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June 18th, 2025- Hardware and Drop Down Updates
5 months ago
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Journal Start
Hey there fuzzies!
We have a few updates we want to let you all know about, namely the following:
- New Hardware
- Removing the Gender Field for Submissions in favor of keywords
Fur Affinity is getting a much needed hardware upgrade to help prevent issues like what happened in May. This won’t prevent all possible issues but it will help!
This upgrade includes additional backup storage for user uploads (effectively doubling what we currently have), a new server to increase compute and storage capacity, and additional bandwidth to help during peak times of usage.
There may be potential downtime when installing new equipment but we will do our best to give enough notice before it happens. We are all incredibly excited for this and are able to afford to do this due to all those who helped contribute to the GoFundMe last year. Because of your generosity, we had the funds on hand this time to make this happen and we cannot thank you enough!
In keeping with our goal to always be more inclusive, and considering how important self-identification is to many in our Community, we have removed the gender field drop down for submissions. It was outdated with regards to terminology, causing some issues and concerns. We wanted to resolve this sooner than later.
We very much underestimated how big of a change this might be for some users, and we pushed the change to the site before giving our Community a proper heads-up on this modification not knowing the concerns it would cause. We apologize for this mistake, and you can rest assured that our team has learned what went wrong in this situation and have modified our internal processes to address this specific issue moving forward. We never want to shock or concern our users with sudden unexpected changes if we can help it.
Why we did this- While the drop down was easy to use, society is evolving and so must Fur Affinity. Our goal is for submissions to be tagged using the keyword system when it comes to gender, which many users are already doing. The biggest immediate benefit will be for pieces with multiple characters, as they will no longer be restricted to a single option. Now every character’s gender can now be added to the keyword list. Having gender marked via the keyword system also allows freedom for users to completely self-label how they see fit for their gender identities, ensuring more flexibility than the previous limited, curated, and potentially inaccurate list that was previously in place.
To ease the transition, we have automatically copied the old 'Gender' field (except for Any, Multiple Characters, etc) into the keywords of submissions that didn't have it already - over 15 million of them.
This allows us to prepare the field for further, more sweeping changes when it comes to the keyword/tag system, and gauge how best to implement new features that this system will impact in the future.
If you come across any bugs related to this change, make sure to send us a ticket with the “Bug/Glitch” category!
To filter search results by gender, include a term such as "@keywords male" at the end of your search query. Multiple genders can be searched for at once. Example:
@keywords gender1 gender2
For example: "fender @keywords male" will search for all submissions containing "fender" in the title, keywords, description or username, and with "male" in the keywords specifically.
You can exclude by using! or -, for example by appending "@keywords !male" or "@keywords -male". This only works when at least one non-exclusion search term is provided. Examples:
fox @keywords !male
@title rednef @keywords !male
For more information, see the Search Help page: https://www.furaffinity.net/help/#search
Since the last journal update we’ve also made these small changes that you might have noticed!
⭐ Banner is now fully visible and scales to the width of your browser, revealing the entire image instead of just the center when viewed on smaller screens.
⭐ Comments highlighting now scrolls to a viewable point on most if not all resolutions.
⭐ Comments colors have been updated and standardized.
⭐ Removed Skype and added SubscribeStar, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, Toyhouse, AO3, Wattpad, and FanFiction as contact options!
⭐ The contact page now has a client-side validator to help with setting those values.
⭐ Using sfw.furaffinity.net now forces the SFW toggle to enable, making it more obvious why your art has been unceremoniously ejected.
⭐ Re-added Neer’s world famous taco recipe after it was mistakenly replaced by Neer’s world infamous burrito recipe. (Please do not attempt to construct and cook the burrito recipe - you have been warned.)
⭐ Sakuri still hasn't gotten any of said tacos >:C I need the press to know this.
We know not all the updates here are exciting ones but we hope to be able to field questions related to these below for you the best we can. Comments spreading false information or purely inflammatory comments may be removed by Staff. Reminder that our Code of Conduct applies to announcements as well. Please remember to be excellent to each other!
We have a few updates we want to let you all know about, namely the following:
- New Hardware
- Removing the Gender Field for Submissions in favor of keywords
New Hardware!
Fur Affinity is getting a much needed hardware upgrade to help prevent issues like what happened in May. This won’t prevent all possible issues but it will help!
This upgrade includes additional backup storage for user uploads (effectively doubling what we currently have), a new server to increase compute and storage capacity, and additional bandwidth to help during peak times of usage.
There may be potential downtime when installing new equipment but we will do our best to give enough notice before it happens. We are all incredibly excited for this and are able to afford to do this due to all those who helped contribute to the GoFundMe last year. Because of your generosity, we had the funds on hand this time to make this happen and we cannot thank you enough!
Changes to Drop Downs
In keeping with our goal to always be more inclusive, and considering how important self-identification is to many in our Community, we have removed the gender field drop down for submissions. It was outdated with regards to terminology, causing some issues and concerns. We wanted to resolve this sooner than later.
We very much underestimated how big of a change this might be for some users, and we pushed the change to the site before giving our Community a proper heads-up on this modification not knowing the concerns it would cause. We apologize for this mistake, and you can rest assured that our team has learned what went wrong in this situation and have modified our internal processes to address this specific issue moving forward. We never want to shock or concern our users with sudden unexpected changes if we can help it.
Why we did this- While the drop down was easy to use, society is evolving and so must Fur Affinity. Our goal is for submissions to be tagged using the keyword system when it comes to gender, which many users are already doing. The biggest immediate benefit will be for pieces with multiple characters, as they will no longer be restricted to a single option. Now every character’s gender can now be added to the keyword list. Having gender marked via the keyword system also allows freedom for users to completely self-label how they see fit for their gender identities, ensuring more flexibility than the previous limited, curated, and potentially inaccurate list that was previously in place.
To ease the transition, we have automatically copied the old 'Gender' field (except for Any, Multiple Characters, etc) into the keywords of submissions that didn't have it already - over 15 million of them.
This allows us to prepare the field for further, more sweeping changes when it comes to the keyword/tag system, and gauge how best to implement new features that this system will impact in the future.
If you come across any bugs related to this change, make sure to send us a ticket with the “Bug/Glitch” category!
To filter search results by gender, include a term such as "@keywords male" at the end of your search query. Multiple genders can be searched for at once. Example:
@keywords gender1 gender2
For example: "fender @keywords male" will search for all submissions containing "fender" in the title, keywords, description or username, and with "male" in the keywords specifically.
You can exclude by using! or -, for example by appending "@keywords !male" or "@keywords -male". This only works when at least one non-exclusion search term is provided. Examples:
fox @keywords !male
@title rednef @keywords !male
For more information, see the Search Help page: https://www.furaffinity.net/help/#search
Other changes
Since the last journal update we’ve also made these small changes that you might have noticed!
⭐ Banner is now fully visible and scales to the width of your browser, revealing the entire image instead of just the center when viewed on smaller screens.
⭐ Comments highlighting now scrolls to a viewable point on most if not all resolutions.
⭐ Comments colors have been updated and standardized.
⭐ Removed Skype and added SubscribeStar, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, Toyhouse, AO3, Wattpad, and FanFiction as contact options!
⭐ The contact page now has a client-side validator to help with setting those values.
⭐ Using sfw.furaffinity.net now forces the SFW toggle to enable, making it more obvious why your art has been unceremoniously ejected.
⭐ Re-added Neer’s world famous taco recipe after it was mistakenly replaced by Neer’s world infamous burrito recipe. (Please do not attempt to construct and cook the burrito recipe - you have been warned.)
⭐ Sakuri still hasn't gotten any of said tacos >:C I need the press to know this.
We know not all the updates here are exciting ones but we hope to be able to field questions related to these below for you the best we can. Comments spreading false information or purely inflammatory comments may be removed by Staff. Reminder that our Code of Conduct applies to announcements as well. Please remember to be excellent to each other!
Comment posting has been disabled by the journal owner.
(and my axe!)
that only lets you filter for the dropdown stuff, which gender was just removed from
This was a bad move.
I've a feeling Browse gets less use than Search.
Can't say if Browse does actually does more or less. But I sure know I use it a lot.
https://www.furaffinity.net/search/?q=stitch pride -lilo&rating-general=on&rating-mature=&rating-adult=&type-art=on&type-flash=&type-photo=on&type-music=&type-story=&type-poetry=
This will find anything tagged with stitch and pride, that is not tagged with lilo.
It will only find results tagged as general, but not as mature or adult.
It will only find art and photos, but not flash, music, stories or poetry.
To enable something, you use =on after an attribute
To disable something, you just use = after the attribute. Using =off will not work,
Any attributes that are not specified will use the default values.
Here are the attributes you can append to a search:
[Page number - (any positive integer)]
&page=
value=""
default = "1"
[Results per page (choose one)]
&perpage=
value="24" - 24
value="36" - 36
value="48" - 48
value="60" - 60
default = "60"
[Sort by (choose one)]
&order-by=
value="relevancy" - relevancy
value="date" - date
value="popularity" - popularity
default = "relevancy"
[Order (choose one)]
&order-direction=
value="asc" - ascending
value="desc" - descending
default="desc"
[Time range (choose one)]
&range=
value="day" - A Day
value="3days" - 3 Days
value="week" - A Week
value="month" - A Month
value="all" - All time
default = "all"
[Rating (choose any or all)]
&rating-general=on - General
&rating-mature=on - Mature
&rating-adult=on - Adult
default = on for all
[Type (choose any or all)]
&type-art=on - Art
&type-flash=on - Flash
&type-photo=on - Photography
&type-music=on - Music
&type-story=on - Story
&type-poetry=on - Poetry
default = on for all
[Match mode (choose one)]
&mode=
value="all" - All of the words
value="any" - Any of the words
value="extended" - Extended (see help [?])
default = "extended"
[Time range (choose one)]
&range=
value="1day" - 1 Day
value="3days" - 3 Days
value="7days" - 7 Days
value="30days" - 30 Days
value="90days" - 90 Days
value="1year" - 1 Year
value="3years" - 3 Years
value="5years" - 5 Years
value="all" - All time
default = "all"
i think at least
one term being "outdated" shouldnt remove the whole thing idk maybe thats how FA works cuz of its code or something
Things should be easier and simpler, not more complicated.
Woops. I get the general idea, but if the idea was that all art should have some tag (note they said they made all gender tags apply if the tag was absent, so all art now naturally have 1 tag), then... maybe keep that enforcement?
This isn't really inclusive... it's using inclusivity as a shield to just remove a step in the system.
People don't tag their pieces correctly in the first place, and staff does nothing to remediate that.
Whether it's a dropdown or a tag, this could've just been fixed by allowing you to select multiple genders for a piece. Make it from a single selection to a multiselection. No reason to hide all this in the jumble of keywords.
If I'm looking for 'portrait' or 'vore' in the tags
And I have ten pieces that come up that are random fullbody YCHs with a bunch of popular tags on them.
That's not tagged correctly. They do it for searchability, and it's incredibly annoying.
Why not give a user a "report" button in the post's page? That's what literally every other site does.
It's not intuitive- why isn't there just a button to report a post?
And on the comment below by Bly Zeraz, it seems as though staff doesn't enforce anything on repeat offenders.
I agree if they insist on consolidating everything to the tags, the system needs improvement.
Still waiting on the site to pull the trigger on policing character theft, on that note.
By adding gender to keywords and saying "Its their fault if they don't tag right" without running it by the community first, even just a small beta branch, FA staff gives the impression that they do not want to work on these problems with the community- they just want to do what they think is best, which isn't necessarily true. It seems lazy.
We'd have more information and better changes if you asked the community at large about intended change before you do it. It's one thing if this was just a UI change, but to change an entire feature without majority community input is a very, very poor choice.
Congrats on the hardware improvements, I guess.
The amount of people that got MAD when it was implemented was pretty big, some people started to add troll tags just to upload, or they straight up deleted accounts, so they really exist
I'm thankful they're talking about requiring tags. But they're taking their steps in the wrong order, since the tagging system is still so antiquated.
3 tags can be "furry drawing art" on a cock vore piece with smegma and gore
I, have, 2tag
Insane lmao
Don't
Is always annoying
I've nudged some people towards it of they weren't aware and they generally enjoy the site more, taking the gamble
I hope this helps! <3
As of the community journal from 5 years ago (as well as a number of journals since), when the new Modern UI came out of beta as the new main Fur Affinity interface, Classic is no longer updated and will eventually be phased out completely.
This means that keywords and tags are only available on the Modern version of the site.
I hope this explains the situation!
Tag yo shit, so when I search for shit, I find yo shit!
I was only wanting to add what I saw in regards to your comment about struggling to see people being upset about requiring keywords. Since sadly I've seen it happen many times before, no mater how little is asked to tag.
I guess my issue most lies in the order that FA is doing this. The tagging system here already is such a bummer since there's no kinda... standard, I guess. Like how different sites have tags autocorrect to more common tags and such.
FA is just really behind.
A more robust system is highly needed. I know it's probably way more work than simply removing drop downs, though. Would be killer to get some sophisticated tagging like itaku with some tag moderators to both clean up and catch up some of the old art that gets left behind from lack of tagging and artists who might not be able to go back anymore. [Or even just a mass tagger but that's something I want for myself to fix old tags haha]
It was the best system they had and to remove it before an alternative is available sucks.
Unless you responded to the wrong comment, I'm going to assume it was my mention of 'standardization/misdirected' as the possible cause? To be clear, I'M talking about people using tags like;
- Male, Boi, Boy, Boyo, Man, Dude [and flip for the ladies]
- Nb, Nonbinary, Non-Binary, Non_Binary
The different ways people do the same tag makes things difficult since there is no standardization. And people coming in will be influenced by whatever tags they first see [IE; misdirected]. Granted, this is the biggest issue I've seen for the dropdown being removed. However, all images have been retroactively added with whatever catchall was used in the dropdown beforehand AS a tag. So nothing was lost and it's all still searchable. You just need to add the catchall in your search now. Adding one extra word to your search isn't that hard imo.
The only issue is going forward is when people who were too lazy to tag and only used the dropdown might not tag the gender. Which we need to start pushing people to do [and tagging in general]. The site will be better for it. And searching will improve if we push for more robust and standardized tagging [and fingers crossed for general optimization in the none tag sense].
Additionally, the removal of the dropdown doesn't stop you, or others, from continuing to use that term for yourself if you enjoy it. Nor does it keep you from continuing to tag it as such. I'd only say be respectful and don't use it on others who wish to distance themselves from that term and how it's been negatively used to harm others in the community. Since you like using that term, it's easy to see how you would enjoy it. But it's not good to just assume it's not degrading just because you don't see it that way or haven't been harmed by it's use.
I want to point out, since I'm unsure if you're implying this or not [there could be an error with lack of punctuation or my dyslexia reading it wrong]; but intersex is not a 'replacement' for that term.
And that there in lies the issue here. That term, while useful in it's origin, has changed over time. It became derogatory because of how it was used [just like how any word can be used negatively essentially]. Being used to refer to intersex and trans people, both of which are just plain inaccurate, and to degrade them as a group is what turned the word into one as time went on. And it continues to happen to this day. Leading to why it's considered a slur to many even if you, yourself, don't see it that way.
Not that I'm telling you to use these [I just want to mention it in case someone crosses this and was using intersex as a replacement of that term] it's generally preferred to use; dualsex or bigenital [for characters; I saw some other terms used for 'species' but I'm not super familiar with them]. I suppose the issue now is which, if any, would get adopted the most for those who wish to move away.
- Back to dropdowns sorry -
I can see how a coinvent option [or tool] being removed is irksome, and that's fair. But considering that dropdown may get endlessly long like the species one, this might be a better in the long run. Otherwise, we will be endlessly adding to it forever as new words are adopted. And if one was removed to 'change with the times', I feel more people would be upset. Wiping the slate clean might be a blessing in disguise. We should be using tags more than dropdowns that only hit one thing anyways.
Although, your pain point about the convince aspect of the dropdown makes me curious if tag favoriting would be a solution? That way you can just click and add your favorite tags into a new search you're starting. Or even something like 'resume previous search'.
Tumblr allows you to follow tags and ngl I would love to see that here. Would allow you to 'save' the terms you like to search the most and grab them easily or start a search up and then add more keywords to search from there. But this is all me spit balling as one user to another.
I apologize for not being straight forwards- I'm just saying FA is far behind the times, and are missing a lot of features they need. If they added things such as community tags or auto-fill tags, this update would be a whole lot less frustrating.
We have mentioned wanting to start over with new code while making QoL updates to this code in the meantime. It just is not quick to do unfortunately...
https://github.com/Weasyl/weasyl
Might be a good springboard for the rewrite instead of making it from scratch and having to wait years of volunteer time
I was able to find one in which people were complaining about the suggestion of blocked individuals prevents the blocked person from seeing your gallery and stuff. A lot of people were complaining about that too because they feel entitled to view anyone's art and such. A few even said about making burner accounts or leave the site because they felt artist have no right controlling who can access their art submissions. I know it's not the one we were discussing, but is and example that people will complain about anything... even a feature that can help people with stalkers if it could potentially inconvenience them should they get blocked by an artist.
But this is still a blanket standard across image hosting websites- to have required tags and especially standardized tags. FA is known to be behind the times with its site, and this is another prime example of them trying to 'improve', but taking two steps back because they didn't consider the effects.
The biggest issue with this downgrade is that there was nothing in place to re-place it. None of the aforementioned issues, nor any unified statement or voice among the staff. Everyone is saying something different, and it's clear they were unprepared for this update. It frankly feels like mismanagement.
I do, however, see a lot more flexibility and potential as it does open up more freedom of identity that surrounds the community. Not all sonas and OCs conform to the standardize choices, and this allows for open expression. Regardless, this is a "to each their own" moment. And everyone's viewpoint and concerns will be different.
The issue has turned, for me, from 'Bring back the dropdown' to 'Consolidate tags to a standard' as I myself have had numerous frustrations (that are apparently shared by many) with people not tagging their art correctly. This update was focused on the wrong thing, is what I'm saying.
It's nice it doesn't affect you, but it, in my opinion, highlights just how broken the browsing of this site can be due to how antiquated most of its systems are.
