Notifacation of tag merging or otherwise

Maybe some time in the future a notification can be sent out to all members to help keep people aware of tag merging or changes such as when tag #pussies went to #vagina sorry for the blatant use of words but it was the only example I could come up with off the top of my head.

Having a heads up on stuff like this is nice. Even though I do understand it would auto correct of this and give you #vagina if you typed in and tried to use #pussies seeing as how one was merged with the other. But for those new and those that don't always keep up with tagging. It could help people from creating two hundred worthless tags.

Just a thought.

Interesting issue. For starters we'd have to figure out which tag changes actually matter. A constant feed of every tag change that happens would probably be useless (though entirely possible). Small changes to insignificant tags happen all the time. So we should at least restrict it to tags that have been applied more then X times.

Secondly, which changes are important. Likely candidates are merging, renaming and changing of aliases.

As with everything there are two ways to go about it, either via convention or by coding something.

1. Via convention: Have a thread and tell staff members to post about changes to “major” tags. This is easy but prone to errors.
2. Programmatic: Have a public page where recent changes to significant tags are logged. To be honest I doubt it'd be worth the effort. Most people won't look at it unless we put it somewhere very obvious.

I've been thinking about various ways to make moderation of major tags more consistent. We could have some sort of “established” tags, that can only be edited by admins/devs. Those would include anything with more then X wallpapers as well as manually selected ones. This would facilitate the decision which tags are worth mentioning and also ensure that they remain relatively stable.

My concern is that this kinda feature would be considered spammy by users who only join the site to browse wallpapers, and have no desire to know this. We'd need to provide this as an opt-in feature.

Another issue is, how many would be interested in this feature? If the ratio of users interested is too low, then developmental effort to make this feature may not be justified, in case of Option-2.

Option-3 is to have a tag-edit history made available in the individual tags page, where info such as mergers, aliases, etc. is found. People interested can just look it up.

I think any an all of these would be worth it to those that actually want to try to follow the rules and keep updated with changes as they occur. I find them by myself but it would be nice to scan a page with all this info on it or be notified of changes like this at least to me it would be worth it.

I am very flexible I don't care if I have to click to get on a page with this on it. I just know I would enjoy having it.

I also like your idea Gandalf about having fixed tags that can't be changed or deleted or otherwise duped or affixed.

Warning! The following comment is NSFW!

Since we are already on topic (sort of), replacing the commonly recognized word "pussy", that stands for the female genitalia as a whole, with the anatomical term vagina, was not a good choice, since "vagina" is the name of a quite specific part of the female reproductive organ that is not on the outside.

If you want to avoid using colloquial terms like pussy, but still would want to call things by their name correctly, the appropriate term would be "vulva" instead, but I don't think that even 1/10th of the people who easily recognize the word "pussy" would even know what "vulva" means, and you have to carefully consider naming choices, when the community you want to cater for, is international.

In some languages latin terms are more commonly recognized than others, and what would be evident for someone speaking english (either natively or quite fluently as a non-native speaker like myself), wouldn't necessarily be for someone only vaguely familiar with english. The other extreme is, when the use of a latin expression is so evident, it's considered natural. I know some spanish guys who can't quite come to terms with using the word "ass", they always say "anal" which isn't even a noun, but it comes easier for them, because they speak a latin language.

tl;dr: Sometimes you can not afford to be civil, and need to phrase things colloquially, if your goal is to be understood by all of your peers, who all speak different languages and have a different grasp of english. I have quite a lot of experience with this, not only because I translate for a living, but I've actually studied linguistics, and have been managing multilingual communities since 2008.

We do have tag-aliasing feature, wherein search for "pussy" will lead to images tagged with "vagina", so this is not a huge issue in terms of search results. Non-native speakers searching for colloquial terms will still get the results they were aiming to get.

However, I agree with you, @1355970, in that non-native English speakers may have a better a grasp of colloquial words (because of their popular media usage, for example) than the formal terms when it comes to certain words, like "pussy", "boobs", etc., and that tag editors should take popular usage of words into consideration while merging, as we are indeed a website for all the world, not just those fluent/educated in English.

Personally, in above example, I would have chosen "pussy" and merged/aliased the rest of the terms with it, especially since the same seems to have been done for "boobs", wherein the formal term "breasts" has been merged/aliased into colloquial term "boobs", instead of the other way round.

Brokenvegetable : How does the ability to follow rules equate with knowledge of tag mergers?

lezboyd Well not necessarily does following the rule equals knowledge of tag mergers, But I am sure that those that want to tag walls properly will want to know of the updates if tags get merged. I know I would like to at least stay on top of the more commonly used ones as they get merged.

As you type the word say "Pussy" into the tag field "Vagina" will come up... but if some people don't understand that the words were merged they may try to create the "pussy" tag or another word they want to use rather then use a word they didn't type into the field that pops up. I just think that maybe it might help cut down on the creation or tags that don't need to be created or words that will just be merged and then deleted as tags. Definitely need at least a page with all the most common created tags or some kind of page you can go to to see examples of wrongly tagged walls and correctly tagged walls.

I am still on the learning curve for some tags as well. I know some people will tag colors to walls. I know that some walls are colored but they use them if even a little of the color is shown. And there are some walls that just are super hard to tag with any kind of tag. I just think that a page that really puts tagging into perspective to everyone might be something that would be worth looking into. I understand that there is a small tagging things in the FAQ, But I'm talking something really in depth that could answer 75% of all questions that might come up as far as how to tag.

Just a thought.

Brokenvegetable said:

lezboyd Well not necessarily does following the rule equals knowledge of tag mergers, But I am sure that those that want to tag walls properly will want to know of the updates if tags get merged. I know I would like to at least stay on top of the more commonly used ones as they get merged. As you type the word say "Pussy" into the tag field "Vagina" will come up... but if some people don't understand that the words were merged they may try to create the "pussy" tag or another word they want to use rather then use a word they didn't type into the field that pops up. I just think that maybe it might help cut down on the creation or tags that don't need to be created or words that will just be merged and then deleted as tags. Definitely need at least a page with all the most common created tags or some kind of page you can go to to see examples of wrongly tagged walls and correctly tagged walls. I am still on the learning curve for some tags as well. I know some people will tag colors to walls. I know that some walls are colored but they use them if even a little of the color is shown. And there are some walls that just are super hard to tag with any kind of tag. I just think that a page that really puts tagging into perspective to everyone might be something that would be worth looking into. I understand that there is a small tagging things in the FAQ, But I'm talking something really in depth that could answer 75% of all questions that might come up as far as how to tag. Just a thought.

I made a thread recommending guidelines for these things over on the subreddit a while back. I've not gotten around to moving it over but I'll do that soon in that case.

Two things about searching for variations on a tag's name: as mentioned, aliases are supposed to account for that, and... it's not perfect, so for example, users can still make tags that are already aliases of existing ones. We'll get around to it...

Then with lady bits, there's the problem of leaning too much towards technically accurate, or colloquial and (hopefully) more usable. Even a scientific term like 'vulva' doesn't cover everything, but then 'female genitals' would be ridiculous. Then with 'pussy', I'm sure loads of people all over the world understand it, but it's still slang, and slang's meaning can vary from place to place (like @1355970's example of 'anal'). When someone changed #pussy to #vagina, there didn't seem to be any problem with people using it, so I changed the other tags to match it. Folks seem fine with using it properly from what I've seen since then and it's a compromise for something which can be referred to in all kinds of ways.