Reworking the rating system

A long-standing complaint about Danbooru is that the "Safe" rating isn't actually safe. It includes too much lewd content. It's also a frequent source of confusion for new users that "Safe" doesn't mean SFW. This has come up various times in the past, both on the forum (topic #18572, topic #20849) and in the Discord.

I've thought this over a lot, and my proposal is this:

• Add a new "General" rating, for G-rated content.
• Rename the current "Safe" rating to something else. "Sensitive", "Suggestive", or something else entirely.
• Move posts from "Safe" to "General".

Essentially, carve out the subset of rating:safe that is actually safe and move it to a new rating.

rating:G would be for things like scenery, innocent comics, portraits, chibis, fully clothed characters, cute animals, pokemon creatures, mecha, no humans posts, etc. Things that have no sexual content whatsoever. Things that are completely safe for work, or safe to view in front of other people in any other context.

rating:S would be for any kind of ecchi, sexy, risque, or suggestive content, even mildly so. Anything not rated G. Things like revealing clothes, swimsuits, lingerie, underwear, pantyshots, cameltoes, covered nipples, and things heavily focused on the ass, breasts, cleavage, feet, armpits, etc. Basically anything focused on sexy anime girls.

I can already hear people saying "Hey, that's really strict, things like swimsuits aren't necessarily lewd". The point is to draw a distinction between completely innocent content, like scenery or comics or cute things, and the "sexy" content that makes up the majority of Danbooru.

I expect only maybe 10%-15% of posts to be rated G. Most posts currently rated Safe would stay at their current rating. Keeping the new rating extremely narrow makes the job of re-rating posts easier.

Obviously, this would be a major change, and re-rating posts, figuring out where to draw the line in different situations, getting everybody on-board with the new system would be a lot of work. But it's something that I think is worth it and that needs to be done.

I think this is a perfectly acceptable solution to the lewdity drift and confusion regarding borderline content.

This sounds reasonable, though I'd like to know how this'll affect safe mode/safebooru domain. Would it be adjusted to General mode, or is there going to be an option to choose between a safe mode like the current one and a separate "extra-safe" mode that's restricted to G posts?

Great change.

since this is what newgrounds already does with Everyone, Teen, Mature, Adult im fine with it

as long as the new name for safe isnt really unintuitive

I basically agree with the sentiment here, but I've been gardening rating:q posts for a while based on our current rating guidelines. If we're moving some things from rating:q to rating:s, what does that mean exactly, and where do we draw the line? The examples given are awfully broad - I don't think post #5350203 should be the same rating as post #5361713, for instance, it makes more sense next to post #5227268.

Does rating:q remain in the new system? If so, splitting S into "actually SFW", and the remainder isn't a bad idea. I'm not sure about merging "questionable" into the current "safe" or "explicit" though.

I agree with the change, although i feel like "G rating" may cause confusion with the ratings of other websites (namely, pixiv's R-18G, where G stands for Guro)

The solution sounds good. I certainly have thought we probably needed an additional safer rating than what we currently have.

I'm sure we'll have arguments though over any garments like swimwear, leotards (ballet and gymnastics), and buruma/running briefs (old gym uniforms and modern track uniforms) regularly used in a public setting, but even with that it'd still be worth creating the new rating tier.

feline_lump said:

I basically agree with the sentiment here, but I've been gardening rating:q posts for a while based on our current rating guidelines. If we're moving some things from rating:q to rating:s, what does that mean exactly, and where do we draw the line? The examples given are awfully broad - I don't think post #5350203 should be the same rating as post #5361713, for instance, it makes more sense next to post #5227268.

post #5227268 is Explicit. People need to stop sticking blatantly exposed genitalia in Q. That ass shot is probably staying in Q, though.

blindVigil said:

post #5227268 is Explicit. People need to stop sticking blatantly exposed genitalia in Q. That ass shot is probably staying in Q, though.

This is true, but this is in response to the OP saying (among other things) cameltoes and ass focus posts are going to S. That's a definite change from our current standards, and I feel like that's drawing the line a little broadly.

My position is the same as Shinjidude's, if we'll have 4 different ratings or at least 3 then I agree, I always thought we should have a "real safe" rating.

feline_lump said:

This is true, but this is in response to the OP saying (among other things) cameltoes and ass focus posts are going to S. That's a definite change from our current standards, and I feel like that's drawing the line a little broadly.

I don't have an explanation for cameltoes, but ass focus posts were never explicitly listed under the questionable criteria, there's about 5.5k posts under ass_focus rating:q and about 2k under ass_focus rating:s. Ass focus definitely relies on other details to decide its rating.

I don't think the list of things that qualify for the new S rating is meant to be a list of things that definitely must go in it, but a list of things that definitely can't go in the new G rating.

I'm fully in support of splitting rating:s into "actual safe" and "sexual but nothing explicit", but if we do so we'll have to take a harsher stance on people who frequently misrate things. I don't want a new rating to be an excuse for S/Q becoming a trash heap because of some absurd insistence that everything gets as low a rating as possible.

As an aside, it would be nice to also have some convenient way to search for rating:g or rating:s and rating:q or rating:e together. Not super important but could be nice instead of having to add (rating:g or rating:s) to every search, for example. Something like -rating:nsfw maybe. Nvm on this I just saw 141044d which makes that unnecessary.

Sounds good. There have been times when i posted sexually_suggestive material but is not so bad to be treated Q or E and i laugh to myself about how it's safe under danbooru standards.

However because S has meant safe for a while I'm not sure changing its meaning would be good because people will still think it's Safe instead of Suggestive.

Perhaps M for Mature?

G for General
M for Mature
Q for Questionable
E for Explicit

Those are my thoughts on the matter

jay19 said:

Sounds good. There have been times when i posted sexually_suggestive material but is not so bad to be treated Q or E and i laugh to myself about how it's safe under danbooru standards.

However because S has meant safe for a while I'm not sure changing its meaning would be good because people will still think it's Safe instead of Suggestive.

Perhaps M for Mature?

G for General
M for Mature
Q for Questionable
E for Explicit

Those are my thoughts on the matter

Mature sounds like it would be placed between Q and E rather than G and Q. I think that would cause confusion.

Yeah "mature" sounds too strong for swimsuit images and light fanservice and the like, also it breaks keeping current "S" as "S" (just changing the meaning), which seemed to be Evazion's suggestion (though I get that that's your point).

If people are concerned about "G" maybe being mixed up with "R-18G", then how about "C" for "clean" for the new rating? It also reinforces that it's safer than the old "safe".

That sounds similar to the system pixiv also uses. There's the separation between "R-18" and "All ages" but also an additional division of the latter category between "Contains slightly sexual or suggestive content" or "doesn't". For instance, post #5363499 is tagged safe, as it is under the current definition, but you can't see the post on pixiv without having an account, because it's marked as sensitive content.

In fact, I wonder if it would be possible to detect and automatically set a placeholder rating based on the pixiv rating, like there are automatic translated tags.

I'm 100% for this approach in the OP. I agree that the subset of G rated posts needs to be strict. Specially to minimize mis-ratings or rating bleed over.

The only suggestion I have is of we are renaming safe for the sake of clarity, naming "suggestive" makes it sound synonymous with "Q" questionable. In fact, questionable its sexually suggestive stuff.

As dumb as it may sound.... S= sexy

Anyways great idea and it will improve safebooru and discord compliance by a lot.

Doesn't really seem like there are a lot of good options keeping the naming with S to mean a small or limited amount of sexuality in the content, unless you're going to use something like "slightly suggestive."