If anything, I'd argue the changes being made overall will do more to correct this issue than you want to give it credit for. Between the required minimum number of tags, it will push artist to use the tags and label the stuff.
Go ahead and look through most of the recent posts. Gender is untagged. You're ignoring the fact that people choosing to not include a gender would mean you literally cannot blacklist to avoid one certain gender for whatever reason-
And this goes for this and many other tags. I feel you also ignored the fact I said that this has turned and expanded and brought up numerous other issues with tagging. This has been referred to 'ripping off a bandaid' but I'd say it's much more inclined to lighting a powder keg.
People don't tag correctly, and browsers cannot effectively blacklist (and haven't been able to for a while). Those are the facts.
Just trying searhing '@keywords -breasts, big_breasts'
50K posts of people tagging big_breasts, but not just breasts. It is only going to expand until there's consolidation.
With the dropdown, you would ONLY get the gender you're looking for that people added. No 'any', nothing else. Now, you get everything that includes your tag, and you'll have to account for evvvery other potential variation you don't want to see, because people are going to continue posting art and not tag it with any gender- as is clearly evident on the browse page.
Certain browsers having issues with being able to add blocked tags or blur blocked ones is news to me, but still a problem that existed previously, and again not an issue of the new tag system, but the system in general.
On the other hand I hate the way "modern" social media handles it because tags there make me look like I'm an attention seeking hipster. Here I can tag everything relevant to the piece and people will appreciate that.
Kind of why I'm really vibing with bluesky! You can 'hide' tags in the alt text to keep things clean and just have a few in the main post to make them 'searchable' on your page! It's such a nice change. And blueskydeck [third party app] let's you add hidden tags too which make your post searchable but not visible anywhere on the post.
Not the best place for a gallery of course. But it's a nice 'alternative' to the people who like live posting similar to twitter.
Honestly won't touch Twitter even with a 2 mile stick. Elon truly ruins everything, think King Midas but more like King Mierdas because everything he touches becomes unfathomable crap.
Hitting the Browse option with such a nuke does kinda suck but I guess it doesn't compare to anything Elon did, so I'm staying here.
They could reallllllly do better with teaching people all of the fun tricks on the site. You gotta luck out and rng onto someone else's post about it and how to do it half the time.
And yeah same. People like the 'style' of twitter since it's just so easy to post there and look through their feed, though. I rarely go on now, but I cannot touch it without my add-ons that make it like the old version of the site. I went on there ONCE and was like 'holy shit how are people surviving on here????' god it was such a MESS.
My feed always had something that grinded my gears. Every single time I look there I see something that genuinely angers me.
Many times anon accounts of political extremes that felt directly braindead were pushed to my feed.
FurAffinity is bliss in comparison, sure that before the tag removing I would potentially end looking at something that would potentially disgust me. But the thing is that it was just the art of somebody else, something I didn't like to see because of my personal preferences. So it's way less. There's quite a difference from seeing a vore image I didn't want to see than seeing the posts of a misanthropic anonymous account.
So I'm not going back there xD
Also this idea of being able to see whatever art is uploaded at the moment, or just search a handful tags I like, is cool.
It does a lot more towards discoverability than most other pages. Given there's people that do their tagging, of course
This but unironically. If users don't tag their shit properly, then they only have themselves to blame.
Problem lies with the fact of people like me wanting to use different tags to search for things.
There's no tagging standard like E6. Look below for a guy who doesn't know which tags to use to find muscle fur art since people use so many different ones. The browse tab worked by letting you look for a specific category and gender.
Now, you can't.
Doesn't hurt the poster as much as it hurts the browser.
I think we agree.
It's been good talking with you then! Lookin' forward to next time 😉
They can stay upset for all I care. Personally, I think you're doing the right thing with enstating the mandatory minimum.
My rule of thumb on stuff like this is only folks who are upset and angry will be the most vocal and sadly that can drown out legit critique or advice or suggestions. Folks who don't have an oppinion or are okay with the change generally don't feel the need to get involved in the conversation. What may seem as 'big backlash' might not have to be.
Make tags required, it'll help so, so much. And if folks want to be funni and abuse the tag system, start creating a list of tags that get flagged automatically such, oh idk, slurs? Because I have yet to see that one as a feature anywhere. User reported sure but idk, I don't think it's a 'gray area' whether or not c*ntboy or d*ckgirl are terms meant to devalue us as people.
Well that's too damn bad, ain't it?
That's literally how search works!
Rather than remove a useful feature, why not merely take the time to update it, make it mandatory to use and for once actually improve a system rather than take a non-existent issue and make everything worse in the process?
It's like the other update where you just did something first, without asking for input or ideas from the community, got major backlash for it afterwards, then had to reverse it and said you were gonna improve.
This is just a repeat, albeit maybe not quite as catastrophic.
Much like before the image may have shown up in a browse/search. But now it will for certain, when I search for anything with the Male tag in it. What I cannot do is avoid seeing its thumbnail and thereby it's content that I may have blacklisted, precisely cause it now only has one tag and nothing else.
I know very well it may be a bit of an overreaction on my part.
But is still very frustrating a random change gets done, with no warning, nor even any kind of feedback from the community, ahead of time, despite promises to the contrary precisely due to past events of not doing so.
- Body type [anthro, feral, taur, humanoid]
- Gender [+ important body parts; wings, horns, fangs, etc] | More can be added if mature/nsfw
- Species
- Art type [digital, traditional]
- Materials [acrylic paints, watercolor, pencil, etc]
- Completion year
- Artist name
- Client name/oc name + commission
- Solo/duo/trio/group
- Clothing [Clothed/nude/shirtless/etc]
- Furred/scaled/feathered
- The color of the above
- And any notable acts that are in the picture [swimming, cooking, sports, etc]
No one will ever know!
Unfortunately, short of community tagging systems ala e621 and inkbunny, there's no real way to worse people to force people to tag pieces correctly.
This change and the recent blacklist should encourage people to tag more.
It makes browsing 100x more difficult to avoid hitting unwanted content.
And this solution would only works if people would actually tag things properly, which I fully know as I have brought that issue forward in the past and was fully ignored. Cause people don't necessarily tags there submission properly or at all.
If people cannot be bothered tagging properly why should we have to be punished for mistaking their characters identities?!
Also I'm not quite sure how you plan on automating character gender tagging... Are you going to use some AI recognition or something. Cause otherwise there is no way that this will work... Which just a point proven that this is not a good solution.
The Browse did had a lot of miscategorizations in the filtering, seeing a lot of Diapers into other categories.
And I did tried to make them enforce people to properly categorization their subission several times in the past, and I have been ghosted every single time, saying that they would note my feedback about it.
Which by now is clearly the root problem of this whole change, but they went the wrong direction entirely... *sigh*
But in the context of the Browse page, this is completely useless, unless they plan on actually removing Browsing all together in the near future, which would be a thousand steps backwards...
*sighs* guess I had no other choice but to use gender tags and stuff from now on.
My intuitions are very rarely wrong, and today is just another point proven that my intuition actually works "as intended"... pfffff...
That's the morale of this situation, that they have completely mixed up.
Unless someone starts to think of themselves like a Plutonian or Jupitarian, I have no clue...
Honestly to me that really is that simple.
Yes, the term "hermaphrodite" is generally considered derogatory and offensive when referring to intersex people. While it was historically used in both scientific and informal contexts, it is now widely recognized as inaccurate and stigmatizing. The preferred and more respectful term is intersex.
Here's why "hermaphrodite" is problematic:
Inaccuracy:
The term implies a person possesses both fully functional male and female reproductive systems, which is not biologically accurate for humans.
Historical Use:
It has been used to pathologize and dehumanize individuals with variations in sex characteristics.
Stigmatization:
It can be associated with ridicule and shame, and it reinforces a binary view of sex that excludes intersex individuals.
Offensive Language:
Some intersex people have reclaimed the term for themselves, but this does not negate its potential for harm when used by others.
In summary, it's best to avoid using "hermaphrodite" when referring to intersex individuals. Intersex is the appropriate and respectful term.
But does that still warrants completely nuking the system though instead of correcting it?
You'd think that changing one word in a dropdown menu and replacing all instance of the word for the proper term, should be simplier than absolutely removing all the coding...
Not everything in the post was necessary bad, but the actions feels a bit prematurely hasten. As a different course of actions could have been better planned with the surveyed feedback.
It honestly feels like they just jumped the ship after receiving a complain or two, or three... (I don't know how many of them they actually received.)
However, I will still say that I did told them that the reactions would be very mixed as I saw it coming.
Hip Hip BOO
Hip hip BOO ye broke the browsing
Would it also be possible to make the species dropdown optional in some way (maybe by adding a "not applicable" option) for cases where there is no subject to describe the species of (e.g. environmental art)?
I am not entirely sure the plan on themes at the moment but we can certainly revisit it.
Plus, many people such as myself like to browse specific species, and for a species that isn't included, the "'broad category' (other)" options are there for a reason. While the species drop-down menu is admittedly getting bloated, outright removing it is not the way to go.
You REALLY should poll the community before you do a change like that. Or just release it on some kind of beta branch. This feels like a change with little research.
Drop downs weren't actually required when uploading on FA previously either! Many left those as "any". We mentioned in previously that an update in the future will require a minimum of 3 keyword tags to upload.
I don't want to imagine the reason behind this change being so blasphemous as "that" subset of people who would rather a certain letter in the LGBTQIA+ didn't exist, but I am curious if it was actually functional for anything past just looking to the right of the submission for quick info.
It's likely that tags will need changes to be on-par with everything else being affected. I would like the idea of tag suggestions being a plausible feature for users to take advantage of for submission owners unsure of what to tag their post with. Places like SoFurry and Ao3 do it, so it's not out of the question.
Reiterating my point:
Relying heavily on tags when a good number of the submissions are hardly (if any) tagged properly will only make this harder for people wanting to search X or Y. I'm a bit surprised there's no "minimum tag requisite" but something needs to be done about the way people filter and vet their content if we the audience are expected to skim through things more than the site wants to clarify on its own.
I might write a Journal about this later on, but I think the worst thing about this decision, even if you kept going on about "how this could be worded better" is pushing it out in the middle of PRIDE MONTH.
Let the rest of the commenters tell you how this "tag the gender" feature is gonna be a nuisance, abused and confusing in certain pieces like TF:TG. I'm hoping we see something in regards to the push towards tags taking center stage as the user's expectation of being the one to filter things when the poster might not be knowledgeable/doing them.
The fact is, this seems to be a bit of a "half-baked" change. I already mentioned the problem in that many users will abuse or confuse this format now, but let's not forget having to scan the submission for the tag you even want to see to begin with. There's a case to be made in that so many people can't utilize the keyword feature that this change might have to be reverted or the list of priorities needs a review based on what the users are actually doing and want. I would argue a big problem is keeping the tags as "keyword" to begin with, and the way to search through tags is going to be unorthodox for the average internet user nowadays. Whatever you plan to do to overhaul keywords, it better be quick as I've said twice, seeing we as the audience are put to control on what we want when we can't even confirm if what we search is exactly what we'll get.
Lastly, "but I feel this is giving people more freedom in how they identify than before..."
I don't mean to sound rude, but if you're going to say that, why don't we have a field for our gender on the USER'S PROFILE? I said this in my initial comment, but the act of specifying gender on submissions got awkward if your piece didn't have anything to represent said requirement. I can understand your viewpoint towards the idea of opening people to more ways of representing themselves, but I think the problem in that is you're viewing it through the idea that submissions are where people are representing themselves more so than the place people will likely see them for themselves.
All in all, this change does not spark joy. It affects practically everyone on every end in a negative way, looking through this in retrospect.
While using tags instead of the drop down was already something many artists did, especially with characters that didn't conform with the options in the drop down, this will encourage others to take advantage of the freedom of identity the tag method offers. Add in that there will be a required 3 tag minimum, the gender and species of a single character alone are 2 tags that are easy to think of, so the requirement would push more usage of tags, and conversely, less "any" gender or "any" species from simply not bothering with drop downs.
We also are looking into how to implement suggesting keywords on submissions for the uploader to accept or deny.
(I'm a tag moderator on another website and I'm painfully aware of how many people miss obvious tags RIP)
It's also a rule violation to use misleading keywords, so you could report this behavior (;
Even if you add the gender to the tags (which is still worse as people will use synonyms like "girl" "female" or "woman") there is now no way to filter by gender via Browse.
This is an objective downgrade for a system that was never broken when they still haven't fix the Commission tab on mobile. If they *really* wanted to remove the term "Herm", despite it having roots in biology to communicate both male and female parts whereas intersex is a larger spectrum, they could have just converted "Herm" to "Intersex" instead of running over every single post removing gender.
Yeah, I never used the Browse feature so I wasn't aware of the gender drop down actually having a purpose there. The rest of my thread can tell you I have a different viewpoint towards this decision with that knowledge.
I just read your third snippet and I agree that it'll be abused or misused as tags are the wild-west. Hard fetishes don't get punished for not being tagged, people over-tag to catch more search results, etc etc.
I wish they would stop pushing out half-baked changes
It's certainly going to be hard to get used to. Certain members of the community won't be happy seeing straight content if they're not in favor of it for one, but we'll have to keep our hopes up.
Either way, Sciggles gave me some responses and I can only hope they'll take what I said in a follow-up to heart. I've only come back recently, and I'd hate to awkwardly leave again because we're back to square one on how they handle their changes.
I'm mostly just poking fun at the half-implementation since any Q/A would have shown the obvious flaw in Browse / still seeing genders on posts (including "Herm")
It is nice to see Sciggles reading and responding to comments though, because as much as I criticize FA for the underwhelming changes and disagree with the direction of resources when "more freedom in how they identify" is an objectively false statement, it is nice to see actual changes being made on probably the worst code-base in production right now.
Also, glad to see Toyhouse being added as a contact option!
Thanks for adding toyhouse!
If some of the terminology was outdated then just change the terms?
Seems like you just made it worse and are promising to fix it....at some point.
We want it back!
Though I think that a tutorial on how to properly tag a user's pieces would be great to go along with the change on with the removal of Character dropdowns.
But yay for sfw.furaffinity.net I will be using this :)
1. Didn't stop people from tagging genders anyway
2. Didn't force people to tag a gender if they didn't want to
when FurAffinity has an unfathomable amount of antiquated systems and issues is definitely a choice of all time
It's easy to groan that it'll get harder to avoid unwanted instances (when in reality the dropdown gets ignored as often as any tags whatsoever), but it's still something to think about. Is there a way to go through and mass-add the old selections from that menu TO the keywords, maybe from a backup? Grandfather them in, sort of deal.
It was never really a perfect system, and I don't think there is going to be a perfect solution, but overall I'm feeling the search got nerfed :P
I get why they did it and appreciate the sentiment, but sometimes aged terms aren't necessarily bad. (example: a few trans/NB folks spoke up to tell me that 'herm' is fine when self-identifying as such, when I was at a point of avoiding it due completely to uncertainty. The nuance!)
All said, thanks for your hard work FA team! <3 (genuine) I'm curious to see where we go from here
Also, fancy seeing you here, Strawberry. I've loved your art for a long time. Good to see you being active in the community as always <3
Also hi!!! Thank you so much, that means a lot ;w; I love this dang community
Not trying to be mean or anything, just figured I'd mention as it's something I've been told by other Intersex people.
I actually don't mind the change, the gender tag always felt rather limiting to me.
Therefore, correction: A handful of intersex folks were the ones who had educated me on their feelings around using/reclaiming the word.
That said, I also don't mind the change as is, but my trouble comes from that it was rolled out before better systems ready and without warning. Not to say I'm particularly upset, it's just an inconvenience for categorization (especially in larger galleries like my own), but I'm glad staff/volunteers have assured us they've learned to roll out changes with more care next time ^^
Tl;dr that's what I'm getting at with my OG top of the thread reply! ^ And I'm glad it's going to be rectified with the tagging system, but folks advocating for culling of old terms entirely is Not Quite It.
It would be super helpful if FA provided suggestions or guidance on keyword syntax for submissions involving multiple characters. For example, do slashes (e.g., "male/male") break keywords? Does FA suggest underscores instead, like "male_male"?
Any kind of official suggestion/guidance would help users standardise their keyword usage, which will in turn make the keyword search function more useful.
What I was suggesting was that FA staff put out guidance for how they recommend users tag things, to standardise it.
Without that kind of guidance, we'll have more situations in which I might tag an image "male_male", while another user might tag their image "gay" or "M-M" or any other number of equivalent strings. Official guidance would help this, making the tags more standard and thereby making the search function more useful. :>
honestly im partially just surprised by how many people actually used the gender settings in browse... but i guess if youre here for nsfw it might be more relevant? lol
hooray for new hardware though!
If the drop down used outdated terminology, the easiest and best solution for everyone would've been to simply update the terminology, i.e. add more option besides male, female and transgender, as well as just include "multiple genders" as an option for let's say m/f pictures.
I see this as a huge step back in providing a user friendly interface and it will most likely negatively affect my browsing habits on FA.
Besides, it's Neer's, and EVERYTHING Neer needs to be archived in his memory!
...and I prefer old-school, outdated stuff. Old School Is The Best School!
Keep It Simple, Showers (Showers is the Japanese name of Vaporeon)
Only thing I think they need to improve it is add community tag suggestions similar to other sites, where users can suggest tags for the uploader to approve and add to the piece.
Community ads are filterable based on your site browsing setting. If you're set to General you will see General ads. Mature to Mature and Adult to Adult.
If you see a higher rated category in a lower one, please do let us know because that is human (cat) error, and it will be fixed asap. Zoning is done manually.
While we can't do some things now, I do keep a running tab on what folks are asking for when advertising inevitably gets a refactor! Even if you get a "thanks for your feedback" response from me, I've marked your suggestion down. :D
The search function on this website also leaves a lot to be desired.
This is an interesting indicator, but I think it may rarely be needed by anyone, but at the same time it will require additional resources to implement and store all the information.
If it's ever going to be, it won't be for a very long time...
1: Uploaders have the option to "opt out" of viewer added tags. When uploading they can select "uploader chosen tags only" which disables viewers from adding them from the curated list.
