Killing Color Streak Tags 3.0

Posted under Tags

BUR #44532 is pending approval.

deprecate red_streaks
deprecate green_streaks
deprecate aqua_streaks
deprecate blue_streaks
deprecate pink_streaks
deprecate white_streaks
deprecate purple_streaks
deprecate orange_streaks
deprecate black_streaks
deprecate brown_streaks
deprecate grey_streaks
deprecate blonde_streaks

Third times the charm I guess. It has been about a year since attempt #1 (topic #28342), and six months since my last attempt in topic #30410 and both times went absolutely nowhere. Now topic #32712 exists using them (and while unlikely to succeed, is proof of what needs to be done), so let's try this again, and preferably this time an admin can approve or reject the BUR (I won't be happy if manually rejected, but I won't try making this BUR again if that happens). We need to decide the fate of these tags, sooner or later, and in my opinion they deserve to be deprecated.

I wanted to try nuking them again, but I had a feeling a full-on nuke would bring more harm than good at this point (that's how bad they've gotten), so loathe as I am to do it, let's just go for the deprecation, I guess. I'm not going to rehash myself explaining how awful these tags are (and why their defenders like them), just read the other two threads attempting this for details.

Updated by Knowledge Seeker

And that's fair. I don't think the opposing argument is necessarily bad or anything. I just think the solution of colored streak tags is not a great one. There was talk in topic #30410 for, say, "mostly red hair" as a solution, but I'm not sure how solidly a solution that'd be right now.

I don't think these streak tags get searched very much either, which was one of the key reasons Evazion cited for nuking light blue hair and dark blue hair in forum #330076 (not that I think these are a very similar situation, but I can see this being pointed out). To me, it seems the main argument for them is to aid in searching for fully colored hair instead of actually, you know, getting searched for by people. Is that an accurate assessment?

If so, then perhaps I can propose the idea of "fully red hair", for example, as an alternative? If people are really having a hard time finding fully colored hair, then that implies it's no longer the norm tagging wise. If we have tags for what people actually want to see instead of these weird work-arounds to exclude the streaked hair, then perhaps that'd be the step we'd want to go.

Of course, if we do that, multicolored hair will need some reworking in order to not get fully chopped, but we can cross that bridge when we get there.

Knowledge_Seeker said:

...perhaps I can propose the idea of "fully red hair", for example, as an alternative? If people are really having a hard time finding fully colored hair, then that implies it's no longer the norm tagging wise. If we have tags for what people actually want to see instead of these weird work-arounds to exclude the streaked hair, then perhaps that'd be the step we'd want to go.

Of course, if we do that, multicolored hair will need some reworking in order to not get fully chopped, but we can cross that bridge when we get there.

A fully_red_hair tag would essentially just be a tandem tag for the red_hair -multicolored_hair search. It's also flawed in much the same way as an unmodified red_hair search, as while users looking for red hair certainly might want to exclude post #9652067, they're probably actively looking for post #9651101, which fully_red_hair would not catch.

While I can completely understand why your goal was "enable users to find red_hair posts where all of the hair is red", the goal should really be "enable users to find red_hair posts where a majority of the hair is red". And on that note...

Knowledge_Seeker said:

There was talk in topic #30410 for, say, "mostly red hair" as a solution, but I'm not sure how solidly a solution that'd be right now.

That was me. Here's what I said:

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These streak tags are bad, period. They follow the inefficient trend of having to exclude five different tags rather than just search for a single tag. For them to actually work the way everyone's clamoring they do and let us search for hair that's mainly one color, we'd need a search like red_hair -red_streaks -red_inner_hair -red_tips -red-striped_hair -red_hair_roots. However, those other tags don't even exist, making color_streaks extra useless.

If you want to find characters with mostly red hair, then you should just tag mostly_red_hair. I'm open to better names, but the idea itself is sound. The very existence of (and recent uptick in) characters with multicolored_hair, and the multitude of different ways that multicolored hair can be depicted, means that the only real solution to this is to invert the current approach. Instead of having to create, maintain and exclude 50 other tags, all we'd need is one for each color, which can then imply the base hair color tag.

