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Donmai

There should be more than 3 ratings

Posted under Bugs & Features

Each post is supposed to have a rating based on the sexual content in it. But some of the ratings can be vague. What I'm suggesting is that the Safe rating be split into three separate ratings, Safe+, Safe, and Safe-. Safe+ should not be for images that contain sexual content of any kind.

This has been brought up many times before. The general idea would be to have a "realer" safe rating, for actual SFW content, given how often stuff like covered nipples, slingshot swimsuits, light cameltoes etc are tagged as rating:s.

I think it's a great idea, but evazion's the only one who can act on it.

The effort to migrate posts to a new rating would be titanic given the size of the database, but honestly there's no time like the present given that the amount of pictures will always only increase.

(personal opinion, I think guro should not be included in such a rating)

Honestly Safe+, Safe-, and Safe all being ratings would probably just lead to a lot of confusion and mistagging. The problem is nobody wants to sift through 3.5 million rating:safe images to update ratings, so nothing ever gets done about safe not actually being safe.

Nah. Classifying SFW-Safe and NSFW-Safe would be too ambiguous and subject to cultural interpretation. Yeah, almost all swimsuit posts except of children wearing school swimsuits would be deemed NSFW-Safe, but would post #4540215 be NSFW-Safe because of all the exposed skin just because of the oversized breasts? Would it be fair to tag art of a character wearing identical clothing with smaller breasts as SFW-Safe despite both images having minimal sexual content? The focus of this particular image isn't arguably actually the breasts, it's just part of the character. Whether the artwork is too "sexy" is too ambiguous, anyway—just like with real life dress.

What about post #4527898? It's a lot more natural and would fly as a work-safe desktop wallpaper in most American offices, but would a small chest automatically make it more passable as work-safe?

Moe itself even has some inherent sexual characteristics—it's not just about making characters appear cute, but anything that evokes strong affection. If you're not used to it, a lot of anime-style artwork can seem sexual because of the heavy blushes, flushed faces, hyper-detailed eyes, and glistening features. You could easily make a case that post #4526639, post #2644583, post #4441120, and post #4528881 aren't work-safe for a variety of different reasons. If moe wasn't a bit inherently sexual or romantic, people would probably be less weirded out by anime at first and would see it more like cartoons.

I think it would be hard to establish a guideline for what's SFW-Safe that everyone could agree on and quickly identify. Is there a use case for browsing strictly SFW-only no-swimsuits anime artwork other than showing high-quality anime artwork to close family?

Updated

e? said:

I think it would be hard to establish a guideline for what's SFW-Safe that everyone could agree on and quickly identify.

There is a lot of difference between post #3874636 vs post #2871692 or post #3297183 or post #2715200, yet technically all of these are safe.
Disagreements happen constantly, anyone can see this by looking at the rating changes log. But since a lot of users of this site are coombrained and desensitized to porn, it's gotten to the point where even cameltoes routinely make it to rating:s because they're not considered questionable enough. Just look at rating:s cameltoe or rating:s covered_nipples.

Is there a use case for browsing strictly SFW-only no-swimsuits anime artwork other than showing anime artwork to close family?

What if I want to look at drawn pictures without being bombarded by pinups?

@nonamethanks said:

There is a lot of difference between post #3874636 vs post #2871692 or post #3297183 or post #2715200, yet technically all of these are safe.
Disagreements happen constantly, anyone can see this by looking at the rating changes log. But since a lot of users of this site are coombrained and desensitized to porn, it's gotten to the point where even cameltoes routinely make it to rating:s because they're not considered questionable enough. Just look at rating:s cameltoe or rating:s covered_nipples.

Yeah, I'd consider #3 to be Q for sure, 90% Q on #4, whereas with the current guidelines, #2 depends on whether you consider the swimsuit to be tasteful, as it's otherwise not sexual at all.

Similarly, almost all hiroki (yyqw7151) art should be Questionable even though they're almost all Safe—disrobing and overtly sexual. Though it's disrobing into a currently-considered-Safe outfit (swimsuit/lingerie), I guess it's the disorobing and subjective perception of the composition that makes it questionable—which could depend on how desensitized one is, as you say.

@nonamethanks said:
What if I want to look at drawn pictures without being bombarded by pinups?