2: Uploaders can "ban" certain tags from being used on their uploads. Either they can go "per upload" and select a tag as "can't use" or in their preferences set a tag as "general can't use". In both cases the banned tag appears grayed out to viewers when trying to attach it to an upload by that user.
3: Uploaders can still create custom tags, those aren't added to the curated list (though could be considered once enough demand is there). Searching for custom tags like that could be a short in the search box like "CT:-Custom_Tag_Name-"
4: To increase tag accuracy certain tags could have a "score" system, if a tag is voted as more accurate it receives a higher score and has a different highlight / appears higher in the upload's tag list. Viewers could also add a "negative" to a submission for that tag which excludes it to THEM for future searches.
Like this a lot of tag abuse by viewers would be very limited and Uploaders can restrict to what they want used. They can add as many or as few tags as they like and "tag spam" would be limited as custom ones need the CT: extension to be searchable.
All currently existing user made tags could be auto converted to CT: tags and the most commonly used that also meet the curated list copied over as curated ones.
I don't want to have to type in what I'm looking for, being careful to add every single variation of a word because no one is going to be able to agree on a single tag to use, every time I want to just casually browse through art.
It's so much more convenient to hit the drop downs and just go.
If you guys don't like using the drop downs, then don't use them. Update them and keep them there for those of us that do. Why does one side need to be taken away from just to make the other side happy? We can actually have it both ways. It's not that hard.
I feel like you should have asked for more opinions on this before sending it out
Also the tagging system needs to be updated to allow special characters and spaces like most other sites have.
I understand it won't be the end of the world if this change is retained, we'll adjust, but I do feel it's a significant downgrade.
That said, I do appreciate the retroactive addition of the dropdowns into the tags.
While I personally didn't really use the Gender dropdown myself, if this heralds the removal of the other dropdowns, it's going to be a major downgrade to the site. Again, yes, tagging stuff is important, but not everyone goes through the effort of putting in all the appropriate tags, whereas the dropdown is a more "Low effort" option that more people tend to use.
If it absolutely MUST go otherwise it'll permanently render a better search impossible, then that's... fine, I guess? But I feel it should be kept unless it's completely necessary to remove.
because the commission pages are cut off and it is impossible to read the tab :(
Apple and Google yelling at Tumblr is why they banned porn, I feel like people forget that
sadly can't say the same for Apple/iOS users tho, at least not without jailbreak.
I'm also in Europe so iPhone side loading is legally mandated regardless :3
Before you tell me "just block the tags of the things you don't want to see", that requires relying on everyone else adopting the habit of tagging the gender related words to their works... which in most cases, people don't.
Any reason why you guys at the staff didn't keep the gender function, but just removed the outdated and offensive labels in it? Browsing is gonna be unusable for a lot of us now.
Plus, overall the dropdown categories are a lot easier to see and people are more likely to use them when they're there versus hoping they'll remember to tag everything explicitly.
The people must know
As of right now this is a major step backwards for a site that is already a decade behind in usability.
The Arceus 2600 is a console that will enforce absolute preservation, since the past is critical to history. I posted something on NeoRHDN about this (But it's on the fritz currently) and there are people who actually support the idea of a device like that, even suggesting using AI as an assistant to help finish prototypes of games that never got released! It's price tag is $900-1200, which is fair for what you're getting. There are so many things it will do, including bringing back lost features of sites, so sites will start reverting back to what they were before they started deteriorating, though some won't be affected, others like YouTube and DeviantArt will be seriously affected, so sites will have to be adjusted to fit the Arceus 2600's preservational requirements. So lots of sites will experience continuous rollbacks until it finally reaches a point that the Arceus 2600 will accept them since they will properly be preserved. So modern features will likely disappear & Classic features will likely return. I know FurAffinity needs to change, but with it going off the rails, the Arceus 2600 will likely snap this, and many other sites, back on the road to longevity, because I fear FurAffinity won't have long to live...I see more users beginning to go Semi-Active like I have, and some downright leaving due to controversial changes.
It'll take something radical to solve it...
But probably like a lot of others I do not like the gender filter being removed it really is unnecessary.
Also, are you going to add a tag system to the browsing page? Because its use is really hampered now. Are we expected to type in Keyword [Gender] every time we use it if you do add it? Or are we expected to just use the search function for everything now, and the browse feature will be phased out?
You guys should have just left it alone, put out an update saying this was coming, and then pushed the replacement live when it was done cooking.
I'm seeing far more people pissed off about this than in favor and I feel like most of the backlash you guys are receiving right now could have been avoided with a simple heads up and a legitimate replacement at the ready.
SHOW us why we should support this change instead of just telling us to suck it up because that's how it's going to be.
though it seems the tag idea could have been implemented in a more user-friendly way
The page you are looking for could not be found.' instead of viewing a profile, I believe it's an outdated dead link.
I'll be able to transfer the information to the right people if you can provide a "fixed" link (and don't change yours just yet so we can corroborate on our end! <3 )
And yes, I said "force" and intentionally did so. If they don't put in any tags, abort the upload and tell them to put tags in. I'd almost vouch for an image recognition algorithm to aid with automatic tagging but too many have backdoors that scrape for content to sell in big databases for image generation. Ew.
We still need the "standardizes tags" feature like Itaku has for tag blacklisting to actually be effective.
I hidde tags but people still uploads things that disturbs me without tagging it!
Pragmatically speaking, it's now one place for people to not tag genders (and foiling the blacklist) instead of two
I really can't wait for community tagging to be a thing here
If anything, now that they are tags, my blacklist will catch more pics
The great example is not to put species and specific content in the tags because they know that most people blacklist specific tags.... It's a way they're cheating this system in a way
And it would be interesting the community tagging option
And yeah, I've always used the drop-down but I also tagged it, but so many people don't use either as they aren't mandatory
And I used the drop-down option for some content and others more the tags box, maybe we should have a box for each thing? (Species/gender/general content) Like in the other sites if you get me xD
And we can't force ".bsky.social", since this can be customized and changed on the platform itself.
I hope this helps. :3
No one wanted this right now and sure maybe it needs updating but you've made the easy to use browse page less functional and put even more pressure on propper and spelt correctly keyword setting.
Not knowing the specific gender identity of a character can make it hard to find art, and with the open-ended nature of user-defined tags it can be almost impossible to keep up with the common possibilities. Maybe we could see both sex and gender of a given character simultaneously to better define a search?
There is also little to nothing actually encouraging or ensuring users tag their submissions. All the changes and improvements to the system in the world won't help if uploads just aren't given any tags to begin with. Could we hope to see something about this in the future as well?
I'm not sure I would consider this a positive change. However, I for one am happy there are at least changes being made. Thanks for putting in the effort!
If we could save searches as bookmarks, it would be far more convenient, but there's no way of doing that.
Example: https://www.furaffinity.net/search/?q=dog
I hope this helps! :3
https://www.furaffinity.net/search/?q=raccoon baseball -female&rating-general=1&rating-mature=0&rating-adult=0&type-art=1&type-flash=0&type-photo=0&type-music=0&type-story=0&type-poetry=0
This finds raccoons and baseball, that are not female, that is rated general, while ignoring mature and adult stuff, and ignoring flash, photos, music, stories and poetry.
The full syntax allows for custom sorting, sort order, time range, the number of results per page, among other things.
I have a bunch of search bookmarks that I use on FA, and it's a whole lot faster than re-typing them each time.
At a glance, it isn't "pretty", but we have people on team to make it pretty.
Thanks for the suggestion! <3
Way back when the syntax used to be displayed, I created several bookmarks for searches I used frequently. They still work today. The time range parameter has more options than it used to, but everything seems the same as it always was. It's just that most users don't know you can create complete searches from the browser's URL bar, and bookmark them, because the search help page lacks that documentation.
Actual search strings will never be pretty, but the documentation to create them can be made pretty.
I just discovered something. Your search appears to be from an open source search server from Sphinx Technologies. I'm looking at the documentation for that and notice a feature called "wordforms". It's a way to normalize search term variants into a desired term. It involves making a file on the server that contains lines like -
guy > male
man > male
dude > male
racoon > raccoon
raccon > raccoon
procynid > raccoon
canine > dog
mutt > dog
pup > dog
It would literally map specified search terms to become a normalized word, which would solve much of the problem of searching for various words that are actually the same thing. Search would find what a user intends, without needing to think of every variations of a word!
If FA is using Sphinx search, it appears to be a lot more powerful than I thought. It might be worth the programmers reading the manual. It looks like a whole lot of FA's search issues might be easily solved, by creating a good wordforms file. It appears that the capability existed even back when FA was born, and has never been used. I'm not a programming expert, but the documentation suggests that your search has some amazing magic built in, just waiting to be enabled. I hope I'm not wrong.
But I also don't have a horse in this race as my horse is all the way in the back trying to help us get an Interactive Media category somewhere for better submission filtering after the death of Flash. XD
Make tagging mandatory. Make a very clearly outlined basic tag requirement visible when someone goes to upload a submission. These need to happen before the system actually gets any better for people.
1) People don't tag their submissions correctly
2) The browse page, which was the only way to find submissions that were not tagged correctly, is now completely unusable without the ability to filter based on preferred gender/sexual orientation
As it is, the current solution is inadequate
However, this change does bring the issue where if you search for new art in the 'browse' section, you can no longer search or limit by gender since you cannot add keyword searching there. Forcing people to only use the 'search' function to find anything. Curious if there a reason the functions they don't share couldn't be combined into the same page by chance? That way people can keyword search while also utilizing the dropdown selection browse has to pull up recent art or narrow down by catagories.
To the commenters, if you're so obsessed with gender, try encouraging people to tag things properly. People who don't tag don't use the dropdown anyways. The only reason I'd see it used is for NSFW, and you can just tag the keywords of what you want to see.
Thank you again staff!
Making your system not as effective.
I don't like this idea with remove gender options in the browser. If you want make site where we working only with tags then first prepare and finish it. At this moment I have a problem with searching arts. In the back days I just only choose in the browser gender female and category and I done! I had what I wanted.
A lot of people giving incorrect tags.
If this is the way you guys want to deal with it though, it would be great if FA would start introducing a standardized tagging system, much like booru image boards have (without the shitty 'tag what you see ' gender bias though).
Because now I have no idea how use the search function with weird shit like: transfemale|transgender-female|transgirl|trans-girl (etc). If I want to search for submissions of transgender characters and themed artwork.
I would be awesome if we could have some standardized gender tags people can CHOOSE to add to their posts.
Actually this tag standardization would be great for the site in general, especially for people wanting to block certain content.
Also, I feel like there hasn't been done proper research among my fellow trans folks about this question. This could have been a great thing to ask to the public before changing things.
It was a handy feature, removing it is just going to cause more confusion.
I know you meant well with this, I really do. But, um... generally speaking, people prefer to have labels for their gender identities. It give them comfort to put a word to who they are. And while "I don't care about labels" might sound progressive, in reality it just cause people undue distress and confusion as you aren't encouraging them (or, in a worrying amount of cases, actively discouraging them) to figure out for themselves. And what you're doing right now is very close to that.
Again, I know you didn't mean to come across like that. But this site has a massive LGBT+ following, and to them, gender identity is something that should be handled with more care than "Eh, just put it in the tags or something"
I appreciate the intent, but this is a step back. Do you know how many people just don’t tag their submissions?
2. People were equally lazy about properly setting the stupid gender dropdown, so that doesn't really change anything.
I mean, are you trying to get rid of the browse section entirely and rely only on tags? Please for the love of everything don't do that. People don't tag their shit right, ever. You're going to force us to have to type in what we're looking for 1400 different ways because no one is going to be able to agree on a single tag to use for a specific type of thing. I've always hated the search function and use the browse tab specifically for this reason.
And judging by this comment section, pretty much everyone agrees this is a BAD idea. Yall were doing so well with the other updates but this one needs to be rolled back and tossed, never to be heard from again.
"People don't tag their shit right, ever."
Uh, from what I've seen they do, aside from the occasional typo. When they're bothered to tag.
Also, it's not like people were fastidious about the stupid gender dropdown.
Plus all there's a lot of people and submissions who got left behind because they arbitrarily left labels out of the tag conversion.
Submit a ticket about this - I just did.
Tags give more precise ways of searching for stuff.
It is quite funny that FA develops slow AF but I believe it’s also because - let’s face it - years of neglect. Was it caused by technical difficulties and incapability to improve the website (and process this amount of data) or by something else does not matter.
Glad to see it changing for better. Slowly ;)
I've already started moving off this site a while ago because these practical functionalities exist elsewhere & so do most artists I follow.
Go and put the relevant genders in, you will find it hard to hit the character limit in that field! It doesnt have to be at the level of tags like E621, but it should be enough that people can find your stuff when searching the site!
the people bitching and complaining need to either re-read the post carefully or just actually I dunno, try the changes?
You broke the browser addons, but have no replacements, so i have to see scat/ piss.gure and whatever in my browse feed. No one tags and the modern layout is terrible.
objectively dont think theres winning, but i think removing the gender category is a good change in the long run. everyone can tag as they want now :3
plus its easy to tell FA wants to make long term improvements to the search and browse functions all together as well. i think everyones gotta give it time, the systems based off a society/internet thats decades old now
Plus, like. If you -think- about it...the gender dropdown really was always a Tag in another form. Just a tag from a specific, curated list.
If this had been done, I would have been a lot more okay with the sudden unannounced change.
This is not gonna end well
Yeah, no. If i did this anywhere else I would be instantly fired.
This is a very bad and unprofessional response.
I am on YOUR GUY'S side, but it is getting real hard to support either side now.
But , ngl, what they did right now, felt like a step backwards.
I'd say tag system needs to be improved in order to add some value to it and encourage people to use it, maybe add suggested tags system or something that makes it easier.
people not tagging stuff have been an issue for long time, but at least we had the species and gender fields to help some, but this as it is right now may just make it even worse to find some specific stuff :o
And even then, will standardized tags be mandatory? Or will we need obnoxiously long searches to cover for example [male, man, men, boy, boys, mm, mxm, gay, homosexual, -female, -girl, -girls, -woman, -women, -mf, -mxf] that all were previously taken care of by the simple "Male" dropdown?
This is just a constant repeat despite promises you will do better and be more transparent.
Instead of removing a very useful feature, it could have had whatever terminology you'd added and now considered bad, removed. Been changed to allow for multiple selections in case of multiple characters being featured in a piece. And be made mandatory to use.
If you're gonna remove features like this in favor of tagging, let other users much like E621 who has this locked down to near perfection, add tags to other people's posts and punish those who abuse that system.
Uh, pretty sure they did announce their intent to get rid of the gender drop-down back in May or April, along with announcing the plan to remove the species dropdown?
"Instead of removing a very useful feature, it could have had whatever terminology you'd added and now considered bad, removed."
Except that that only covers HALF the problem. It DOESN'T cover the problem of needing to ADD to the dropdowns for inclusiveness' sake - which is also a problem with the species dropdown. Keeping those up to date was a game of Whac-a-Mole, and the only way to avoid that is to replace them with tags (which people had been doing for years anyway in cases where the species or gender label wasn't included), or replace them with text fields (and idk how well that would translate into search filtering).
"Been changed to allow for multiple selections in case of multiple characters being featured in a piece"
Now, that's a bit more useful of a suggestion, but it still runs into the whac-a-mole problem.
"And be made mandatory to use."
I mean, that would just get people picking the lazy "any" option to avoid thinking.
"let other users much like E621 who has this locked down to near perfection, add tags to other people's posts "
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Uh, no.
"locked down to near perfection" my ass!
E6 proves why community tagging is a fundamentally bad idea on gallery sites that have porn. It gets abused there fucking CONSTANTLY, and is ruled by opinionated moderators who tend to refuse to be corrected even when mountains of evidence are shoved in their faces. I know for a fact that female reptile characters without breasts - because, y'know, reptile - are constantly getting tagged as "cuntboy" on E6 and mods refuse to let artists correct that. And that's just one example.
And it would ABSOLUTELY be abused here, at far too great a rate for mods to keep on top of.
Adding tag groups - and quick tags/tag assist like, say, SF has - would be better and more useful.
2] You let people write in if on the list of most common terms, what you need is not there, much like they are wanting people to do now anyway with the tags.
3] Yes and was part of the overall message rather than a snippet like you made.
4] That problem already exists and on a much larger scale than just picking the sex or sexes of character(s) in images.
5] We can agree to disagree on that, I know full well it's not perfect and you have the same problem with moderation on here as well, such is life when you let people have leeway. It is still much better than allowing no tagging at all or as they have flaunted the idea of here, a minimum requirement of 3 tags which could be anything and not fix the problem of blacklists not working for example.
6] The last bit might be the most productive thing of this comment.
1: expediting the implementation of "3 required tags" might be worthwhile if its possible, in light of this change (i'll admit i thought it was already a thing)
2: adding an easier/more streamlined way to report submissions for incorrect/manipulative tagging would probably be good too; maybe there could be a smaller "report misuse" link or something directly to the right of the "Keywords" heading on submissions?
The dropdown menus realistically should be replaced with keywords anyway, given how many problems they create as is.
And good luck with making it, if you ever do
And speaking of dropdowns (though this is off-topic), can we also have "Fairy", "Vampire", "Merman/Mermaid" in the species dropdown and the lactation (breast milk) in the themes/fetishes dropdown?
Tons of users don't put keywords on their things.
Making it even HARDER to filter art you like on a website with shitty filter features already? Bad!
What you just mentioned is a pretty big L.
I can see why its coming off that way now that I've actually scrolled through the messages.
(Minor in this case means insignificant)
Literally almost everyone on the site: Well that's dumb.
That could work better instead of remove it and hope for artists to tag properly
Guess what, They wont
Plenty of artists don't bother with tagging posts on first place, this won't encourage them to do it either
I don't see the need for removing the gender drop down. It's hard enough to filter things as it is.
Besides, as others have pointed out already, tagging is often not done properly on this site. And what's to stop someone from misinterpreting the purpose of tags? Suppose a "physically" female character who identifies as male is being uploaded. What tag should be used there? What tag *would* be used, for that matter? This is ridiculous.
