Tagging tiny "watermark" characters unrelated to the main piece

The artist eudetenis (though he's probably not the only one) often puts a whole bunch of chibi characters in the corner of his artwork, presumably as some kind of watermark. These characters are usually tagged which is usually desired on this site, however in these cases I don't think it's desired at all! No one who searches for idw_(girls_frontline) is looking for post #3439263, because it doesn't have anything to do with IDW. This artist appears to reuse the same characters quite often and it seriously messes with the search results for those characters that have a low number of posts.

Could we please have some policy change regarding the tagging of these "watermark" characters who happen to be in an artwork but aren't actually relevant to it?

This is a huge can of worms because a lot of tagging is done for minor / half-out-of-frame details that searchers don't really want, but there's no good way to specify relevancy for a tag.

I agree it's a bad situation, but I don't suspect there will be a solution other than blacklisting eudetenis or subtracting them from your saved search.

The culprit here is actually a writer who commissions multiple artists for his work. We don't have any way of accounting for commissioners at the moment - would a pool work?

Otherwise, we have the cameo tag for situations like this, as well as the underused *_(cameo) tags for specific characters. Applying those would be possible, albeit clunky.

Tagging the watermark itself (or maybe the commissioner) would make more sense than tagging every single character. There are posts that have literally 20+ tags just for this watermark. If you must list all the characters, it can be done in a translation note.

How about replacing the tags with something like character_watermark?

I've stumbled upon something relatively similar recently too wherein an artist censors their work with a picture of the Astolfo bean plushie, and those pictures are thus tagged astolfo_(fate) which makes pictures of totally irrelevant characters show up in an astolfo_(fate) search. I'm not sure there's a perfect solution to something like this.

I've tried removing the tags on a few posts; let me know what you think.

Per the discussion in post #3612111 , resurrecting this topic. I'm firmly on the side that believes these things should not be tagged with their respective franchises/characters. They are, at best, irrelevant to the picture they are on besides as someone's signature, and add clutter to searches for their franchises/ characters. I would propose removing the tags from the offending pictures entirely, or failing that group them under a new, different tag. "Character art signature", perhaps.

Judging from their tag history it seems that user #462237 is the one who have been tagging (and re-adding) the characters/copyrights, at least on the more recent posts about this. You can even see on the first page that they removed the singature characters tag ad re-added all the copyright/character tags that DreamFromTheLayer above was talking about.

Garrus said:

I would propose removing the tags from the offending pictures entirely, or failing that group them under a new, different tag. "Character art signature", perhaps.

Same thing i proposed in topic #16222

Kayako said:

To make this work, we would basically have to create new tags in this category for every character that has ever appeared like this in an image, which would be a LOT of work.

It would be preferable if we could qualify within a post itself which characters were "in focus" and which were not, without the need for more general, site-wide searchable tags. But danbooru doesn't currently have that kind of functionality.

Dissatisfied with the answer, but yeah, unless someone here wants to code for this particular reason there's not much to do

To be fair, I haven't contacted the user in question about the tags, although I don't think there's anyone else who wants the tags.

We could simply use the existing _(cameo) qualifier or something similar if we really need to keep something, though I don't think it's that important.

What is the difference between using *_(cameo) tags and the tag cameo iself?

How about "nonstandard signature" and "meme"? It conveys what is there well enough, is two tags, and the creation of the former would allow it to apply to more than this specific case, should different nonstandard watermarks/signatures pop up in the future. If someone is searching for instances of a specific artist's signatures, all they need to do is search "nonstandard signature + artist".

Garrus said:

How about "nonstandard signature"...

We already have artist_logo.

忍猫 said:

What is the difference between using *_(cameo) tags and the tag cameo iself?

The former specifies the character without actually interacting with the respective character tag. If somebody cares enough to want to keep track of the artist signature characters, might as well do it that way.

feline_lump said:

The former specifies the character without actually interacting with the respective character tag. If somebody cares enough to want to keep track of the artist signature characters, might as well do it that way.

But I thought that tags that useless and specific should be removed? I've used *_(cameo) tags before and they got removed, and I used cameo before for a name being mentioned, etc and it got removed.

Bump.

This topic is getting a bit old but this is still an ongoing issue, so it would be nice if we could finally come to some kind of decision. Is there anyone other than user #462237 who finds all these extra character/copyright tags useful?

Personally, I don't think the watermark characters should be tagged. But is there really any way to prevent someone from adding them if they are determined to do so?

It's pretty much one commissioner having them added to pictures, and one user adding the tags persistently, so it'd be a pretty specific rule if we made a rule against it. But, I think a good amount of people who is not that user believe the tagging is negatively affecting the searching experience so I don't think it'd be bad if we did so.

At the very least, I feel like the copyright tags should be removed; that's always how I run into those images and go "what the heck, those don't look like any characters from X", followed by "oh it's eudetenis again". But then anyone who regularly searches for the characters included in the watermark would be just as annoyed (if not more so, with the ratio of bogus results being worse) so they'd probably want the tags completely removed. Though in some of the cases the added characters are more integrated into the image rather than just slapped on, so I think those should stay as it's no different than numerous examples of a character doll or poster in the background

Also I'm developing a suspicion the commissioner and said user are the same person, considering how many of them seem to have been uploaded by him and how persistent he is with the tagging. It really gives me the vibes of artists who slap tags of all the popular franchises on their art to force people to stumble across it (90s search engines and the html meta tag, anyone?) Although I don't notice it on the pixiv source pages in this case, but then pixiv also has a 10-tag limit.