I'll admit there's still inconvenience in this approach, because searching for mostly red hair and completely red hair at the same time is impossible. However, both individual searches (red_hair -multicolored_hair and mostly_red_hair) are very simple and easy to use, and a vast improvement over the patchwork mess that would be necessary to maintain red_hair -red_streaks -red_inner_hair -red_tips -red-striped_hair -red_hair_roots.

Everything I said then remains true now. On their own, the color_streak tags do not let users exclude posts where the hair is mostly other color(s), because there are many different ways to only have a small amount of red in your hair. On its own, mostly_red_hair would completely solve this issue.

AngryZapdos said:

A fully_red_hair tag would essentially just be a tandem tag for the red_hair -multicolored_hair search. It's also flawed in much the same way as an unmodified red_hair search, as while users looking for red hair certainly might want to exclude post #9652067, they're probably actively looking for post #9651101, which fully_red_hair would not catch.

While I can completely understand why your goal was "enable users to find red_hair posts where all of the hair is red", the goal should really be "enable users to find red_hair posts where a majority of the hair is red".

Ooh, yeah I didn't think of those majority red hair posts when I came up with this idea. Yeah, that'd be a problem if we go with that. Also, yeah excluding multicolored hair is probably the better solution. Something these tags fail to do because then they'd need to imply multicolored hair.

That was me. Here's what I said:

Show

These streak tags are bad, period. They follow the inefficient trend of having to exclude five different tags rather than just search for a single tag. For them to actually work the way everyone's clamoring they do and let us search for hair that's mainly one color, we'd need a search like red_hair -red_streaks -red_inner_hair -red_tips -red-striped_hair -red_hair_roots. However, those other tags don't even exist, making color_streaks extra useless.

If you want to find characters with mostly red hair, then you should just tag mostly_red_hair. I'm open to better names, but the idea itself is sound. The very existence of (and recent uptick in) characters with multicolored_hair, and the multitude of different ways that multicolored hair can be depicted, means that the only real solution to this is to invert the current approach. Instead of having to create, maintain and exclude 50 other tags, all we'd need is one for each color, which can then imply the base hair color tag.

I'll admit there's still inconvenience in this approach, because searching for mostly red hair and completely red hair at the same time is impossible. However, both individual searches (red_hair -multicolored_hair and mostly_red_hair) are very simple and easy to use, and a vast improvement over the patchwork mess that would be necessary to maintain red_hair -red_streaks -red_inner_hair -red_tips -red-striped_hair -red_hair_roots.

Everything I said then remains true now. On their own, the color_streak tags do not let users exclude posts where the hair is mostly other color(s), because there are many different ways to only have a small amount of red in your hair. On its own, mostly_red_hair would completely solve this issue.

With all this in mind, yeah, I think mostly red hair would be the better solution to the problem. If the purpose of these tags is to avoid getting posts like post #9654121 in one's red hair search, the solution isn't to create streak tags which serve no utility beyond aiding in that one specific search. The solution is to make excluding things like that post viable, while also not removing posts of interest like post #9651101 which actually stand a shot at being searched outside of that one specific search.

If it's any condolences, the current method is even more counterintuitive than this solution to performing this search. Ideally, being able to be performed by member users is the goal, but I'll settle for "doable in a three tag search" if two tags just can't seem to work.

At the very least, I imagine the vast majority of members don't care about hair colors enough for this to be a problem. RIP to the minority who do, sorry guys. If we can figure out a way in two tags that'd be great.

I'm of the opinion we should knock the member search limit up to three tags anyway, but that's a whole different ballpark than these stupid streak tags.

Kaleidoscoped said:

my only issue with a mostly_<color>_hair tag is that to search for posts which contain fully/mostly colored hair, you'd have to input a search like (red_hair -multicolored_hair) or mostly_red_hair, which is fairly counterintuitive and doesn't work with the two tag limit so rip member-level users, but it does sound a little better than maintaining a variety of "red streaks, red tips, red inner hair" etc. tags.

My issue with a tag for hair that's either completely or mostly one color is that it will make up most of the base hair color tag. Take brown, for example. There are only 136k posts in brown_hair multicolored_hair, while brown_hair itself has almost 1.7 million posts. A hypothetical tag for hair that's all or mostly brown would apply to ~1.6 million of the existing brown_hair posts, which is just shy of 90%. At that point, we'd have spent far more manpower on a tag that's almost identical to a cursory brown_hair search.