As a side note, I am very happy about the hardware upgrades at least. That is a change I can get behind.
some people identify with the term and reclaim it, which is fine, but a lot of people were using the term to tag fetish content.
Not only was there no advanced notice, it would have been better to ask the broader community what they think of such a change in the first place. or better, make a poll.
As you can see in this comment sections, the majority found that change kind of unnecessary if not even impractical for multiple reasons (that i will not list again since others before me already did)
especially when it comes to using the browse funtion.
TL;DR : Many would be relieved if you put it back in the browse tap. Add "multiple genders" for pics with such. and let people browse in there preferred way.
"If people aren't tagging already they certainly aren't using the drop downs either. We would like for users to tag their works- however if they choose not to it only hurts themselves in the long run when it comes to search-ability." Bit of a hot take to be honest. People not tagging their stuff doesn't just hurt them, it hurts and annoys the people who don't want to see that stuff due to improper/false tagging to begin with.
And any kind of gender ideology aside, this has effectively kneecapped the chance for new artists to be discovered, and the fact it was done without any warning to the community was incredibly irresponsible. If I could, downvote.
In addition... the fact that it wasn't announced at all, just silently rolled out for people to discover hours before it was announced, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. This journal pointing out they "learned from their mistakes" and will be sure to post about an update before it's rolled out first is pretty insulting.
Like many others, I heavily dislike that slurs were endorsed by the site (in terms of being in the dropdown at all). But it would have been so much easier to just remove the slurs or change the terminology than to remove the option entirely WITHOUT any large community feedback. And even now WITH the feedback, it seems to be "sucks to suck :)"
Instead, people can just tag as they like now. Old/outdated terminology, new/more modern terminology, whatever fits best.
Wouldn't it have made just as much sense to keep a small list of most commonly used terms and then add a simple write in for the dropdown box? Does the same thing essentially in the end.
The Gender category was always just "A Tag" with a different coat of paint, as far as how it modifies a search. This is merely a simplification/removal of redundancy, because you're right: people could always just tag exactly as you said to accomplish the same thing.
We are adding a keywords filter to the browse section as quickly as we can, but we want to make sure that nothing breaks on the site before it's there.
If I dont want to see male characters, there are now SIX tags I'd have to remove before I even look at whatever concept I'm looking for.
You have to admit this was all done in the wrong order.
I encourage you to open a trouble ticket related to Technical Issues if you feel like something could be improved in regards to your user experience. We -do- check those tickets and try our best!
That is to say, it's now inconvenient to catch all tags that people could use.
If you want to very consistently blacklist a specific set of tags (such as genders), the tag blocklist located here may be very helpful for you to permanently hide anything tagged as such
OR cram the search bar with keywords to temporarily block (which may not even cover all potential keywords since there is no keyword standardization)
You are misunderstanding the inconvenience.
In other words, we basically just combined 2 search systems into one simplified one, but now you can tag whatever gender you want instead of our predefined list. I know it's different, and changes take awhile to get used to, but all previous functionality is still there in a new form that gives you and the uploader more control over how content is found and categorized.
Give it a shot via the search feature and see if you end up liking it :3
Point being, the system before was easier. One option, and standardized. Even other mods are admitting this is a problem- you should be able to as well.
I would point out that it was -not- one system, previously: it was two - keywords AND a category. It's now just one.
There are super valid critiques and concerns, and we as mods will absolutely not pretend they don't exist. The reason I'm replying to comments such as your own is because I believe your concerns to be genuine, but I also feel like most of your examples have so far been covered by the new system, hence my suggestions. We're here to help and we know this is a big change, but we are confident that after a few more related changes roll out, people may end up appreciating the new paradigm after a bit.
The convenience of just clicking a couple drop downs trumps any combination of words we have to type in a search bar. You're taking a feature that most people use and tossing it in the garbage in favor of something that is far more cumbersome. Took about two clicks to get what I want in the browse page, in this new system if I wanted to browse by gender, I'd have to type it all in and just HOPE that everyone is using the exact same keywords that I put, instead of having it all nice and neatly categorized with a simple click. For example, If I want to search for male fatfur art, I am now going to have to go to the search bar instead of the browse page and type in: keywords male fatfur fat fat_fur fat-fur immobile blob obese overweight over_weight over-weight weightgain weight_gain weight-gain food stuffing tubefeeding tube_feeding tube-feeding overindulgence over_indulgence over-indulgence feeder feedee gainer chaser chub chubby superchub super_chub super-chub musclegut muscle_gut muscle-gut and so on and so on.
How it WAS working is that I'd click fatfur and male from the drop downs, hit update, and done.
Do you see why people wouldn't want to do it the other way? It's a thousand times easier to do the drop downs in browse.
Like, we're going to have to keep personalized lists of every single variation of a tag of a specific theme just to throw them in the stupid search bar when we want to casually browse by gender now. That's insane.
I truly don't see why browse and search can't coexist independently of each other, and why they need to be merged at all. Browse and Search are two completely different functions of the site that serve different purposes.
Browse lets you do exactly that. Just casually and easily browse through themes or categories that you want to see new things in, with some optional refined filters to narrow things down. Search is what you use when you want to look for a very specific thing like a user, or the title of a post, or anything made by a specific artist, etc.
I think everyone here can agree that the search function needs to be completely revamped but not at the cost of features that people love and use regularly. And most people don't want to have to jump through hoops just to use a website. Shouldn't have to save keyword strings, or generate search url's to bookmark, or memorize specific combinations of words just to find new art. Why make things more complicated than they need to be?
Not trans, not intersex, but biologically herms.
I also don't see how it's fixed with the new system. The old system already allowed people to put more specific genders in tags in addition to the broader standardized site categorizations. The old system had broad categories that people could apply in accordance with which they most felt fit, or opt out using, and then apply more specific tags if they needed something not covered in those or want to specify within those categories. The broader categories had the benefit of being standardized. So if you wanted anything in the self-applied category "male" you could easily browse for/choose just that, while if you wanted something more specific you could search for/tag that. So there was both the practicality of a broader category's standardized categorizations and the benefit of the tags' ability to additionally personalize if you want. Unless you force the tag system to be standardized, like it is on some sites, you now have the problem of making it much harder to search for say specifically "male" as some people will tag "male", "man", "boy", "boi", "guy", "transman", "cis-man", "masc", "masculine" etc. And if you do force the tag system to be mandatory and standardized you loose the benefit of self-expression/categorization, and will just recreate any potential problem already existing with the drop-downs, but now with no alternative.
The tag system is also going to be much harder to use for non-English-speaking users. I've seen translation guides floating around non-English-speaking furry spaces for the dropdowns, so people can at-least get the broad categories down. That is going to be much harder with a potentially infinite amount of tags. Even if these were standardized into mandatory categories people would still now have to memorize how to spell the English words correctly every time they search or upload.
FA Staff Thought Process: One Step ahead and no further
Joking on a post that's drawn this much ire huh?
We're also planning on making tags mandatory on new submissions, which we mentioned a few journals ago. This is a top priority that we're making sure works properly before it goes live :3
Also, remove all the keywords you want from posts, repeat offenders are gonna keep doing it because it works. Unless you start doing something about YCH accounts that spam this, I don't think what you described is a solution.
Also, what were the removed terms? I have a friend who is concerned that their characters (who are biologically hermaphrodite, and have no other way to describe such) being removed from the site since they use those tags and descriptions.
That is to say, we don't know what the term(s) was, and we don't want to be banned for using something we don't know is disallowed or not. People don't know if it was 'herm' or 'shemale' or something else. The latter term is much more understandable to remove.
I would encourage the team to think really, really hard if they want to push updates with no warning and not ask the community at first.
No terms are removed; any genders previously selected are now tags. If your friend classified their submissions as "hermaphrodite" under gender, it should now be tagged as such, and you can find it by adding `@keywords hermaphrodite` to the end of a search.
We actually value peoples' abilities to use terms that they feel most comfortable with, which is why we felt that a curated list is really limiting. Tagging will allow anyone to use whatever terms they want via tag
"Multiple characters" really should have been included in the migration because now metadata on a huge amount of hetero art/art involving more than one gender has been lost. It is not the most useful tag, I grant you, but it would have been better than nothing.
If this had been done, I would have been a lot more okay with the sudden unannounced change.
From
People can still tag their art with `multiple_genders` or something, if they want, though! We encourage them to do that if they want to
I've seen a lot of points personally that I've forwarded to the rest of the team where I felt, "Yeah, that's a good point. We should maybe do something about that, as that seems like a pain that we've caused with the new change." I can't say much more at this moment regarding this controversial change, but I would like to reiterate that regardless of differences of opinions, we ARE listening to your feedback ^^;
"You'll take the update and like it!"
I get that people weren't really using the dropdowns to begin with, but if we're supposed to be relying almost entirely on the keywords system in the future, then there already needs to have been a strong push to force people to actually use it and not just skip over that field when uploading, rather than waiting after all the work to eliminate other searching features is done and suddenly there's no way to find anything anymore because people don't tag their stuff but may have used the dropdowns in the past.
I don't hate the change, but it feels a little half-baked to have done it in this order. It feels like a step was skipped.
May I suggest:
Ambient
Classical
Country
Electronic
Experimental
Funk
Hip-hop
House
Industrial
Jazz
Metal
Multiple Genres
Other Music
Pop
RnB
Rock
Singer-songwriter
Techno
Trance
While turning the 60s-90s genres into tags, similar to what was done here?
Most were utilizing tags anyhow. It's just easier for the uploader and the backend to eliminate the dropdowns.
Here's an album showing what I'm talking about: https://imgur.com/a/N2jQy9d
I want it to look like the second image, as having that information at easy access while browsing is important to me, but I'd rather not have to browse at 90% zoom to have it appear.
https://www.furaffinity.net/control.....roubletickets/
This way we can track the issue and discuss with the tech team, and they can ask details as needed.
Also, the formatting change for gender just sounds horrible. I use browsing to find artwork in specific categories - including specifically searching by gender - so this is removing a ton of functionality for me. Is there no way to go back?
But again, there's so much variety in tagging. Removing a filter and making zero improvements to the keyword search...
When other sites have had this figured out for years lmao.
FA is trying to catch up where they should have years ago, and making the wrong steps.
There must be a way to bring it back, or else how can I post my female art in my gallery?! And I want to see the female arts only when I search in that website!
I don't know if it's too late, but there's gotta to be a way to bring it back!
How long will it take to fix that option?
Also, removing the gender drop down in favor for keywords will make things so much more confusing and complex. The drop down worked.
I know what term everyone is upset about (h*rm), but there’s just as many people who identify with that term. Just because some loud folks whine about it, doesn’t mean everyone wants it gone. As a queer/NB person, I’ve personally never seen nor heard of it being misused, compared to other anti-trans/“anti-trans” phrases.
Bad moves, all around. :(
Still, many also use it to self-identify. Is it right to tell them they cant use these terms, because someone might dislike it?
I can't stop people identifying with whatever slurs they want, but that doesn't mean it should be a gender option separate from "other." It's cool that they identify with it, but the fact is it's a slur. Me identifying with "dyke" doesn't mean that dyke isn't also a slur all of a sudden.
edit: I'm also non-binary and exist in trans (and intersex!) circles. We have different experiences and yours isn't more valid than mine just because you identify with a slur.
I find it offensive that you say these are "slurs" that people use to identify themselves, and somehow they're wrong and evil for using these terms. Very welcoming of you.
I, personally, enjoy the "gynomorph" and "andromorph" bodies, but don't enjoy "hermaphrodites" because they have multiple sets of genitals. That's my squick point, but then people will tag both at the same time, which just makes search results worse on both ends. There's no winning.
I've used that term myself for my sona, as I felt it best represented them. I'm also a queer/NB person.
In all seriousness, why couldn't you just add more genders in the dropdown menu instead of just getting rid of it altogether? Like add "trans male" "trans female" "non-binary" "gender neutral".
Oh wait, staff of any kind never listens to their audience. So my comment is meaningless.
Wouldn't surprise me if half the staff are secretly MAGA right wingers
The thing is, those were already in the dropdown! I don't get it.
Honestly, what they need is an "other" tag, or something similar, with a text box to add in your own term. Taking away words, because some folks dislike it, is inappropriate. These are not terms created to hate, but words turned into hateful terms.
The term fa***t (slur for gays) has been embraced by the gay community, generally. Should we stop people from using that term? What about "gay"? It was a non-hateful term, turned hateful term, turned embraced term.
Have you considered that this gave people an outlet to officially talk about it who weren't in the discord?
This is a horrible change. Roll it back.
Stop. It. You folks always claim y'all care about the userbase but I haven't seen evidence of that. So many users quit because of massive bullshit like Nazis invading the site and people being falsely accused of AI and you're more worried about pissing off right-wing Trump dick sucking POS losers. Generally pathetic and honestly this comment right here gives YouTube staff a run for its money.
Basically he was being a dick to users claiming "UwU don't care about what you think go to Discord blah blah blah <3"
Again, I am on your side, guys. But this is unprofessional as all hell and only proves my point that the communication is bad.
There was a far better way of communicating that. You just made the situation worse.
Please do not do this next time.
Literally no reason whatsoever to keep this change right now when the replacement isn't even ready yet.
edit: sorry, posted this comment and then when the page refreshed i saw it was being addressed; not trying to drag things out
How did this not occur to any of you?
Such a fucking hugbox that it's REALLY not worth your time. I left within three days iirc
As it is, it's pretty much impossible to get the results you want from the search, because searching for "hug", "hugging", "hugged", etc will show only posts tagged with those *exact* words.
Additionally tagging needs to be mandatory and enforced. Blocking tags and searching is useless if people can just write whatever they want for the tags, or nothing at all.
Not just changing a major feature of the site, but doing so completely unannounced with no input from us the users (was anyone even asking for this?).
Altering submissions (by "helpfully" removing the data in the old Gender field and turning it into tags) without permission from the poster.
Giving no explanation for their decision besides a vague blurb about "inclusivity" and "societal changes"
Following their announcement with a blurb about how neat this other, completely unconnected feature is and how to use it to emulate the removed feature in a clunky and less reliable manner.
I personally rarely use the Search function unless I'm looking for something specific, because it relies on all of the posters using the exact same tags, which is just not going to happen. Some of them use abbreviations instead of full terms, some of them only use full terms with no abbreviations, some of them use different words from others that I would have to know and account for, and some of them just plain don't use tags at all. It is more effort than I am willing to put into casual porn browsing, and being told I have to use it to filter out and entire body type does not change that, it just means I won't be using this site for casual porn browsing.
So, whose bright idea was this? Because they are probably about to get a lot of angry messages.
And of course, you’re framing it as inclusion. But who exactly did the old system exclude? Artists could always assign whatever gender they wanted to their characters. Now it’s just a mess.
Honestly, I’d love to really vent, but I’d probably get banned for it.
If they want to be inclusive...why not just ADD more drop downs as opposed to REMOVING them and being EXCLUSIVE that way?
Not only will it make new submissions less specific, it will invalidate years of previous submissions made before the keyword system even existed.
And, personally, as a gay man I only want to see art of males. Nothing else.
Some kind of tag standardiation would be great. You cannot express it isn't possible because some of your major competitors have had it for years. Surely this has to be on the docket?
You made the site harder to use for everyone involved without actually moving towards any kind of improvement.
a dropdown menu would never been able to list every gender that exists, inclusion is always better than exclusion <3
In regards to the outdated terminology, Why not just remove it and leave the gender searching intact? I dunno, this just feels backwards to me, to be honest.
They're so out of touch with the rest of the community, it stopped being funny ages ago.
Fucking insane.
Before I was able to use the browse option with relatively few cases of “false results” (offensive content to me that should have been filtered by the dropdown), but now it's turned into a shitshow where EVEN using the filter tags option very few of the results are what I was expecting to get.
Do a simple test: Try to get only images of females with the type "muscle" and filtering (to remove) images tagged as "male". It's a disaster.
I know, a bit of a stretch, but I could see that happening.
Thanks a lot. :/
The modern layout feels to clunky to navigate.
Tho idk if you’re using just the original site’s skin or not? If so it should be in the profile info section
Why not just update that menu to be more inclusive instead of removing it and causing unnecessary chaos with searching?
They have been. But both that and the species dropdown - which they're also wanting to ditch - have been ever-moving goalposts to keep on top of. There's a lot of "Why isn't (x) on here yet?" for both lists, and there always has been. People have been using tags to compensate for that lack of inclusion for years, and requiring everybody to do it means less whac-a-mole.
I personally think replacing the dropdowns with text forms would have been more elegant, but Idk how well that could translate into search filtering.
And here's the thing: Without the gender and species dropdowns as lazy crutches, people are going to HAVE to start tagging if they want those sweet sweet faves and comments.
Don't forget that an intersex slur was also included
I’m a bit unsure what people are complaining about other than they don’t like change, personally lol! All of these people should’ve been tagging the character genders from the get-go!
And id imagine putting a tag minimum should help at least a little
Don't think there was any possible smooth way to remove it, but such is web development.
Thank you for your continued work!
They copied submissions that set the gender into the keywords. So that solves that 'issue.'
You actually couldn't even use search to search for the contents of the gender field before. So that was never an issue (now you can!)
Removing options from the dropdown would create haves and have nots, people who set the option before removing it, etc. So that's not a solution.
The only thing that REALLY needs to happen is adding a way to browse via tag, so people can add or filter tags from their browse. I bet 95% of FA never used that feature though.
This is really setting FA up to integrate searching and browsing into a unified experience with tags and filtering. The move has to be made eventually to improve.
Thank you folks for making it better. That said, please communicate changes in advance, that's probably 75% of the angst here.
You evolve by adding things or improving existing things, not by removing things that are functional.
With all due respect, i mainly use browsing to search for things, now i can't filter that by gender anymore. The tag system could already have been used to tag genders before, this literally didn't add anything,it just removed something that worked for alot of people and there's no tag system at all for the browse function now.
At that point why is the browse function even a thing at all anymore? Why remove the drop down tags for gender, but not for category, type,species etc?
It was convenient the way it was before and it worked, we don't gotta overcomplicate things
But this just feels like making the browse function worse, with no other benefits
We do enforce keywords, as it's part of our Upload Policy (Section 1, Paragraph 2: Submission Details).
