Hey all!

It's been a while since my last journal, which was about the FurAffinity user experience in relation to uploading. This time I don't have a browser extension to shill, nor do I offer an easy solution to this particular issue that I've been seeing ever since I joined the site almost 10 years ago. Instead, this is going to be something of a rant that will also (hopefully) be informative to some of you. My aim with this journal is mostly to encourage a community effort to improve tagging across this site and to help turn more of the community into power users at the same time. Read on if you are interested!

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So, let's rap about Tags/Keywords on FurAffinity...

First of all, let me stress this: FurAffinity's keyword system is not bad by any stretch. It is generally good for getting your artwork seen by people based on a relevant theme that they query, but several things hold the system back from being truly great. These problems that I have with the system aren't just technical in nature, they are also simple bad habits that are widespread in the community. The latter issues can simply be solved by education and community efforts to do better using the system as it currently exists. Maybe wishful thinking, but I do love this community and this site and would like to see things improve!

Here's a few basic bullet points that sum up my grievances with the system as a very frequent user of FA. Let this serve as a TL;DR for my entire rant going forward:
• The search function is useful, but the cool options that it does have are not obvious or easy to find for people due to the design of the user interface
• Users aren't required to put tags on their uploads at all on FA, meaning that art discovery and/or content exclusion based on the existing keyword search is impossible in some cases
• FA does not feature community tag editing like dedicated image gallery sites (e621, Danbooru, Derpibooru), which means that users can incorrectly tag posts and have them sit like that until the end of time

Now that I've got these points down, let's expand on each of these a little bit. It's worth talking about because even though that some of these problems are baked into the site's core features, we can make things better by simply putting in the work, doing research, and improving our tagging as a community!

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The Search Function

I don't have too much to actually complain about with FA's search compared to the other topics, but I would like to at least shed some light on some of the things that you can do with it that might not be obvious even for users who have been on this site for years. If you click on the magnifying glass icon without entering a search query, you'll open the basic Search page which displays all of the search options that I'll be talking about here.

On the Search page, on the right side of the page there are a ton of search options that you can use to customize any basic query that you enter into search. One of the options that might be most useful to you in that category is under the Sort by Range header, where you can adjust your search to look for posts that are over five years old. However, there is an element of Search that is drastically underutilized by most of the community. On the right side still, on the very bottom, is a dropdown which is labelled Advanced Search. Within this menu, you can find all sorts of useful operators that you can add to your search queries in order to even more specifically find what you want. I'll describe a few useful queries and some use cases which hopefully everyone can make use of.

Let's say I want to find all posts that include my dog character Sam Yaeger, but only ones that were made by one of my good friends Derrysome. I would use this search query:
"sam (at symbol)lower derrysome"

You use the first part of the query as the tag/keyword you want to find, and then after the "@lower" you enter in the FurAffinity account name that you want to restrict that query to. It's super useful, and can help you find posts from specific artists... as long as the artist's posts include the tags/keywords that are needed.

Now let's say I want to find posts of characters of characters named Luna, but I don't want to find any pictures of Princess Luna from My Little Pony. I would use this search query:
"luna !mlp & !my_little_pony & !princess"

You use the first part of the query to specific the tag you want to find, and then use the exclamation marks (!) to specify tags that you want to exclude from the results. You can link multiple tags you want to exclude (or include!) with the AND operator, which is represented by the ampersand symbol (&). This works well, as long as the users add the specific tags to posts that you're wanting to exclude from your search in the first place.

Say, this is the second time that I've mentioned that the quality of these search results is dependent on whether or not users actually use the tag/keyword system correctly. Which is a perfect segue into the next section...

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Tags, FurAffinity, and You

FurAffinity does not force its users to include any kind of tags or keywords in any post. In fact, the only things that you need to upload something is a title, a description, and an appropriate rating. Inappropriate ratings or content that is banned on the site are about the only things that are explicitly moderated when it comes to posts, reasonably so. In theory, this is totally fine. It's convenient and easy to just select a file, give it a basic title, and then throw it up online for people to find, especially if you own a popular page who already has an established following. However, the inevitable result of this lack of input required from the user when making a post is that people post content that isn't able to be found using the systems that FurAffinity has in place.

Let's use this image I uploaded for an example of what I mean.