With mostly_x_hair tags, however, we get the same functionality without the bloat.

>search blue hair
>get hundreds of Toki posts with blonde hair
>go to fix the obvious mistags before you realize it's because she literally has a single strand of blue hair

If I search blue hair I expect to find characters with blue hair. Not blonde characters with a single strand of blue hair.

It's so bad that it bleeds over into Asuna being tagged with blue hair even though she doesn't have any blue hair whatsoever.

If you search blue_hair ai:blue_hair,0%, red_hair ai:red_hair,0%, etc you can see this kind of thing happens all the time. Characters get tagged as having a certain hair color even when it's just a secondary accent color, not their main color. Then if the character turns out to be popular they pollute the hair color tag with thousands of posts that aren't that color.

I'd rather have streak colors than have hair colors filled with things that aren't that color. I view them as containment tags for people who can't bear not to tag every last color in the image. The obvious solution is just to not tag blue hair when a character doesn't have blue hair. But apparently we can't have that, so here we are.

The only problem is that it still doesn't cover gradient hair, colored inner hair, colored tips, or random other things like Manhattan Cafe's white ahoge, so the problem of hair color tags being used for hair that isn't mostly that color still exists.

evazion said:

>search blue hair
>get hundreds of Toki posts with blonde hair
>go to fix the obvious mistags before you realize it's because she literally has a single strand of blue hair

If I search blue hair I expect to find characters with blue hair. Not blonde characters with a single strand of blue hair.

It's so bad that it bleeds over into Asuna being tagged with blue hair even though she doesn't have any blue hair whatsoever.

If you search blue_hair ai:blue_hair,0%, red_hair ai:red_hair,0%, etc you can see this kind of thing happens all the time. Characters get tagged as having a certain hair color even when it's just a secondary accent color, not their main color. Then if the character turns out to be popular they pollute the hair color tag with thousands of posts that aren't that color.

I'd rather have streak colors than have hair colors filled with things that aren't that color. I view them as containment tags for people who can't bear not to tag every last color in the image. The obvious solution is just to not tag blue hair when a character doesn't have blue hair. But apparently we can't have that, so here we are.

The only problem is that it still doesn't cover gradient hair, colored inner hair, colored tips, or random other things like Manhattan Cafe's white ahoge, so the problem of hair color tags being used for hair that isn't mostly that color still exists.

*Sigh*...Guess that's that huh? I still feel like there has to be a better solution for this sort of thing, that doesn't require these sort of otherwise unhelpful tags, but if that's how you feel about this, that's how you feel.

I wonder if the "mostly [color] hair" proposal would help with all the other tags you mentioned, as while these streak tags can't cover colored tips, the "mostly [color] hair" hypothetical tags can. Should I try organizing a favgroup based around it, as proof of concept or whatever you wanna call it?

i'm gonna have to agree with evazion here. the secret unspoken part of my posts (that i forgot to mention) was that i always thought the <color>_hair tags should be for posts where that color makes up a substantial portion of the character's hair.

i know saying that is a massive stretch considering how long the current definition has been in place for, but if we tagged it that way to begin with, then the problem of excluding a dozen tags just to find posts where a character has hair that is mostly or fully a certain color would be a non-issue.

Knowledge_Seeker said:

I wonder if the "mostly [color] hair" proposal would help with all the other tags you mentioned, as while these streak tags can't cover colored tips, the "mostly [color] hair" hypothetical tags can. Should I try organizing a favgroup based around it, as proof of concept or whatever you wanna call it?

I’m interested to see how people perceive this potential tag, I’m just worried the "mostly" part might become subjective to the tagger.

mostly_* tags sounds like it would be a good idea, but I'm worried that not only it's subjective but that it would require constant gardening because of people forgetting to add them or not knowing about their existence.

Regarding color streak tags, it always felt icky tagging the streak color with the full *_hair tag, specially with single streaks, so I'd rather keep the color streak tags than keeping on polluting hair color tags.