While the team does its best to enforce them, we can't have our eyes everywhere at any given time. So we ask for Community help when it comes to keywords, and submit a ticket if they find a submission that is abusing the system, using the "Keywords" category.
We're also aware this might be somewhat less user-friendly, and the tech team is looking into the feasibility of adding a "report" button to the submission page to make the whole process smoother as some folks have suggested.
As of right now, using keywords on entries is not required, but this will change as more functionalities and features are added to the system.
We're looking at requiring a minimum of 3 keywords per submission in the future, but this is still under discussion/subject to change as other steps that are required before doing "the big change" are taken.
In the meantime, things are a bit... "hectic", but please rest assured there is a method to the madness.
I hope this explains the situation a bit, and provides a ray of hope!
I never really comment on these things, but I feel like it's worth mentioning
Also I appreciate adding the new social tabs, thank you!
I like transformation style writings that are based off male. And yes, it’s erotic. I am gay also. It’s nothing against any other gender, it’s just my erotic preference in transformation writings. And even though I look at non-erotic transformation also, I still only want to see male. Not trying to start a war or be inclusive but I’m sure others of all identities feel the same way. In some ways, it’s like I blocked the tag “inanimate” because I don’t like those transformations but they still show up because they aren’t tagged. Sorry, I’ll give it a try but I don’t think it will work for me. Thanks.
We need a proper keyword blacklist so we don't have to manually exclude keywords using the search bar.
Examples of such a blacklist being what e6 has, or how DeviantArt has "muted tags"
Alternatively, you can add/remove them manually from your list by going into the User Profile page, locate the "Tag Block List" section and add/remove tags from there.
I hope this helps! :3
I'd rather not have to switch layouts just to configure the list
I was in the same situation until about 2 months ago when I joined the FA team, and had to switch to the "Modern" layout/template instead to access our tools. But after about 2 months, and using the "Retro" skin... I have to say that it's far more workable than I thought and retains MOST of the "Classic" look and feel (not everything, but close!).
If you haven't done so, I'd suggest giving it a try for a week or two.
Worked well enough for me, but obviously, YMMV!
The only "way" to get it back under the picture is to narrow a window until it looks somewhat like a mobile resolution. It's not a perfect solution by any means, but... it's something?
Ultimately, I personally feel that changing to the newer UI using the Retro skin makes things reasonably close to the Classic one. It has some pros, it has some cons. But after having to use it for a few months since I joined the staff team, it's... Not as bad as I thought originally. And the newer functionalities are genuinely a check in the "pro" column.
I still miss the render speed and how "light" and simple Classic is, but alas... X3
Dragoneer made the retro theme, and I had great hope, but it turned out to be a modern version of the dark classic colors, so I couldn't use it. He said he would work on doing a modern retro light theme, when he got the time, but he was eternally busy with so many things to improve the site, that it was probably like walking up a never-ending hill.
There is a modern light theme, but that is totally unusable for me. It uses pure white as the background color, and is hard sensory overload for my faulty optic nerves. That results in bad painful headaches after just ten minutes of browsing, but at least my eyes don't blur the text on a light background. I can actually read it, but it's literally painful, like staring into high beam headlights. So it's unusable for me.
Classic light works almost perfectly for my eyes though, since the main blueish-gray background color is close to 20% darker than pure white, leaving room for the text to still be darker. I don't get the headaches with classic light, even after a few hours of browsing.
I'm thinking of trying to modify the appropriate css style files from modern retro, to create a modern light theme, that uses the exact same colors as classic light, since it is not so harsh or intense. I imagine such a theme might even get many other classic users who have nostalgia for classic light to switch to modern. I'm just not sure if I'm up to the task. How involved is the css for modifying a theme? I've written scripts to modify the appearance of a few simple pages before, but never for a site such as this. I did make different colored icons for the various notification types on here, like submissions, shouts, comments, journals, faves, notes, and tickets, but those were stretching my css skills to the limit. Those replace the 46S, 2F, 1T stuff at the top of the page with something like 46🏞, 2❤️ 1🎟.
Who would I talk to to get the proper files to edit for possibly making a new modern theme style? With classic no longer getting updates, and more new features coming to the site over time, I guess I should try my best to make my continued use of FA possible. Classic isn't really a nostalgia thing for me. It's mainly an access issue, with maybe a small 5 percent nostalgia attraction added in. I'll dump my bit of nostalgia in an instant if I can find a way to use FA with modern, preferably before any new features are added that I want badly.
My mom being blind from retina pigmentosa, I ABSOLUTELY understand where you're coming from (guess who's been calibrating her screens all over the house?) to as much a degree as someone who's living and supporting someone with a visual impairment can.
I see that you do have a very specific usecase, for sure. And one that's... really difficult to handle from our end, specifically.
I could talk to tech about maybe providing something that would allow users to tailor their own needs, or make a document on how to modify styles locally, or something. I unfortunately cannot promise much, though.
I apologize that this fell through the cracks.
Hopefully, we can come up with a scheme that allows you to continue using the site for the foreseeable future. <3
If modern is anything like classic, there are many dozens, and possibly hundreds of places where a color value would need to be swapped. It would be something like find all #CC738F and replace with #23c358, until all color references were done. Unfortunately, some colors will likely be in #FFF format, and others in #FFFFFF format, while others will be names like red or skyblue. Then, when all was done, it would need to be tested to be sure nothing was overlooked, and there's no text on a same-color background. It might be easy, or far more involved than I think. No positioning or functionality would need to change, just a big bunch of colors. I'm guessing that all of the modern themes are only different from each other in their color settings.
As a now-ex long-time user of the Classic UI, I absolutely understand your frustration.
However, it was mentioned in a Fender Journal 5 years ago that with the modern UI being put at the forefront and brought out of beta, Classic was being retired and wouldn't be receiving updates. This is not a new development and the team has since been very upfront about this reality.
Even as recently as a journal 2 months ago, the fact that Classic was no longer updated was reiterated.
It is an unfortunate reality that for FA to shed its old, outdated codebase, some things needs to be brought into the modern times. And this will be a multi-step process that will take some time. And one of those steps includes the Classic UI being phased out.
While I understand that this is not the reply you'd like, it's realistically the only one I can provide you with.
And otherwise, all I can do is suggest trying the modern UI with the "Retro" skin, as I have discussed earlier with Strana. There was a bit of a transition period for sure, but I found it to be surprisingly better than I initially thought - especially when compared to what it felt like when it was fully launched back in December 2019. It has received QOL updates since, and it's not exactly the same beast as back then. :3
I hope this sheds a light on the situation, even if it's not the answer you were looking for.
But it does feel odd that we're starting out with removing the gender menu only, and not the others.
Honestly across the years on sites like these, SoFurry, Itaku, etc. I favored how e621/e926 made tagging and searching the most. It's clear, concise, lumped the keywords being guessed into the more centralized choice, and leaves very little outliers. I may be misinterpreting the new searching, but with many descriptors to a gender like male (guy, man, men, etc.), who's to say I'm missing out on a piece with one of those words being used by an artist unless I specifically search said artist? Everything is just lumped in now, I guess.
The blacklisting was a welcome addition but this was just... a choice, lol.
Now y'all just gotta make the block function actually useful so we can actually banish them from our perception and from engaging with the blockers profiles whatsoever
I'm glad i'm not paying and removed any and all hints of paid links using adblock.
Still thanks for the suggestion, just not a fan of creating accounts for really anything. (Privacy and Principle related)
Please please PLEASE never implement such a thing, it's a breeding ground for discrimination and harassment. Just don't. I like being in charge of how I tag stuff and just being able to turn it off does not make me feel any less uncomfortable knowing there's folks whose first language may not be english, enable it for the purpose of other people helping them tag stuff only for ill-spirited folks to suggest slurs to them. If that sounds hyper specific, that's because I used to be one of those people.
"BUT WHAT IF PEOPLE DON'T TAG/ DON'T TAG CORRECTLY????' Ahem, enter a website called Inkblot. Inkblot actually has a team of moderators that go over any user submitted reports of incorrect tagging with a robust, clear and to the point set of rules of what is and is not allowed in terms of content and appropriate tags. (Some are no brainers, some are already pre-established okay terms by communities) It is not perfect but leagues better. If someone posts (for instance) blood but does not tag it as such, you can then report it and the moderators will then contact the creator by hiding the post until the appropriate tag is added or removed entirely. This only works if you, like they have, set up a set of rules and include *exactly* which tags must be used when a specific kind of content is depicted.
This would be more work on the FA team, but I also think it would solve a lot of er, complaining. I literally do not see the issue in just sticking to the common gender markers of male, female, non-binary, genderfluid, trans (you can be more specific with masc or femme) like, what is so hard about using them as tags? Didn't we already do that? Common, community wide accepted tags evolve naturally and folks will follow them once established. Sorry I'm rambling and raving but good lords it is NOT the end the world.
Just y'know, don't use slurs folks. C*ntboy is in fact, a slur.
Where the issue is, is people not having the respect of learning what someone DOES and DOESN'T want to be referred to as, and following those guidelines. I have seen MANY artists following this rule, they will ASK their commissioners what they want their character labeled as when the artwork is posted, which is a polite and respectable action.
Yes, this can lead to a smaller discovery of their posts, but, is that not within their personal choice? I understand that these terms can be triggering, and I understand the pain behind it, but, for the sake of making the majority feel comfortable, is it fair to tell the minority to just ”suck it up and accept it!” in reference to using terms they don't feel applies to them?
Don't you think that might make them feel uncomfortable and less than human? Its always about respect, and sometimes respect is just saying ”I disagree and I chose to walk away and not participate!”, because these people aren't asking you to feel the same as them, only to be seen as they want to be seen!
The main thing pushing me away from the number porn site style of "anyone can tag pics/centralized tags" is that I will inevitably log in to see "trans_(lore), [slur], [incorrect use of "intersex"]" on my uploads. Don't like that.
But also having that as an option you can toggle on or off would be nice, for those who wish to do so.
Hyper specific concern but what are we good for as users if not for sharing things mods might never even think of? :P
Now I'm glad I'm not buying FA+. Because if this is the kind of response we're gonna get, fuck that. lmao
I understand your shift towards a tags system, and obviously the Search feature over Browse. But would allowing users to suggest tags also be an option? Or a 'community tags' addition? It could help direct artists towards more common tags they're either not using or forgetting to add.
This is the most ass-backwards thing you could have done.
Because I can completely assure you people aren't gonna remember to put them in tags. and there are going to be people that go out of their way not to use any tags now.
Really goes to show how much you care.
All this did was cause needless complications for a system that was simple. As for the whole outdated terminology thing, just remove the outdated terms and update them to be more appropriate with today's terminology. Nothing would be lost, and everything would be fine.
A lot of us are mad because it feels like you guys aren't taking this seriously, and are just brushing off our feedback, trying to insinuate that 90% of people wanted this change. (They didn't.)
Think about how we feel, yeah?
On paper, some of what you're doing makes sense. In practice, clumsy.
that helps no one.
Other staff members are doing a much more professional job at responding to comments than she can. It's clear she shouldn't.
Yeah, it would help if people would take a breather before responding, mods included. Would help if people thought about it first.
I think they did take a breather because they are calmed down now. Either that or the situation finally calmed down.
Her response wasn't good but she did acknowledge it was wrong and apologized.
Basically, it's a move that was on the block for years and years and it finally happened. It's not out of the blue
How are we even supposed to know that many others wanted it when you never even asked? You might've changed your mind if you actually did care enough to ask your users instead of just listen to whoever complains the loudest.
And then you go ahead and reply with a smile emoji when people get pissed. Respond more professionally next time and you'll get better responses, weirdo.
If you want my two cents, yes this was not well handled. I think the change went backwards and communication was (okay, is) poor. But I do think the change could become a step in the right direction and the whole thing was overblown and got too heated.
Again, thank you for apologizing and I hope things get better for you.
It's not a GOOD excuse, and I'm aware that there are people here to just get angry no matter what, but we are pretty tired of repeated hatred from the same people
Again, I apologize for that
In other news, the announcement popup covers up the top of an image and submission metrics (views, favs, comments, rating) on the right, when viewed in a desktop size.
So you either have to close the announcement or resize your browser so that the metrics move underneath the image, that then gets partially covered up.
And I know to go to Support> "News and Updates" or
Support> "Events and Spotlight" if I want to see the news.
I feel it would be better to incorporate the category into the submission page, so people use it instead of just leaving it as all. Then encourage using tags for gender, themes and species.
Here's to also a future where we can not receive notices about certain submission types like YCH's and commission openings.
Male
Female
Gender Neutral
Asexual
Multiple
Other
I think we all wanted things to go better and moving forward we want things to be better, this was genuinely am oopsie.
As far as I can tell, they don't have plans to roll things back as it is a move to have everything done with tags, to be more in line with other sites that people enjoy.
I'm sorry it's not what you wanted for an answer, and I'm sorry I can't fix it immediately. I'm just here to help try answer questions the best I can
This should have been a LAST step, not a FIRST step. Doing it without testing and before upgrading the tag system to provide equal replacement in terms of function and convenience was completely jumping the gun. If they want to do everything with tags, they need to make the tag system fit for doing everything with first. THEN and ONLY then should they remove legacy features. Not one minute before.
And the fact that this basically threw everyone who used the "Other" label because it was better than nothing, and those who used "Any" due to genderfluid, under the bus? Means that it actually BACKFIRED from an inclusion standpoint. And while "multiple characters" doesn't say much, it's still meaningful. That ALONE means this change should be rolled back - you erased meaningful identifying information from MILLIONS of pictures in one fell swoop because you arbitrarily left those labels out, and it's not remotely fair to force the artists to fix that on their end when it's YOUR mistake. It's not artists' fault that staff were overly impatient to migrate to "tags do everything".
If the staff want to make this right, they revert this change and restore the stripped metadata. End of story. FA is not in a fit state for this change to actually work properly, and this is not a change that should be made before the site can actually support it.
All it's doing is causing a lot of ire, and frankly, the overwhelmingly negative feedback should be a sign to perhaps reconvene with the rest of the staff, gauge community feedback and go back to the drawing board on that.
Second, that list is still very binaryist (it doesn't even mention "non-binary") and limited, with "other" doing a bit too much lifting to feel inclusive or be useful for filtering (so several of the people throwing fits about removing the dropdown would still be throwing fits, because what they're really upset about is seeing ladies with dicks)
Trying to keep adding things to the list for inclusion is an ever-moving goalpost - same for the species dropdown, and that one had even more "Why isn't (x) on here yet?". Better to replace them with something more flexible, although I feel like text forms might have been more elegant.
People who weren't included were tagging anyway.
TIL.
I can't promise the outcome, but this will make things easier to track on our end, and insure it will be looked at. <3
arcanine @keywords female !male
This would make a search for "arcanine" in submissions' keywords, titles, and descriptions.
It would also specifically look for the "female" keyword, whilst excluding all submissions with the "male" keyword.
I hope this helps! :3
You can do so by clicking the "+" sign next to a keyword, or manually adding them using the User Profile page. This should help filter out submissions that are tagged as such, hopefully making your experience on the site a more pleasant one overall.
What I can suggest as a "workaround" would be to create search queries that fulfill what you want to see, and bookmark the site with those searches "active". When you execute a search, the site's URL does change with your search, and can be bookmarked as such. So when you want to look for certain things, you can just load that bookmark and get the results you feel like looking at at that moment.
Example: https://www.furaffinity.net/search/?q=dog
Again, I know this isn't the user experience you're wishing for and can be a bit frustrating. And we're sorry that the experience currently feels degraded.
But it is a step in a marathon of needed changes to bring about a much better overall experience for everyone in the hopefully-near future.
We're looking at ways to mitigate some issues that have been pointed out in the last few hours and implement changes/additions to the search and browse pages.
It's not going to happen overnight, but please believe me when I say we're working on it.
I hope this helps a bit, even if it's not perfect at this time.
What about 'Man, Boy, Masculine, Male-presenting, AMAB, Cis male, Trans man'
She has to put those on there every time?
Does chocolate not taste like chocolate!?
IS PURPLE NOT ACTUALLY PURPLE!?!?! Dx
But yeah, "Bang" is another word for it, FOR SOME REASON. How else could the world-famous interrobang be called as such‽‽
Don't ask me why, I'm just a dog. Bark bark bork.
Thanks for the correction, still. x3 <3
But also thanks for the knowledge that its also called "Bang"! I had no idea, and thats actually sorta neat! My 12 year old past self can go pound sand, learning IS fun! >=D
It would be better to add tools to make tagging easier (tag aliases for example making man/male/boy the same result, maybe showing a user's recently used tags or frequently used tags on the upload page to click on and easily add them) and make the user experience better before doing a change like this that only makes the user experience feel worse.
Is it impossible to rollback this change that has caused so much pushback and then implement it when it is more thought out, on a schedule after announcing the change, and when you have more systems in place to make this function better on the site for all the users and artists?
I believe the gender dropdown issue is much more complex than you are making it out to be. People rarely (if ever) do the right tags but they always tag it with the dropdown. Why not just add more custom genders in that or new additional genders? I believe this change is just making it so people are just going to argue over it or it'll tag things improperly so others see things they do not care for when browsing art.
Thank you for apologizing as well for rolling it out without an update post. We, as a community, appreciate transparency over everything else.
also multiple characters needs to be better implemented especially during pride month when people only care to see specific content fitting their personal preference.
Great job, FA staff.
you have every right to be angry but insulting mods doesn't get anyone anywhere.
Again, i am absolutely upset and i've been communicating with the mods about it, i have not been silent. You and everyone else have every right to be upset and angry. The change was poorly handled and communication on both sides (read: BOTH sides) was poor.
Take a look at the discord and my responses. You do not see me going "They don't care, fuck the mods" or "those accepting the change are silent and not upset enough." I've called out a mod on this very page without being rude, and guess what? they acknowledged they were wrong and apologized. You, on the other hand, made it worse.
You can post all you want. But you have made the situation worse and i will not be surprised if people stay away from you or a mod bonks you as a result.
You have every right to be upset and angry. It's not an excuse to be an asshole.