This image has the absolute bare minimum that you need in order to upload an image to FurAffinity. A single character post title, a single character description, a General rating, and all default categories. No tags/keywords were applied to this image, nor are they any descriptive works in the description that would be get picked up by the Search function. How would you be able to find this image if you were going to look for it using the search feature? If you try putting in the name of the post, which is just a period symbol, it doesn't work since a single period isn't an accepted search query. Despite the presence of a character that has appeared in several other posts on this website, my dog Sam, it has no tags which can be used to easily find it. I've effectively created an image that is impossible to find using the Search box. You could only find this image by using the Browse tab and indexing through until you find it, looking in my page's Scraps section where this image is located, or using the "@lower SmashUniverse64" search query and looking through all of my posts that way.

Needless to say, this is really, really bad for trying to find things that you might be interested in on this website. Due to my relatively small following on this site, that post probably won't get many views or favorites. But, if you are an established artist with a huge following, this lack of details matters less and less since you can just put in the bare minimum, hit upload, and then everyone who follows you will see it right away. However, the problem of not being able to locate that image easily still happens in that case and it impacts everyone in the community as more of these 'ghost images' are uploaded. Oooo, spookyyyyyy. 👻

I don't know what can or should be done resolve this problem. I think it's unlikely that FurAffinity will get some kind of community tag editing feature like e621 or booru sites, and I also think it's unreasonable to force tagging onto people on point of upload if the goal is to be able to post things efficiently with no excess moderation right out of the gate. Heck, FurAffinity even has a built-in feature which discourages thorough tagging for posts: keyword limits. A max of 250 characters can be used to specify tags/keywords in the editor, which depending on how many characters appear and how many things are happening in the image can get filled up really quickly to the point of having to exclude potential tags from the post. Many users have even resorted to using the keyword editor for gags or jokes, i.e. things that will not help anyone find the post. I am not immune from this either, I've done it before several times, and because of the lack of moderation on tags I, and everyone else, can get away with adding something to a post that helps no one. 😂

While not necessarily a call to action, I would like to at least share one at least one idea that I feel could massively improve the searching and browsing experience without very much effort at all: character tagging. On my own page, SmashUniverse64, as well as my best buddy's page that I help manage, Gyro-Furry, I've followed a very strict tagging structure where at the very least I include the character's full name as a tag. This way if you enter the character's name into the search bar, you should be able to precisely find all of the posts that character appears in, as long as it's a piece that appears in either my gallery or Gyro's gallery.

Let's use my dog Sam as an example again. Say I want to find all of the pieces that include him. We would enter this query:
sam_yaeger

While this doesn't include every piece of the dog, including the image I used as an example that has no tags, this is what I've managed to do after just a bit of effort on every post that includes this character on both my page and Gyro's page. You get (almost) everything! There's even a few posts from my friends darknido and Coolboy01 that are included in the query results because they used the same tag. Shoutout to them for using a similar tag structure in their posts!

This is how I pulled off something resembling a character picker in my Commissioned / Gift Art folder on my page without having to sort my posts into a ton of different folders. The difficult part is setting up the links and putting them into rows, but then once it is setup, each link will index every additional post for each character as long as I use the correct tags. If anyone wants or needs any help setting something up that is similar, I would happy to guide you through it!

I understand if this kind of tag structure doesn't work for everyone. For myself it is pretty easy since most of all of my characters have first and last names that are very easy to slot into this system i.e. sam_yaeger, hazel_verday, ira_aetheria. If your character doesn't have a last name and you'd like to try something similar anyway, consider including some other identifier along with your character's name for your tag structure.

Examples I could think of, using my own character and username as a base:
sam_smashuniverse64, sam_su64, sam_someotheralias

But remember, the most important part is sticking to whatever structure that you choose, because then overtime you'll build a library of posts that are able to be easily found even years later. People will appreciate it even if they don't say it out loud!

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Phew...

This has been a mouthful and a half, but I hope that some of the things I said it here were helpful or at least gave you something to think about. I love FurAffinity, and with some community effort we can make this place better for everyone who uses it. Maybe next time I'll do a journal about the text codes, but then again you're probably better off just reading the section about it in the Support tab. It's worth doing, I promise!

Dog out!