Other than doing your best to exclude existing pinup-related tags from your search, it would probably be a better soluton to lump most tasteful swimsuits/lingerie and anything that's almost objectively lewd in nature into rating:questionable rather than make a new tag; I think that's what most users' initial thoughts are. But even whether a swimsuit looks S or Q depends too much on the character's proportions and the art's composition, so it's probably an unsolvable ambiguity unless all non-child swimsuit/llingerie posts are considered Q.

e? said:
Is there a use case for browsing strictly SFW-only no-swimsuits anime artwork other than showing high-quality anime artwork to close family?

Character poses. Phone backgrounds. D&D character profile pictures. My new discord profile picture. Browsing cute pictures of pokémon and not wanting to see Gardevoir feet pics or something. Not wanting to see foot focus images (which are undertagged) in general. Not wanting to see "rating:s bulge: 2509 posts".

There would be real utility in it. And, as I always say:
Safebooru is the best place to find foot porn.

I support splitting Safe into two tags, but agree that goddamn it would be an endeavor.

Do we really even need a second safe rating? I think having three ratings is not a problem, the problem is that what constitutes "safe" is extremely broad. Making a new rating but not cleaning up or trying to solve the existing rating issue would likely just end with the same situation.

What if safebooru.donmai.us (or another subdomain) was repurposed into a "truly safe" booru? So in addition to what it already filters, it also filters things that are Danbooru-Safe, but not Normal-Human-Being-Safe. So things like ass, bulge, cleavage, foot focus, etc. The exact list would be some debate but it would be a start.

Imo the safe+/safe- split makes sense. It doesn't create a new category, it just makes a new search option.
So for example, if i were to search rating:safe, it would bring me both safe+ and safe- posts. Searching rating:safe+ would instead bring me only s+.

ルーミア said:

The problem is nobody wants to sift through 3.5 million rating:safe images to update ratings, so nothing ever gets done about safe not actually being safe.

This wouldn't be an issue, because safe posts aren't going to be moved to a new category. People would just have to "update" the safe rating.
Plus, you'd probably be surprised. A few passionate people is probably most you need. A script can probably take care of most (all cameltoes would go to rating:s+, all no_humans scenery to s-...)

DownWithTheThickness said:

My two cents: the name of the rating implies, to me, that if there's any doubt whether something counts as "nsfw" or not, that it should just be marked "questionable".

I can agree that Questionable would then become bloated with "too safe" artworks. If you're gonna search for rating:q, you aren't searching for someone with the slightest hint of cameltoe/bulge.

If the border between S and Q is fuzzy, I think a S- class could indeed act as a buffer state between them. With the sheer quantity of the data to process and the lack of clear definition I'm doubtfull such task would be doable, but it is not really a problem if we are still able to search for S in the meantime.

Username_Hidden said:
I can agree that Questionable would then become bloated with "too safe" artworks. If you're gonna search for rating:q, you aren't searching for someone with the slightest hint of cameltoe/bulge.

Yeah, it just push the problem from a S+/S- split to a Q+/Q- split.

Tomzai said:

Guro could just as well be it's own ''rating''.

Thinking about it, on japanese sites ratings usually go SFW -> R-18 -> R-18G.
But i think that bloats the rating system too much. The reason behind R-18G's existance is so that people can avoid seeing it. Pixiv doesn't have a blacklist feature, but Danbooru does. Therefore a guro rating would be superfluous.

Username_Hidden said:

Thinking about it, on japanese sites ratings usually go SFW -> R-18 -> R-18G.
But i think that bloats the rating system too much. The reason behind R-18G's existance is so that people can avoid seeing it. Pixiv doesn't have a blacklist feature, but Danbooru does. Therefore a guro rating would be superfluous.

They also usually have an R-15 tag for questionable stuff (kinda matches our questionable rating somewhat), and an R-17 tag for something that is on the extreme end of questionable bordering on explicit, kinda analogous to doing a rating:questionable sexually_suggestive search here. There also exist semi-'joke' tags R-17.5 and R-17.9 for more... 'extreme' stuff, but those are used kinda as a joke instead of in a consistent manner.

That said, the R-15/R-17 tags are usually sort of underutilized on those websites. Most important thing seems like is to put R-18 and R-18G to alert to people about potentially objectionable content (which are also usually 'blacklisted' by default for a new user).

(On a side note, the R-18G tag is a bit more expansive than what most Western fans would call "guro", because it also includes other potentially 'grotesque' content like scat or vomit or... cockroaches. Yeah, people there will complain about seeing a drawn cockroach [in enough detail or in large enough numbers] if it's not censored or tagged R-18G.)

Though this is mostly just digression. And yes, for our purposes our guro tag is good enough.

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