But bootlicker, okay, cool. And then you decided to insult me and make the situation worse.
Again, every right to be upset and mad. But NOT an excuse to be an ass.
There is a way to be firm and upset without being rude about it.
Honestly I'm in the camp of, You should of kept it as an option, not required it, and let people do as they will, can you use it yes, can you not? Yes, can you tag anyway...yes. Removing it, does nothing but make the site worse for some, (Personally it doesn't effect me at all I don't come here to browse, I already follow who I follow, and get new people if I find something on the rare times I view the front page, I would never come here to find a new artist, I do that on reddit, where I follow reddits of things I already like.) But I understand the push back. there really was no reason for this change other than you wanted to push an agenda.
Having genders as tags instead of a drop down is a good change, and the only people who are complaining as far as I can see are the type of people who don't know how an image board works and have never used one. In the time it took to type out the average "I don't like this" comment, they could have learned the newer features of the site.
If you need an art gallery to host your content, FurAffinity is a good option.
If you need a goon cave, there's many image boards that will host your niches in a comfortable environment.
All I see is boo hoo I don't know how a tag system works and I am too lazy to learn.
The change doesn't bother me because I already tag my work correctly & I always use the search bar rather than the Browse section to browse art. It should be common sense for artists to tag their work properly. Some people already suggested it here, but it would be nice to have a minimum of 4 tags required before uploading art. It's too common to see YCH reminders & extreme fetishes not being tagged on the homepage.
I do think maybe a good way to have headed this off was to wait until after mandatory 3+ tagging was implemented, because "Species, Gender, SFW/NSFW" would be three incredibly easy ones to get a post out there with, but that's hindsight for you.
Unless you want to implement something like e621 and not load the post at all if a tag is blocked?
Even make it a toggle because there's sometimes nuance in tags?
Otherwise this is terribly inefficient if 60/72 images loaded per page are blurred, and 7 out of the remaining 12 images are under-tagged and show you things you don't wanna see regardless.
For search though, I completely get it, but that aside, people like me use browse to discover new artists who align with what we're into; you gotta really know what you're after when using search.
Could you not simply add more dropdowns with updated terms if a piece has multiple characters?
Maybe add dropdowns for both sex and gender?
Because I've noticed people who don't tag at all will still use the dropdowns because the option is there in the submission page.
There is so much more discussion to be had here, I'm not even saying my suggestions are right, but more options should be explored with the community before cutting something entirely.
As for right now, I don't really care to use the browse page, I'm just gonna check in with submisison notifs and dip.
And I feel like they made the change to the drop down because they wanted to play Good Guy ™ without realizing what it meant to the user experience. Like, if they wanted to be more inclusive, they could have just made the gender field a text box that defaults to "other" if nothing is typed in.
I feel that would solve the untagged issues and lead to better searchability/ tag blocking.
Idk if you lot in the dev teams have the stats on that or not. But other gallery sites (e6 and Itaku) have generally robust and standardized tags.
I'm one of the many artists that make my livelihood here, so to say that I'm invested in the health of FurAffinity is an understatement :)
There's no need to echo the entire sentiment of the thread. So for me, the killer was the sudden implementation without forewarned transparency of the plan. That is to say I really appreciate the comment I'm replying to.
Lastly, a quick question; Did y'all go scorched earth? Or is a temporary rollback possible until the infrastructure of a better search engine is implemented? I feel like that would be the best compromise for the time being.
Either way, I trust y'all with the cleanup and upgrade roadmap, and am curious to see where we go from here. Thanks again for all you do!
Right now, there's a genuine loss of filter functionality (especially for the browse tab) that's a lot clumsier to approximate by other means.
What I would ask is that people be informed of the demolition at least a day ahead. People will of course always complain. Simple fact of any website dedicated to a particular subculture. But at least it wont be out of sheer surprise.
But thats just my outlook. Idk what the backdoor decision making/ internal logic is like.
Thanks for the reply tho.
Just remember this subculture is fickle. You're not gonna please everyone.
Which like.
Is fine.
People are people.
Y'all made a change out of order. Y'all know that you did. Instead of reversing it, you're just going to commit to doing things in the wrong order? Why? How is that ever going to make the site more useful?
Although if picking from the library of presets is mandatory it had better have general-use tags like "fullbody", "portrait", "still life", "turnaround"
I will say that a lot of people are overlooking that without gender and species dropdowns, artists are going to have to start tagging if they want engagement.
But still I feel there be a tag category for general "objective" tags that describe what the piece format is.
Im more concerned with how the staff are going to handle years and years of untagged materials.
Will it be like e6 where tags can be suggested? Or something else.
Because if not done carefully, that will lead to that system being weaponized hardcore.
As for policing tags, perhaps a volunteer group of users akin to e_Hentai's Tag Vigilantes. Shift as much of the work away from the mods as possible, only involving them at the final stage after the reports are collated and crosschecked.
And speaking as someone who draws a lot of TF/TG, the system was never perfect, but the Gender dropdown stuff was at least nice to attempt filling in.
Just say that the drop down was inadequate for pieces with multiple characters and unlisted genders. No need to try and virtue signal.
The rest of that paragraph is fine. That one line, however, is fucking cringe.
https://www.furaffinity.net/control.....site-settings/
You can make any of these your default, so every search after that, will go back as far as you choose.
1 Day, 3 Days, 7 Days,
30 Days, 90 Days, 1 Year,
3 Years, 5 Years, All time
I believe the search also has a hard limit of displaying something like the 16,000 most recent results. In that case, just click on your advanced search settings for a search that has too many results to display, and select only one of adult, mature or general. Look at all those results, then repeat the search with a different rating selected, then repeat again, with the remaining option selected. That way, you get to see about triple the results all together.
The main browse page also has a similar limit. The same trick applies. Just browse one content rating at a time, until you hit the limit, them change the rating and browse until you hit the limit again, and so on. I actually did that when the site was stuck in read only mode for more than a week, and it really did take days of non-stop browsing to hit all the limits.
In general though the gender tag like this has only made browsing more frustrating because with some genders there's a bunch of overlapping terms for the same thing meaning submissions will slip through the cracks.
going forward if you implement standardization on some tags it would be better to just overhaul the browse feature to just show new and trending stuff.
Some common terms:
male, man, guy, lad, boy, trans man
female, woman, gal, lass, girl, trans woman
intersex male, intersex female, nonbinary, agender, genderfluid, andromorph, masculine-presenting, feminine-presenting, he/him, she/her, anygender, gender
And if you don't want to see some of those, you have to do this on EVERY search.
Surely it's clear how inconvenient it has now become?
Woah, this got WAY out of hand.
So i have some comments...
first off, some of the anger was not justified. please do not insult the mods. and do not insult others for being fine with the change.
But on the other hand, don't just say "just use the tags" because it isn't that simple. It feels like some of our feedback was pushed away and it only made people angrier.
second, i totally understand things take a long time to code and implement. but there was a better way of doing it here, this came out unfinished and with missing necessary changes. And unannounced. We would appreciate being told next time.
If there was a beta fork or at the very least being told about it before its implemented this wouldn't have been as blown out of proportion. But poor communication kills, and it killed the chance of this going over well with users.
Third, "just use the tags." The tags system needs work, and just saying use the tags completely pushes away valid criticism of the tags not being a good idea. If the tags were improved and the search better, there wouldn't have been the insane backlash.
Also some of the responses in the announcement were NOT professional. Just putting a smileyface to criticism isn't professional, that is not okay. It feels like we aren't being listened to. I get some of the users are rude and not giving good criticism, but seriously? do not be unprofessional in responses.
Overall this was handled badly and unprofessionally by the mods and devs, but the response by the community is not warranted. Overall im very disappointed how this was handled and responded to.
This change isnt as bad as people say but wow it got ugly. not cool guys.
Imagine you want to search for “female” but you agree to receive results where the female is involved with a male. But you don't want images with only males, or even worse (for me), with males involved with males.
If you search for the tag “female” but block “male”, you'll only find images of females alone, where no results will appear where females are involved with males. And that's if the uploader places the tags correctly, because in my experience some uploaders place tags incorrectly on purpose to offend others and thus get attention for themselves.
Thanks! :3
Just thought I'd break up all the negativity and complaining about something people have absolutely no control over.
Also, I've said exactly what I mean to say. I refuse to let some offended little special snowflake break me in half over something that I said that they didn't like.
They've essentially created a problem trying to solve a nonexistent one.
What, was deleting a word too difficult and broke the css formatting because it was hard coded into the framework at specific distances between characters?
"But I don't like that!"
Cope.
This.
If people would spend less time complaining and more time adapting, this whole world would be so much better off.
COPE.
Personally, I haven't used the drop downs in ages and tag everything including my own artist name so people can just block my art entirely if they wish.
1) Can we get a fix for 4k web browsers? A change was made a couple years back that put giant empty side bars on the site whereas the website used to fully utilize screen real estate.
2) Can we get the submission options section moved up above the keywords? It's rather inconvenient to have to scroll down and hunt for it.
We are trying to get a LOT of backlog finished in terms of making the site easier and this just got pushed out prolly a little too quick
The idea is to do mandatory tagging for submissions, so that things can be placed where they need to be
Sorry about that
This, if anything, makes misgendering more likely.
I'm really shocked at the number of people who are offended at the idea that they might see genders they're not searching for. If you're a gay man and looking only for porn of men to whack it to, sure, you probably want to see mostly men if you're trying to find that, but seeing the occasional tit isn't going to rock your world, and the idea that some genders are somehow so offensive or disgusting that someone would be hurt by the idea of not being able to avoid looking at them sounds like a bigotry issue, not a tagging issue.
Not to mention, if you search for the tag 'male', you'll only get images tagged 'male'. So unless people are mis-tagging (which they could do with the dropdown method too), you're not going to have to look at any more 'female presenting nipples' if you're looking for art than you were before.
If you're worried about only wanting to see new art of certain genders, species, etc, you can sort the Search entries by date and it'll show you all the newest stuff.
i'm not like this because i hate women or anything.
My apologies if I'm talking down.
Its really stupid they did this and the lack of filtering is a major deal breaker for me.
I hope we can spread the word about the importance of PROPER tagging. Maybe FA can investigate a tagging system, kind of like what e621 does, with inline dropdown suggestions.
One thing about tagging is it helps spread the availability of your art. I see so many awesome four-armed critters getting posted with no tags relating to (for example) "four_arms", so unless I happen across it, I'll never find it!
Another important aspect is for proper tag blocking. For example: Maybe I don't want to see pics of messy diapers, but I do want to see pics of clean ones. Meanwhile, a pic of someone eating cake with crumbs on them, or a random adult art where there's bodily fluids in certain places, are also tagged "messy". I don't want to entirely block the tag "messy", but I also don't want to see dirty ABDL art either, just clean ones. Hence - for example again, e621 - "soiled_diaper" and "clean_diaper" are tags that are usually used in diaper art; meanwhile here, people just put "messy", and even worse when they don't!
Disclaimer: No hate/disrepsect to anyone into that stuff; I just personally want to block it for myself, but it's hard to block "messy" in one context but not in another, when it really should have just been more properly tagged "soiled_diaper" in the first place! XD;
While I can understand the decision based on some comments as a part of some planned future improvements. So I feel removing the gender dropdown menu is a disaster if the next update isn't one of those said improvements, such as adding the required 3 tags, or a tag suggestion feature. Without them being implemented as soon as can be, this update just harms FA overall.
I think the biggest issue here is communication; you keep wording things like you're working with the community but the truth is the true community is literally on FA and your current way of including us is having us either join the Discord (even though not everyone has or wants a Discord), or sending in a Trouble Ticket which is not only not obvious to most users (I only learned we could submit suggestions via it AFTER the massive backlash against what is referred to as the "Pokémon Ban", and I've been here since 2010) to staff that have faced near endless accusations that has made an unknowable amount of us not trust communicating with you in any sort of private setting. I think you need to communicate potential ideas more via journals like this before you even consider implementing them because it feels like that's really only real way to ensure you're communicating with the FA community. In such journals you should have a section that reminds people they can join the discord or submit a suggestion via the Trouble Ticket system, that was the community is always fully given the chance to be included. Otherwise it have the bad optics of making it look and feel like a select few are getting to shape the site and its future while the rest of us are (for lack of a better term), deemed worthless peasants. I think doing a journal would also help build greater trust and kinship with the staff and the community as a whole, which should help with the site and communities overall mood. After all if I'd gotten to debate and talk about this feature's removal and the reasons why I feel you could have convinced me to be more in support of it. I honestly think it would help with the issue of communication.
Cause without the gender drop down (even if outdated) makes using the browsing page a real nightmare. I want to look to see if certain comics have updated? Now I got to dig through all the things posted into the 'comic' section today.
Like.... I understand what the end goal was, but I feel that the team removed an part without slotting in a replacement.
My thoughts boil down to that this was a rushed removal of a feature that clearly did not have a replacement under Browse.
What I feel would have been a good idea is to have a Keywords field under Browse and being able to type suggested keywords in to filter content READY before removing this, essentially like e621 on the main page but I suppose that would remove the Category, Type, Species etc. as well.
This seems like a hastily made decision that a few of the core FA staff wanted instead of something like proper A/B or beta testing, something this site used to do when there were major layout changes and such.
If you don’t want male you have probably six tags you’ve got to blacklist now.
‘Male, masculine, male_presenting, boy, man, trans_male’ which is really annoying if you’re just trying to filter out noise due to the lack of tag standards.
I saw your other comment, which is great, but common sense would have you think you’d improve the tagging system before nerfing the searching feature altogether, no?
The frustration lies with the lack of transparency and frankly unprofessionalism of some of the staff. We don’t just dislike change.
We dislike when it’s sprung on us with no alternatives.
It’s not wrong to be upset over that.
If they had an open forum and discussion about future website changes none of this could’ve been as severe as it was. The lapse in communication and care is what is so offensive to me.
It might be better for you, but the keyword search isn’t intuitive in general. And the tags are still a wreck. Any new users will have no clue, without some digging.
A lot of people are rightfully annoyed that it was taken out before the replacement was implemented, but I'm not here to belabor that point.
So long as it is easier to search by or exclude specific genders, I only see this as a good thing, as the old menu was very limiting for people to self-label. Moving to a full keywords method of searching things would be a nice change and give people way more control. I know y'all are going to get a lot of flack for this change since people don't like changes, but I did have a possible suggestion for future development.
Taking into account that I don't know what your plans are for the tagging system, I actually had a possible suggestion for the future! Now, this will be long but hear me out! My suggestion will not be /perfect/, but I felt it might be a good thing to consider!
Currently, the subject list is very limited, for how wide the pool of subjects, kinks, 'specialties' are posted commonly on FA. The species list is in a similar boat.
The logical solution would /seem/ to be 'well then expand the lists' but then you wind up with HUNDREDS of things to scroll through on the drop-down, and most people don't know that you can type a letter to try and get to your specific alphabetical section. So, most would just give up using the drop down at all.
So then the next solution would be 'well let people add whatever they want and just make it a tag, then.' But then you run into the all-too-common issue of 'Well, what tags do people even /use/ for this topic? Is it Shrinking, getting_small-etc?' Then the tags and terms become diluted, lost to the sea of different people's specific terms and (mis)spellings of the words. A full 'tag whatever you want' method doesn't work either. [Example I found recently due to some tag research: Consensual Non Con has half a dozen ways it can be tagged, but none are consistent and many are flat out not used despite making sense. CNC is the most popular one, but only has 3k submissions, and many aren't related to con-noncon. Then there's connoncon which has 31, and consensual_noncon [which would be the least confusing and most specific] has 8. Meanwhile Noncon on its own has over 16k. There's no unified term for the niche of consensual_noncon, but there really should be for ANY niche so people can tag it accordingly, especially when there's such an important distinction such as consent. And if a term doesn't exist, the method of having a suggested term could slowly BUILD a recognized term, sort of like how terms like abdl get popularized. FA could decide on a clear, specific term for something, and then add it to the database so people could be directed towards a unified term for the subject.]
So if fully custom 'tag it yourself' method doesn't work, I have a compromise.
Something that /could/ be done is to have, in place of a limited drop-down menu, a database of terms and species.
The user clicks on the new 'subject' box, and starts typing "shrink".
The database pulls and suggests any terms with the start "shrink", such as Shrinking and Shrinking/Growth, but also RELATED tags like giant/tiny and macro/micro, as the database lists those terms as having the related term 'shrinking' in their database definition.
The user clicks on 'Shrinking'. 'Shrinking' is added to their post's tags. They also add macro/micro and then a new suggestion that pops up, giantess, as it was relevant but they hadn't thought about it.
But the piece ALSO involves vore! Under the old system, you couldn't categorize both macro/micro and vore. You HAD to pick one. [you could add the tag, but y'know if people searched by 'subject' it wouldn't show up in vore if you just /tagged/ it as such unless they did advanced search.]
So, now they type 'vore'. This pulls up vore, willing, unwilling, fatal, nonfatal, perma, oral, endo, long_term, digestion, absorption, mawplay, maw, mouth, tongue, swallow, throat, belly, etc etc etc. Now the user can click each one and apply them as needed, and they have an easier time understanding what tags could be helpful on their piece! Or they could just put 'vore' and be done.
The same can be said for the species list. There's tons of species on there, sure, but it doesn't matter if there's multiple characters, or it's, perhaps, your own species, and you don't want to label it as 'fan species' or w/e. [Like me labeling one of my characters as a 'Minky Dragon' instead of 'Dragon [other]']
Adding this same database method for the species list, which would just add the tags to your post, would go hand-in-hand with the loss of the gender dropdown. People would just have a database of species that they could pick from. And of course, if their species isn't on there, they can add it to their tags anyway with the normal method of tagging. On top of this, maybe if a tag is used enough times in good faith, it could be considered for the official database, somewhat like other tag-heavy sites like Itaku, where community-made tags are abundant!
Adding more focus to clear and thorough tagging is a good move, and would only do more good for people curating their experiences on FA. Sure, not many people would be this thorough, but that's not the system's fault. Many people just /don't tag/, but these easier-to-use and more exhaustive systems would be for those who DO tag religiously and want their work to be more easily curated.
