezaru.donmai.us/post?tags=rabbit_%28artist%29

Only two of the 14 images are visible to me so I can't do it myself)

It's important not to overdo it, though. For example, describing every little piece of food in this image:

http://miezaru.donmai.us/post/show/135483

is not very useful, because their only purpose is to give the image an okama-esque backdrop. 'toes' and 'chopsticks' are more useful additions.

And this brings us to another important point of tagging that some people tend to ignore: add tags to images that were added by others. Make it a habit to check the tag list after looking at an image to see if something is missing and add whatever you deem is necessary. This will greatly improve danbooru as a whole in the long run.

This has been changed to hermmy as per the pen name (in english no less) on the top page: http://yotsuba.saiin.net/~rabbit/top.htm and artist entry added.

I assume that's what you were getting at by mentioning it, at least.

I was actually mentioning it because his/her tag was 'rabbit_(artist) (artist)', which is redundant, but fixing the name is even better.

As I understand it the currently implemented artist system differentiates between tags and artists via the 'artist:' prefix, making the old tagging system ('artistname_(artist)') obsolete.

So if there was a picture drawn by the artist bunny and featuring a bunny I would just tag it with 'bunny' and 'artist:bunny' and the system would automatically tag it with 'bunny' and 'bunny (artist)', the latter having the word '(artist)' in the appropriate red parentheses.

But looking at the artist index I noticed 'al_azif_(artist)', so I assume that either a) not all artists have been re-tagged yet or b) it doesn't work quite like that (yet).

if you tag something as artist:banana it will mark everything with the banana tag as banana (artist)

rabbit_(artist) was used to disambiguate between the artist and actual rabbits.

I see. Thanks for clearing that up.

We need a better solution for that.

In my opinion having 'artist:bunny' instead of 'bunny_(artist)' would be a better solution. I don't think it would impact the speed of the tagging process that much and it would "clean up" the current tags.

Plus, the prefix shouldn't be mandatory when there is no normal tag of the same name, i.e. you can still write 'takamichi' as a tag and it would appear as 'takamichi (artist)'.

But then you could end up in a situation where you have 'banana (artist)' but you couldn't add the (new) normal tag 'banana'...

You touch on something I've thought a lot about but never came up with a good alternative for. The _(type) issue.

The problem with artist: coming first is that it just messes up alphabetization, unless Albert can just have it ignore that by default, but I don't want to type 'artist:' into danbooruup and the autocomplete come down with like a thousand entries =P And it doesn't really solve the _(artist) issue, it just moves it to the front of the word.

Actually, I think I like it less because it's just easier to see the tags at a glance when the real word comes first, rather than having to visually filter out all those types (which isn't an issue when it comes after the tag). And if you use a colon, Albert has to change the way we apply types, since artist:tagname is the format right now.

Also, the prefix is *not* mandatory, so it *does* currently work like you mention in the 2nd paragraph. If I tag something 'mei' it becomes 'mei (artist)' [note, not mei_(artist) (artist)... we need formatting and basic colors in the forum] because 'mei' is already tagtyped to artist.

And yes, as you say, that means you can't go and add a non-artist 'mei' tag.

In the hierarchy of simplicity, it seems like no type tags come first, then copyrights, then characters, then artists. No type tags rarely conflict with typed tags (exceptions like 'rabbit' exist) thankfully.

So Potemayo the character is tagged 'potemayo_(character)' while Potemayo the show is just 'potemayo'. An artist called Potemayo would be 'potemayo_(artist)'. The series gets the simplest tag.

Likewise, a character known (only) as Sakura would be tagged simply 'sakura', and would therefore beat an artist named Sakura to the simpler tag. Thus the artist would have to take the _(artist) qualifier rather than the character taking _(character). Thankfully this is not as big a problem as one might think because we use full character names, and it's very rare for exact collisions to occur there.

The most obvious solution would be to not have tagtypes apply automatically, so you COULD have an artist 'banana' and a character 'banana' and a show 'banana' and the actual fruit 'banana' without the ugly _(type) qualifier.

Right?

Well, no, because as you noted, then we have to re-tagtype every damn time we upload any character, artist or series, and that's a far, far more irksome situation than just dealing with parenthetical qualifiers, in my eyes.

Ah, nothing is perfect.

About the only way it can be done is to have 4 boxes on the bookmarklet and danbooruup - artist:, character:, copyright:, and no type. And... honestly, I do not recommend this at all. It's really just confusing for people and could get really ugly fast. And then you'd need to extend it to the Edit Post interface and the edit section under the posts itself and... no, just *no*.

I really think the status quo is the best balance of accuracy and sanity, imperfect though it is.

I adopted the whole parentheses stuff from Wikipedia, where it seems to work pretty well. It's true that we can get cases like name_(artist) (artist) on the tag list, but I think that's more of a cosmetic issue than a usability one.

It's also true that currently there's no real standard to when we add qualifiers like (artist) or (character) to a tag. It's mostly a case of whichever comes first.

"It's also true that currently there's no real standard to when we add qualifiers like (artist) or (character) to a tag. It's mostly a case of whichever comes first."
Mostly, yeah, but I know I've qualified _(artist) on tags that had no existing posts (of any type or lack thereof), just to avoid potential, relatively likely, problems. Mostly when the artist goes by a single name PN/HN and it's a common one that characters often have. When I make that decision in my head, it's because I prioritize simplifying character over simplifying artist.

As we add more and more artists, we come across more things like that, though I'm constantly amazed how it hasn't been nearly as big as problem (artists sharing names) as I'd have expected. It does tempt me to use a site name or something else much more unique, though, when I see an artist like 'taro' or whatever (random example, no idea if thats a tag). I've mostly avoided that though.

The reason I'm stating this it's for users who don't understand what "bad" images are.

Examples of images that may be or can be bad:

Images that are of [certain] pornographic content [unless if albert allows it],

Images intended to insult, harm, attack, anyone.

Images that are copyright without the copyright owner's permission.

Images that are of spamming, viral, worms, etc [things that may damage/crash/annoy users].

Images that may be deemed illegal based on your country's jurisdictions, unacceptable to the public interest/moralities.

If you're truly unsure if a posted image is deemed acceptable/unacceptable contact the administrator for verification. Otherwise [for banning prevention] DON'T POST IT.