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Gender Filter Gone?
4 months ago
Hiya, I return, this time with a bit of confusion about this website's update.
What happened to the gender filter? No genuinely, where did it go? I also did some looking and apparently it is gone for new uploads as well.
This update feels rather reductive. As a trans guy, I like looking for art featuring trans masc people and trans men because I feel seen and I like porn more when it features someone like me in this regard (granted, I like men in porn in general). The lack of gender filter will make my search a bit harder.
To illustrate this, I might look up trans + man. However, this could very well still bring me any number of trans identities beyond the trans man category because it is two words, thus the search results will include any piece that includes both tags "trans" and "man". Meanwhile, having it be one word (transman), include dashes between (trans-man), or an underscore (trans_man) will more than likely make my search results more niche and much narrower, making it more than likely I miss many, many pieces. The lack of gender filter also highlights an innate thing about this site: a lot of people do not tag their pieces and a decent amount tag their pieces wrongly (ex. ftm on tftg mtf pieces). The former just means it is harder to filter out the miss-tagged pieces. In the latter case, that makes finding said pieces even harder, especially if the poster takes no effort to properly include filters. There are pieces that have no tags and filters, for example. On this website, that means it is really, really hard to find them, especially if they are older than a day.
Removing the gender filter only compounds this problem especially for niche categories. I've complained in the past about how this website can be rather user unfriendly (I've deleted them a while ago, however). The tag blocks are useful, but it doesn't feel like enough. Like I've said, not everyone tags their submissions. For one, you can still favorite pieces from people you block. Hell, you can still comment on their pieces and access their page. Blocking does not even remove their art from searches or categories. All of this defeats the purpose of blocking users. If FA were to implement a better blocking system, having it be multi-tier would likely be ideal to grant users better control over their own curated experiences.
This also highlights the headache it can be to find pieces on this website. I wish there was an ability to save searches, for example, to revisit so that I don't need to manually add "-[user]" 20 times to remove all of the pieces I do not want to see because said users cannot be assed to tag their shit properly.
Furaffinity very well might be heading in the direction of becoming less usable if they remove more filters. I am definitely not the only one thinking of this update, I looked on twitter and bluesky. I also saw a new comment under an old journal entry about this.
Perhaps I am screaming into the void in which case I might delete this later down the line. If anyone is reading this, what are your thoughts?
What happened to the gender filter? No genuinely, where did it go? I also did some looking and apparently it is gone for new uploads as well.
This update feels rather reductive. As a trans guy, I like looking for art featuring trans masc people and trans men because I feel seen and I like porn more when it features someone like me in this regard (granted, I like men in porn in general). The lack of gender filter will make my search a bit harder.
To illustrate this, I might look up trans + man. However, this could very well still bring me any number of trans identities beyond the trans man category because it is two words, thus the search results will include any piece that includes both tags "trans" and "man". Meanwhile, having it be one word (transman), include dashes between (trans-man), or an underscore (trans_man) will more than likely make my search results more niche and much narrower, making it more than likely I miss many, many pieces. The lack of gender filter also highlights an innate thing about this site: a lot of people do not tag their pieces and a decent amount tag their pieces wrongly (ex. ftm on tftg mtf pieces). The former just means it is harder to filter out the miss-tagged pieces. In the latter case, that makes finding said pieces even harder, especially if the poster takes no effort to properly include filters. There are pieces that have no tags and filters, for example. On this website, that means it is really, really hard to find them, especially if they are older than a day.
Removing the gender filter only compounds this problem especially for niche categories. I've complained in the past about how this website can be rather user unfriendly (I've deleted them a while ago, however). The tag blocks are useful, but it doesn't feel like enough. Like I've said, not everyone tags their submissions. For one, you can still favorite pieces from people you block. Hell, you can still comment on their pieces and access their page. Blocking does not even remove their art from searches or categories. All of this defeats the purpose of blocking users. If FA were to implement a better blocking system, having it be multi-tier would likely be ideal to grant users better control over their own curated experiences.
This also highlights the headache it can be to find pieces on this website. I wish there was an ability to save searches, for example, to revisit so that I don't need to manually add "-[user]" 20 times to remove all of the pieces I do not want to see because said users cannot be assed to tag their shit properly.
Furaffinity very well might be heading in the direction of becoming less usable if they remove more filters. I am definitely not the only one thinking of this update, I looked on twitter and bluesky. I also saw a new comment under an old journal entry about this.
Perhaps I am screaming into the void in which case I might delete this later down the line. If anyone is reading this, what are your thoughts?
I feel like searching would be easier if we were allowed to dual search key words and tags and have the ability to pick both or one of the two. (both = much have tags & categories) (one of = either matching tags or matching categories). The removal of the gender category really doesn't help the userbase
https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/11160892 <--- The journal you need to read.
Altersex would be useful for characters who aren't intersex or trans but happen to have a non-standard sex. dualsex and bigenital are self-explanitory. Though, imo I feel altersex is probably the best of the three for a generic label that covers the setup I mentioned.
I agree. The terminology wasn't good but I also feel getting rid of the category is just throwing the baby out the window with the bathwater...