And how would we get these databases of terms? Surveys!
You could survey the entirety of FA's userbase via a google form to ask for suggestions on subject tags, species, [excluding wide ranges like 'pokemon' cuz there's over 1k of those, unless you want to put every pokemon in the database, which, more power to ya], and anything else the team may need. Then, you can sort out the most widely-requested additions, add those first, and then work your way down to the more uncommon/niche ones! As long as something receives over a certain threshhold of requests, it'd be considered [so you wouldn't have a single person getting, idk, 'ergonomic monitor arm' in as a species on the official list as a joke].
This solution is by no means perfect, but the further removing of limitations of what you can and can't label your art as, AND the continued focus on tagging thoroughly and intelligently, would be greatly appreciated, and would help move FA in a more accessible direction.
Something I think would make a lot of people happy is the ability to save searches! Yeah you could do that manually yourself but nobody wants to do that apparently.
But like if I wanted to search keywords vore mawshot male -female, and that was a FREQUENT search I did [it's not but hear me out], I could have the option to save it as a default search term for future ease. That'd def be more programming and such to implement, but could be a fun quality of life thing to consider in the future so people could save their incredibly specific searches without having to save them somewhere to copy-paste, or without having to re-type it every time.
Many sites have a 'community suggested tag' feature. While it's never a good idea to let community members /force/ a tag onto someone [have seen many a hate crusade using this], /suggested/ tags that would take 1 click to deny or accept and apply would be great!
That way if someone doesn't tag a diaper piece as 'diaper', someone could click 'suggest tag(s)', click 'diaper', and submit it. Then that person would get a separate page for 'suggested tags' and could click an X or a Check to deny or accept. Keeps control and moderation in the hands of the artists, while reminding people they gotta tag things, and hopefully, overall, reducing the amount of untagged art out there.
I'm not gay bruh
If someone didn't tag it with those, well that's on them, ain't it? They weren't using the gender drop down anyways so this change does not affect the amount of people tagging genders/sexes.
I'm so sorry that the reaction to almost any update is negative- but man this one has been particularly nasty. Tons of people are just misunderstanding the whole point, acting like just because the list was bad before that this is suddenly 'performative', yada yada.
Y'all are putting your poor spoons and mental health under constant fire, and I'm sorry this is happening. I know you can't really respond publicly to such a sentiment without people skewing it, so no need to respond. But, know that people that use the site regularly and who love to see improvements moving along are cheering you guys on, and I hope that my comment/suggestion can help even a little!
If you're going to do stuff with policing gender expressions then please suggest approved keywords so that searches can actually be performed.
Lots of problems with this update, but if we're partway through a process then I can tolerate everthing being broken for a while before it gets fixed. For a while.
Example: https://www.furaffinity.net/search/?q=dog
The search information is not retained in the URL for me.
Sorry about this, but I hope the workaround is okay. ^^;
For me, the important part is switching from "5 years by relevancy" to "3 days by date", and that's the part that's not in the URL when I use the top-bar search.
"5 years by relevancy" results rarely change, and the fact that search defaults to it is the reason I didn't use search in the first place.
If you decide you want different ones for that specific instance when you're searching, you can always change and search again.
But if you make a new search or reload the page, the search settings saved in your profile should take over.
I hope this helps resolve the issue!
Dang. I didn't even know that page was there, let alone that it contains search settings. It might be an idea to put a link to/mention about it on the search page... 🤔
Most of the information from the search page is there. ;3
(I just find it a bit too much to keep it open, so I tend to have the help page in a separate window open while I work on a query in the main page - YMMV, of course!)
I get why some people would be upset if they have a search method for FA that works for them and now have a monkey wrench thrown into it, but if this update leads to more streamlined search methods in the future I might actually use the search bar instead of surfing people's favs to find art.
Honestly, I would rather search through FurAffinity art using e621 rather than the browse tab on here because e621 is better about detailed tags & allowing you to search for very specific things.
YOU could always abstain from using the system if you found it inappropriate, nothing or no one was forcing you to use it. The way this change was done it's actually FORCING people into doing things in a way many find less practical, less intitive.
IN practice, this results in a backwards move and mindset, implemented in a less than sensitive way. A recipe for disaster.
What about pieces already posted that skipped the keyword "male" in the tags because of the drop down system. Its unreasonable to expect people to go through the entire back catalouge to retag it.
If you wanted to be more inclusive just remove the trans categories and include trans characters under the gender they identify as instead of as a seperate category. The multiple character option was already an option for those who wanted to add the tags, an option to add more than one gender to an upload would have worked much better without gutting the browse system.
If things are outdated, update them don't remove them. This feels like a very performative change as opposed to an actual functional one. People who would be interested in seeing certain things will now have a harder time finding it, and artist have a harder time reaching that audience.
I understand there is no pleasing everyone but this feels like an update that will please no one in the long run.
"
The dropdowns were added to the keywords automatically! Only a few submissions that already had the max amount of keywords assigned didn't have this done for them, but Tech is working on getting those submissions in line.
The person above asked about people who didn't tag the drop down options because they had already selected the dropdown. They do not have to go back and retag because the drop down selections were ported over to the keywords.
No one's keywords have been removed. 😅
You converted the dropdown options into tags for existing works. But you made this change and did that before actually telling the community about it. So what happens to every submission during that gap, that the artist was likely accustomed to setting the dropdown for?
Saying something along the lines of "Just search for 'male'" also doesn't work because this site has no standardization of tags, so there's several perfectly valid tags that an artist might use that aren't the single word "male". So while that works for now with the recent conversion, any searches after approximately tomorrow require obnoxiously long search queries full of ORs and -s, that was all handled by the "Gender: Male" dropdown previously unless you're going to implement aggressive standardization, in which case... it would have been easier to keep the dropdown.
I'm all for inclusivity but this is not a idea solution.
800 giant penis images or futinari's for all I guess.
when i had two visibly transmasc characters with "cock, dick" set as tags they both got flagged and those tags were removed with me getting a notice, which has never happened with any of my other posts
There are far too many pictures out there right now both polluting search results and giving you jumpscares in your submissions box, because the artist had some moral quandary with the tagging system and actively choose to continue to never tag anything they post, or the submission is from the before times where the tag system simply didn't exist.
And no, the whole "Hide Content Without Tags" system is not a solution. Both because it gives ammunition to the artists who actively choose not to tag ("just hide untagged art and stop complaining, ugh"), and because it also more or less deletes all of the art on the site that existed before the tagging system.
Both of which could be easily solved by community volunteers being able to add tags to submissions.
Also... are these new "gender tags" you added onto every submission in lieu of the gender dropdown excluded from the "Hide Content Without Tags" system? Because otherwise you just completely broke that. Since every picture on the site is now technically tagged.
800 giant penis images or futinari's everywhere and no way to filter it out.
If the gender tab. Was not inclusive enough, you, the mods, could have changed and/or added terms to make it more inclusive. Instead, you just made the browse tab worse.
Revert this change. Do better.
It sounds like FA wants to provide the uploader with the ability to express their OCs the way they want to (in this case, gender). And that's fine. If uploaders who dislike certain terms don't want to use them, they can opt out at the cost of their upload being less searchable. But for the Browse / Search user, they should be receiving results that 99% of the time fit their search.
Removing the Type category like this, before the new system is in place, would be a bad move.
However having read some of the comments I find myself agreeing with those that don’t like the change to the gender drop down I can’t personally attest to how much I used it for my submissions but i atlest tried and found it the easiest part to use when using the browse feature and tried to make sure that I used that part correctly (even if I wasn’t always successful)
And unlike a lot of people, I understand that the gender and species dropdowns were inflexible and clunky and were becoming games of whac-a-mole to keep up-to-date. I also understand that not having those as shortcuts is going to encourage artists to tag more in order to get engagement (you're not getting those sweet sweet faves and comments if nobody can find your stuff).
HOWEVER.
In my opinion, this change was NOT ready for primetime and - barring the problem term - needs to be rolled back ASAP so it can have more time in the oven.
First, FA's tag system just isn't good enough right now to provide replacement functionality. All tagging is still manually typed in, and because there are no tag groups and no prefab, standardized, click-to-add tags (something SoFurry has had since it was still called Yiffstar)... people often need to enter multiple versions of a tag (ex: "nonbinary", "non_binary", "non" and "binary") to make sure. This is made worse by the fact that the tag field has a character limit. If tagging is going to be doing most of the lifting, that limit needs to go bye-bye.
Bottom line is, the tag system needed to be overhauled before rolling this out. Species, you could get away with using the existing system. This? Nope. You've put the cart before the horse, sad to say. That being said, letting users tag other people's stuff as some suggest is a bad idea - it would be abused to hell within fifteen minutes of rolling out, and mods would be unable to keep on top of it. I know for a fact certain kinks would be mass-targeted with abusive mis-tags.
Second, not including "Multiple characters" in the conversion of dropdown labels to tags has removed important metadata from millions of submissions. Yes, it didn't tell a whole lot, but it was still an important descriptor so excluding it was a bad call. That alone is worth rolling this change back.
Third, this implementation creates a lot of extra work for filtering (due in large part to the limits of the tag system; that "having to enter multiple versions" thing is even worse for search filtering) and only affects searches, not the browse tab. And based on multiple comments the convert-dropdown-to-tags apparently hasn't actually worked 100% properly for filtering?
Part of the problem is that the dropdowns provided a "show this and only this" functionality that I don't think the search operators can adequately replace, at least right now.
Fourth, speaking of the search engine? It still has the old hard maximum on how many results it can serve, and it still doesn't have persistent memory for what page it was on.
So as much as I like this on a conceptual level, I'm afraid FA just isn't in a fit state to do it justice - and rolling it out before FA is ready to do it justice seems to be doing more harm than good.
Additionally, I would like to suggest an alternative possibility: Replacing the gender and species dropdowns on the upload end with text forms (with a suggestion tooltip) instead of folding them into tagging, with the dropdowns on the search and browse tabs dynamically and automatically updating to include custom entries from these forms. That might be a more elegant approach.
TLDR: Good idea, bad execution b/c FA not ready to support it yet, needs rollback til other upgrades made; also needs consideration of alt. implementations.
Was this perhaps rolled out prematurely to make a statement?
Convenience and practicality for the user was never a consideration because they did it to make themselves feel morally superior, and that's all there is to it!
Under this lens, it will all make a lot more sense!
Well, as I said... there's no point in debating it.
They went ahead without our input, so clearly they didn't feel they needed it to make such a drastic change.
Their way or the highway, basically.
the classic Browsing Artwork mode, which now lacks the specificity to just browse submissions with the gender I'm interested in seeing,
and the Search mode, which is very specific and relies on user tagging, lowering visibility of untagged or poorly tagged material. Especially since users rely on the species dropdown a lot and do not write the same species as a tag into the submission metadata.
Trying this out just now - male shark - as tags, and comparing it with a manual head count in the now gender-untagged browse mode, I am actually missing the majority of uploads as a result.
To make this transition work you would have to copy the species tag from the dropdown into the actual tags on all submissions, and auto-copy that data each time a new submission is created. That would solve the problem I think.
I preferred the dropdown on the gender field for some ux reason but maybe it because the list isn't as long as species. Now that it's on tag, i wonder if people will start tagging the relevant keywords.
In addition of dropdown menu, Perhaps search field on the species field would be helpful? (yes i know we all can actually type to search while the dropdown menu is active, but it wasn't obvious)
There is remotely no other problem with this that people can't adapt to, if they are complaining, then they either only search FA and not ANY OTHER IMAGE HOSTING SITE that already has this as a feature, or they simply did not read the journal above.
This is a great change
For example, [Male] [Boy] [MM] [MxM] [Gay] etc will all require separate searches to find everything that would have been under the simple [Male] dropdown before, and with heavy overlap between them, and no simple search term with will reliably find both solo and non-solo pieces.
Perplexing change, to say the least. Especially *before* the sweeping changes to the keyword/tag system come in. Not sure why this wasn't implemented after functionality was improved otherwise.
It's impossible to make every update exciting but it's always good of you to keep us all updated with any changes to this site ^^
Hopefully, Sakuri will get some of those tacos soon :3
Not sure if you know of this feature or not (sorry if you do), but in your profile settings there is an option to block all art with no tags if you prefer to do so, which might help if people just aren't tagging at *all*
If curated tags are planned, why were they not added before making a change that makes it harder to search for things? Why are we now being forced to put every possible permutation of "female" or "woman" into our searches to find female art now because we have to rely on the vague hope that people tagged it with one of those words, instead of having a central database with implications and aliases that can guarantee that a search for "female" will bring up everything tagged with any term that means female?
There is no robust tag-oriented search like many other art sites, because you don't have the infrastructure required to have a robust tag-oriented search. And instead of implementing that infrastructure first, you're forcing people to rely on the extremely weak tagging system to find things, knowing that it's insufficient and that removing functionality makes it harder to use with no upside.
But still great work on the site overall! It’s a hard thing to get right, but anything that moves us towards convenient, intuitive, consistent tagging would be nice…
If you're going to change the system to be less offensive, you should have changed the offending term in the list. The solution you've implemented is a half solution that seems to break a lot of people's workflows of browsing the site.
A change like this should have been bundled with the 3 tag minimum and hiding blocked tags update.
In the future, it may be wise to discuss this with users first and potentially warn them, rather than going "oops, sorry uwu. We just edited the metadata for millions of posts to solve a small issue."
Hell people already don't follow the upload policy, I see many artists posting a dozen reminders every day or even every few hours. Some of them even just delete adopts and repost them to both get around the reminder limit and to prevent people from seeing how long an adopt has gone unsold for...
Making existing tags more accurate is something I enjoy helping with.
In all seriousness. What a way to ruin the good and positive inclusion vibes you had going. In a time where this fandom should be the most united for... Obvious reasons.
We are not trying to give ammo to anyone or throw anyone under the bus or make them unseen...my 100% genuine view and intent with this was to make it more inclusive and allow people to freely tag what gender expression best suits them or their art...
While i can't know for others, to me this month is supposed to be of celebration, to remain united. Instead we are delivered an update which brings division and probably even resentment towards actions or policies which are done in the name of inclusivity but which end up effectively removing a system which worked for more than a decade to help organize and browse one of the most diverse sites that has ever existed on the internet.
While the original intention doesn't sound bad, a change like this shouldn't have been done so harshly, in such sudden and uncompromising way.. Now it's backfiring with the same abruptness it was implemented. Lots of people are either confused or angry, not because the action of outsiders but from feeling neglected/disregarded by the staff of the site that is supposed to make us feel welcome and understood.
I believe something which combined giving people the choice of a genders tag while also being able to still have a functional, more intuitive, drop list search would have been better.. Because, even if not ideal.. Right now, i just can't see an easy solution or suggestion out of this mess... :/
Gender is important to a lot of people, both in terms of expression, and in terms of searching practicality. Now instead of clicking an option, they have to manually type in what they want both in tags and searching, which is extra busy work. You guys want to move to an e621 style tagging system, sure - but implementing that at the same time as removing features would have worked better, because now the site is going to run for an unknown amount of time like this. It could be weeks, months, or years until there's movement on this, from our perspective.
Removing potentially offensive options from the drop down may have been a better temporary solution until these other systems were in place, as well as giving people with less represented pronouns and identities the option to manually add it to their own to the drop down, for ease of marking and searching. But as it is, things are just harder now, with no benefit as of yet.
Chuds will use anything for ammo. I have, unfortunately, seen someone express that this is due to 'political correctness' and the usual rubbish. Which means they're blaming gender minorities that had no say in these changes, which is really unfair, especially during Pride Month, when we're all supposed to be united and relishing our differences. Going off the comments here, the update also seems to make some feel like their gender expressions don't matter, which is contrary to what the update is supposed to be doing.
Going forward, please consider making a beta branch of the site for users to test updates, and polling the community beforehand. FurAffinity is a pillar of the community, with nearly 20 million visitors a year. It's bigger than Shutterstock. I hope you take this feedback kindly, and that you have a good day, mate. Thank you for your time.
Instead of retooling what was already there to remove terms that were deemed to be harmful, or letting people add their own genders to search for, the entire site is effectively punished with more busy work. It'll also not fix issues where there's multiple people interacting in a scene - looking for solo male art? Well, see, this picture has a male and a female, and is thus tagged both 'male' and 'female', so it'll show up. Well done - one of the glaring issues of the site and you didn't fix it.
In future, create a beta version of the site, and consult users instead of launching major, site-wide updates without consulting your users. This action has only antagonised a lot of people and made the staff at FurAffinity seem out of touch.
Basically, we just got left with a site that's much harder to use with no indication of how it's going to ever become easier to use. But frankly that's par for the course at FA.
But for now I won't be using browse to look for anything. It was already terrible enough to search for things, including how you guys don't let 2 letter tags exist.
It could not only encourage sexism but it could also encourage transphobia as well, as if the site does not want to acknowledge any characters genders.
removing this and forcing 3 tags which people are almost assuredly not going to use just for gender anyways directly hurts the functionality of the site; and the bulk that do tag are putting their preference in the tags to start with. Redundancy is better than nothing.
the entirety of the tagging system needs to be reworked before you remove browsing tools that enabled the outdated nature of this site to function
Making the move to a better tagging system may have some teething problems, but this is obviously a step in the right direction, as it allows a more accurate way to describe the art, as well as removing FA staff and technical limitations from impeding peoples self description.
Just signed up for FA+ due to the work I see being done to get FA up to date
Hopefully we can all work together towards a more better search feature in the future!
Keep being awesome in the meantime!
As long as tagging hasn't become a habit for everyone, it's just no good.
The system is so incredibly useless and all over the place and over the last 17 years it barely improved. The problems with it back then are still present today.
Here is an example. Type in the search bar Big Dicks, Big_Dicks, BigDicks, Big-Dicks.
All set to Relevancy in descending order, 5 years, All check boxes check.
You get completely DIFFERENT results in each one. and shows just how messy the keyword system is.
Y'all are rocking it and doing your best and I am glad you ripped the band aid off. Good luck with the backlash, this will make a better site in the long run
Browsing on the browse section just feels terrible as you'll see unwanted content, it was amazing prior to the change but now scrolling on it there's just the chance you'll run into undesired content.