BUR #44778 is pending approval.

create implication red_streaks -> streaked_hair
create implication green_streaks -> streaked_hair
create implication aqua_streaks -> streaked_hair
create implication blue_streaks -> streaked_hair
create implication pink_streaks -> streaked_hair
create implication white_streaks -> streaked_hair
create implication purple_streaks -> streaked_hair
create implication orange_streaks -> streaked_hair
create implication black_streaks -> streaked_hair
create implication grey_streaks -> streaked_hair
create implication blonde_streaks -> streaked_hair

By the wiki definition, seems only rational if these tags are being kept? The combination is undertagged.

I'm interested in how many people actually search these color streak tags, but it should help streaked hair searchers. Should also help "hair must be one color" searchers in the negative slightly.

brown streaks not enough posts

BUR #44780 is pending approval.

mass update favgroup:45597 -> mostly_red_hair
create implication mostly_red_hair -> red_hair

Hold on, let's not just imply these stupid tags to streaked hair just yet. There's still the idea discussed here. Here's one favgroup as a proof of concept. If this BUR get upvoted, I'll go ahead and do the rest. If this idea works, there will be no reason to keep the color streak tags around, as then the main reason endorsed for keeping them will no longer exist.

It also will catch things that don't fall under streaked hair, making it much more versatile. It'll probably exceed the two tag search limit if you want full and mostly red hair at the same time, but it ideally caps at three, and it's not like these streak tags are any less unwieldy...

BUR #44784 is pending approval.

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create alias red_streaks -> red-accented_hair
create alias green_streaks -> green-accented_hair
create alias aqua_streaks -> aqua-accented_hair
create alias blue_streaks -> blue-accented_hair
create alias pink_streaks -> pink-accented_hair
create alias white_streaks -> white-accented_hair
create alias purple_streaks -> purple-accented_hair
create alias orange_streaks -> orange-accented_hair
create alias black_streaks -> black-accented_hair
create alias grey_streaks -> grey-accented_hair
create alias blonde_streaks -> blonde-accented_hair
create alias brown_streaks -> brown-accented_hair
create implication red-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication green-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication aqua-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication blue-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication pink-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication white-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication purple-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication orange-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication black-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication grey-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication blonde-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication brown-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair

Just give the colored streaks tags broader names so they also cover gradient hair, colored inner hair, colored tips, etc.
And then make them imply multicolored hair directly so you can do a search for red_hair -multicolored_hair that easily excludes them all if they didn't get tagged with something else that implies multicolored hair.
If there's a better name for it then let me know but I thought this makes sense for expressing the idea that this hair color isn't the character's primary hair color, it's a secondary hair color that makes up less than half of the hair and should be mutually exclusive to the main hair color tags.

bawlzzz said:

BUR #44784 is pending approval.

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create alias red_streaks -> red-accented_hair
create alias green_streaks -> green-accented_hair
create alias aqua_streaks -> aqua-accented_hair
create alias blue_streaks -> blue-accented_hair
create alias pink_streaks -> pink-accented_hair
create alias white_streaks -> white-accented_hair
create alias purple_streaks -> purple-accented_hair
create alias orange_streaks -> orange-accented_hair
create alias black_streaks -> black-accented_hair
create alias grey_streaks -> grey-accented_hair
create alias blonde_streaks -> blonde-accented_hair
create alias brown_streaks -> brown-accented_hair
create implication red-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication green-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication aqua-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication blue-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication pink-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication white-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication purple-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication orange-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication black-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication grey-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication blonde-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair
create implication brown-accented_hair -> multicolored_hair

Just give the colored streaks tags broader names so they also cover gradient hair, colored inner hair, colored tips, etc.
And then make them imply multicolored hair directly so you can do a search for red_hair -multicolored_hair that easily excludes them all if they didn't get tagged with something else that implies multicolored hair.
If there's a better name for it then let me know but I thought this makes sense for expressing the idea that this hair color isn't the character's primary hair color, it's a secondary hair color that makes up less than half of the hair and should be mutually exclusive to the main hair color tags.

I like the idea of X_accented_hair tags. Though I think it might make sense to keep the streak tags separate and have them imply the accent colors instead of it being an alias. Then all of the various streaks/tips/inner_hair/etc. tags could implicate their respective accent color tag.

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