I assume the change will be something like a curated tag list where you're able to search for tags, even if thats a good change, it hasn't been prepared at all and left browsing broken.
It's just problematic at the moment and as i said, half delivered, why make the removal at all of gender filter when the browsing and search update isn't finished?
I do look forward to see what else is updated, hopefully a curated tag list when tagging and a better tagging hud is implemented to encourage tagging, as people tend to not tag their pictures, maybe make tags mandatory as well? perhaps allow for tagging applications so people can help on tagging in case some tags are missing.
Phew, I just needed to write this to calm down. I don't understand anything about IT at all, and that's why I'm worried 🥲
I hope you have everything under control. And I hope that other users of the site will also be able to cope with their anxiety 💔😅
And thank you for warning us about possible problems in advance. This is incredibly valuable and important 🤍🤍🤍
I hope that calms some fears. I know it certainly did for me to have them managing it.
I mean, shouldn't tags represent elements that are in the submission rather than what isn't easy to identify?
gonna be my last post here for now. I am just sick and tired of this whole damn thing on both sides.
While yes, you can use tags, its not ideal. the tags need more work before they are ready and have needed work for years. the tags shouldve been updated before this whole thing. So saying "just use tags" fixes nothing. y'all need to build up and fix the tags before the change.
also, i am absolutely fucking fed upwith communication on both sides. the announcement was late after the removal of the feature (at a bad time, no less), which pissed off users. some of the responses weren't helpful either. but then users started harassing mods and saying nasty shit towards them. then mods started acting out on the website and making the whole thing worse, forcing Sciggles to step in. and as of now it has no end in sight with users saying nasty shit towards staff and those who dont mind or care about the change as strongly as they do while the staff tries to put things under control. i am absolutely disappointed in how both mods and users responded. this whole thing happened over a botched update, something that didn't warrent the overly strong reactions. people had every right to be upset, but this went way too far, and i am incredibly disappointed on how this was handled. There needs to be better communication in the future.
i would like to say the discord mods here have done a good job, all things considered. thanks guys.
again, this was an absolutely botched update, something that mods have agreed with. but this was not handled okay at all, and i am disappointed at everyone involved. this should not have happened. lost a lot of respect for both sides here.
i do agree at least that the update has potential, and i think it should definitely be improved. so here's hoping for better communication and better features in the future.
I don't like seeing gender treated in a special way over other tags - I think that encourages gendered body stereotypes (critters using "male" or "female" as a synonym for genitals), and I don't think it's very useful for filtering since most pieces are just "multiple characters".
Yes, there are issues with tagging, but those are issues that are going to have to get solved - and this just wasn't a useful field for filtering or browsing, and very often didn't correctly reflect the actual content of the art. FA is going to have to go through a rough period with getting the community to start caring about tags, and it's going to be difficult and every single change in that process is going to see some opposition.
And I don't think FA should ignore that criticism because the site can genuinely make really bad decisions along that process. But there's no version of it that has no criticism. I think improvements to search and browsing might alleviate some of the concerns. But I think there are really toxic side effects to "we have a dropdown for the gender" that just adding more options to the field wouldn't have solved.
The fact that critters are treating this as a way to avoid seeing genders or genitals that they're not into - the field is not helpful for that except in the most hetero-normative ways. Like, I'm getting to the point where I tag genitals and gender - I don't necessarily tag "trans" every single time because there are social effects to normalizing the idea that every single transgender character have an asterisk next to their gender.
And the only way that a "male" tag means that you'll only see penises is if multiple-character pieces stop existing, and if "male" intrinsically means "penis". And it doesn't mean that.. I am fully in favor of a change that stops treating gender as a proxy for body type. The proper way to filter out body types you don't want to see is by tagging appendages.
Suddenly removing a valued feature instead of making an adjustment to how art is sorted does not fix things. Far from it - it only upsets more people than intended. I'd be willing to let it go if they just change how the idea of "Multiple characters" worked or if - given the stated reason was to remove a term that has since become a slur - just changing the fields on the form worked, but removing it completely? Hell no.
I commented to the same effect elsewhere but I'm tired of feeling like every transgender character has to have an asterisk next to their gender because furries are consciously or unconsciously suggesting that when they browse the male categories, they only want to see 'normal' males.
Gender is not a proxy for body type. It is harmful for us to be perpetuating that stereotype.
I feel like there's some kind of revisionism happening here, I've been on this site and paid attention to categories, and they weren't the reliable filters critters are saying they were - because of course they weren't, they were never required, they had a "multiple characters" option which communicates nothing, and even then, many artists selected categories based on the main subject of the picture when their were multiple characters - so you were guaranteed that looking at a "male" piece didn't mean you weren't going to see a female furry.
Where transgender characters are concerned - if you're going to filter on gender and you actually want to avoid genitals, then the only way that is going to happen is by excluding transgender critters from these spaces. I have transgender characters who have not transitioned or had any bodily modifications at all. I'm not going to misgender those characters just because critters are determined to use their genders as a proxy for their genitalia.
I will tag the genitalia.
And even from the most cisnormative perspective, even if we forget about transgender characters entirely - the inflexibility of these categories made them a bad fit for filtering out even cisgender males and females out of artwork. Critters are telling me that this worked, but like.. I've been on this site, it didn't work. I've used the browse feature before. This was always a fairly useless dropdown in my experience. X3
I'm really very confused here and trying to understand while clean up the mess...
I appreciate both the change, and the handling of the criticism on this. I don't want FA to ignore critique around tagging, I just.. don't agree with this particular critique at all X3
I sent an actual feature request about it already, but I do want to draw some extra attention to Baker's suggestion that there could be a fully front-end "required" yes/no set of questions that pop up about genitals if a piece is being uploaded and it's marked as Adult, and to have that just add the tags in the front-end when the request is made. ( https://www.furaffinity.net/journal...../#cid:61141697 )
I sort of feel like that would address 99% of the "but you're trying to make me see genitals I don't want to see" crowd? Maybe I'm oversimplifying it, but I feel like floofs might be so used to thinking of gender as a proxy for body type that they haven't considered that the site could just ask about genitals directly if it's a serious problem.
Going forward, ultimately I think it is the better move to put labeling gender at the hands of the user, as there is far more flexibility then we would ever get trying to fit every reasonable option into a drop down menu. It is just going to take some adjusting..
..speaking of which. Is FA considering doing something similar with the species drop down? It is often just as neglected and suffers from many of the same issues the gender option faced. More so even, with the sheer impossibility of having every species, real or fantasy, in a single list.
Also, yes, we ARE considering doing this with species dropdown. It's a high priority in this transition we're rolling out bit by bit. We tackled gender first. But it's exactly as you said: that species list is getting long and it's only going to get worse if we don't convert it. Gender has that same issue too, albeit less so.
As for the species drop down, I have always been one whose had to use the "other" option but I know to include everyone it would undoubtedly get ridiculous! I am sure it is also going to be a lot of work but their is no rush in getting things right.
Thank you all for the hard work and dedication! <3
or would it be easier to make a feature where if you have an artist blocked none of their content can reach you at all?
First, I noticed that you made the tags work by exclusion, i.e. if the tag is selected then the associated content is not displayed. You actually need to do the reverse - the content is displayed if the tag is selected - because then it's possible, for example, to select “female” where the idea is to return images that have at least one female. Or better still, have both types of tags: Tags that you want the image to have and tags for content that should not be displayed in any situation. You've only implemented the second type of tag in my example, you'd need the first as well.
Secondly, do NOT leave the tag text open for anyone to edit, be it the uploader or site visitors. It's the only way to avoid hundreds of variations for what would all in practice be the “female” tag. Uploaders would be able to suggest new tags, but only the admins should be able to add new tags.
Thirdly, if uploaders are the ones who assign tags to the images they upload, visitors need to have some means of flagging as invalid wrong tags that relies as little as possible on admin intervention, to prevent for example an uploader bent on causing discord from purposely tagging images wrongly and in offensive ways.
@keywords male should return ALL results tagged as "male."
@keywords -male, or keywords !male should return all results EXCEPT those tagged with "male", though you'll need some kind of "positive" tag to go along with it, such as "fox" or "reptile" at the moment.
Variations will exist for now, but there is discussion being had behind the scenes regarding the potential pros and cons for tag standardization like some other sites do.
They do! Anyone can submit a trouble ticket regarding incorrect tags. This has already existed and we check those tickets multiple times a day as a team. It IS admin intervention, but it's a quick fix and we're happy to do it.
- Bring back the drop-down for Gender selection.
- Add Text entry field for selecting Other in the Gender selection.
- Require 5 Tags minimum before finalizing upload.
- Make the Gender drop-down selection act as a tag.
The only filter that worked on the Browse page and allowed me to cut out at least a small portion of irrelevant art. Now this page has become completely useless.
FA staff had to start somewhere. And no matter where they started, people were gonna hate it. Yeah, it sucks that browse is slightly broken right now. But if this site is to have ANY semblance of progress and become stronger and better for years and hopefully decades to come, theres gotta be some broken glass and walls knocked down at some point.
Personally, I think switching over to a purely tagged based system, and getting rid of the drop down menus entirely is the way to go. I always hated that system when uploading stuff, cause it felt like an unneeded extra step when I could literally just add that as a tag instead (and I often did!) I also think implementing a user based tag suggestion option, similar to sites like IB or E6, would be a great thing to add, so long as uploaders can approve the suggestions before they're added, or turn off the feature entirely, so long as they then tag things correctly.
So, keep strong FA! I see this like a house renovation! Knocking down some old rickety walls and to make space for all kinds of fun activities in the future! Right now, we're in the knock down and create a mess phase, but I know that the rebuild and repaint phase is not too far away and will make things look and perform amazing!
It is going to be painful for FA to slowly transition into a community that cares about tagging things. The right time to start that transition is when new tagging features get added and when excitement is highest about them. That's when you announce, "we're going to start using tags to handle gender now too."
If FA waited a year to do this change, it would go over worse, and getting critters to care about tags would be harder.
I do think communication could have been better, but.. this is not too early to make this change, arguably it should have happened even sooner. This period after the blocklist was added is the most excitement that there is ever going to be about tagging artwork on Furaffinity - and there is no technical solution to tagging, the only way it works is if the community gets excited about tags and internalizes that they are necessary. It will get harder the longer Furaffinity waits to rip off the band aide.
Literally all they had to do was the opposite.
Improve tagging, remove gender drop down. Simple as. Way less ripping off a bandaid.
Gender shouldn't be used as a proxy for genitals. That so many critters were treating this field as a way to filter out genitals they didn't want to see is not a positive signal for the community.
We shouldn't be acting like e621 - specifically, we should not be using gender as a filter in this way or treating it as a special tag type with rigidly defined categories.
Gender != genitals. Period.
And let's be really honest here, the dropdown field has never been a reliable way to filter genitals. The tagging system is the only way we're going to actually get a reliable filter for genitals.
Both because, that's not what "female" means, and also because, the dropdown field was a shitty way to handle that and it didn't work. A piece that was predominantly featuring a single female character might still have a penis in it.
I feel like I'm being gaslit here, I have searched on this site and used it, I know that this field was not a reliable filter.
But tagging and blocklists *work*. If we have community norms around tagging, you can put penis in a blocklist and for the most part, you won't have to see one. But in order to do that, we need to actually build community norms and that means not relying on broken alternatives.
My issue is more than the terminology, this is a system that excludes transgender critters from spaces and treats their gender as secondary - it has toxic externalities.
But to your point, I do have a better way to suggest that Baker really helpfully brought up, and I literally just sent a feedback request to the site suggesting it ( https://www.furaffinity.net/journal...../#cid:61141697 ) - basically, normalize genital tags as part of the upload process. This would be a purely front-end change and would only apply to pieces marked adult.
----
But no, I don't think it's as simple as "the old system worked." Both because in my experience, the old system didn't work, and because I am fucking tired of furries falling into this cisnormative bullshit. I have transgender characters who are male who have cookies. I'm not going to put an asterisk next to their gender because the furry community can't get its shit together long enough to normalize whether or not a penis should be called a penis or a dick.
That is an easy problem to solve, and hey - if removing the dropdown is the way to make that problem get solved, then all the better - that just makes me more confident that this change is a good idea. We are never going to build a community that cares about tagging if a bunch of cisnormative band-aides are constantly standing in the way of effective tagging systems.
The fact that many furries are saying so adamantly that the feature shouldn't be removed until tagging becomes accepted is proof to me that they mostly don't believe that tagging is going to become accepted any time soon. And so what they're effectively suggesting is "we should stick with a system that has toxic impacts on marginalized communities indefinitely until the world changes." That is not an acceptable solution.
@\keywords male -female
Because all of the categories were converted over to tags. Every single piece that was in the male category before this change will be tagged as male.
For pieces going forward.. normalize tags. Have an or operator in search. have a way of saving searches. That stuff is all more likely to happen now.
I'm not saying the old way needed to stay forever. But implementing it like this, as the first step in their vague (to us) plans to improve things was the wrong way to go about it. Removing functionality like this needed to be the last step, after it's replacement was already implemented and working.
Tagging is a community effort. This will never happen until the community has a reason to care.
You can see the arguments in these comments about the suggestion that FA is going to require even just 3 tags. This is what I mean by pulling the band aide off - sometimes a broken system with negative externalities can make it harder to fix the underlying problems.
The energy around tagging is at its highest point now. If anything, this change should have happened sooner, back when artists and users were actively spreading the word about the new tag blocking system. Waiting a year to implement is a guarantee that it will be harder to get artists to move over to a tagging system.
There are technical changes that I think would make this easier. I believe they'll happen soon. Better search operators and search saving is one of them. I'm suggesting other improvements as well.
But the actual solution for how to make it work better in the future is not something that can be addressed with a site update, it's critters taking the time to remind artist and write notes and promote tag usage and tag standardization.
There is no substitute for that. The old system was fully optional as well. No matter what features are built or when the transition happens, there is going to be a period where critters are going to have to adjust to typing a tag into a box. We might as well make that change when critters are most excited about the tag box.
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I think my other issue here is - if you don't believe that these technical improvements and changes are actually coming soon, and you don't believe that this is at most a temporary short inconvenience - then what you're actually asking is for us to ignore the problems. If somepony tells me "wait until the improvements are made first" - well, what's the timeline for that? How long should we deal with a system that has negative externalities for maginalized critters while we're waiting? Are you going to be pressuring the site to make those changes while we wait for the category system? Or (like most users), if this change gets reverted are you going to shrug and say "better tagging/search would be neat but the current system is good enough"?
Because I guarantee you, the changes that help with the transition to tags are going to come faster now that the dropdown is gone. There's actual real pressure to make them now. And sometimes putting pressure on a system to improve, even if that means it's temporarily a tiny bit more annoying in the short-term, is the right thing to do.
Especially given that - all of the existing backlog is already converted to the new system, and the only thing that needs to happen is for users and artists to remind each other to use the new system going forward - you know, like a community does.
No, it won't be 100% effective. But, and I can not stress this enough - the old system was not 100% effective, and if you are holding its replacement to that standard, you are being unrealistic. At no point has there ever been a 100% reliable way to filter gender or genitals on FA.
Tagging is an individual effort, until and unless FA implements community tags. And enforces tag standardization. Both of which needed to happen before this change.
Do I think the system can be improved? Yes. Do I trust FA's staff's track record to actually do it? No. Do I trust them after this disaster of a decision? Even less then before. Even if you're right that this lights a fire under them to improve the system, I trust them even less to make positive changes under that pressure.
I'm not asking you to ignore the problems. By all means, if something about how the site works is offensive, push it get it improved. But this is not improvement; this is impairment to site functionality, with the promise that one day it'll be looked back on as step one of making a better system... that we still can't see what the final shape is supposed to be.
I'm not holding the replacement to the standard of 100% perfection. I'm holding it to the standard of "covers the use cases of the system it replaced". Which it currently fails to meet.
I mean, how do you think the old system worked? It was optional. You didn't have community suggestions for categories. You had the *exact* amount of influence over critters using the old system that you now have over tagging.
But community norms (sort of) existed. There's no reason why they can't exist for tags. Again, you want to hold out for a suggestion feature that didn't exist for the feature you're lamenting.
> I'm not asking you to ignore the problems.
What I'm asking is whether anypony other than me in the community is going to push for the changes unless they have a reason to.
Because I'm going to go out on a limb and say you probably weren't pushing for a roadmap to remove the dropdown before this change was announced.
The problem with leaving a bad system in place is there will always be some part of the functionality that somepony doesn't think is being covered by the new system, and saying "you can advocate for something better" when we both know the overall community is entirely apathetic to those changes without some kind of pressure - is the same thing as saying, "let's just leave the old system in place."
> "covers the use cases of the system it replaced".
I think that with a combination of blocks for untagged pieces and negative search queries, you can replicate the same level of accuracy using the system as it exists today. It'll be annoying but, no, I don't think it's impossible. Set up your tag blocks to exclude pieces without tags. Search "male" and append a negative query for your female tags. I just tried this and there is not a cookie in sight.
Will some pieces that aren't tagged as male not show up? Yes. (hint, there were also male pieces not showing up for you in the old system). It is also a problem that Furaffinity lacks good OR operators, but just the negative operators on their own will filter out most pieces you don't want to see.
Like, yes, this is annoying, full agreement, but it's not like it's now impossible to filter female pieces. If anything, I expect this change to make filtering easier in the future, because there's now going to be more community pressure to use the fields that can be added to blocklists and used as filters. The dropdown system lacked that functionality.
I don't understand how to get across that if you don't want to see a genital, we should have community norms about tagging genitals.
But it is cisnormative if somepony says that the way to do that is to have a "female" category. Women can have penises. And on my part, I'm sick of feeling like transgender characters have to have asterisks next to their genders because a bunch of furries are, consciously or not, saying, "oh but I meant I wanted to see the 'normal' kind of woman."
I don't want to force you to see anything you don't want to see - but I don't want to have to be treated like my identity is my genitals - especially not when there is a very easy clear solution that solves both problems: tagging genitals.
But sure, if they wanted to have as part of the upload, a series of yes/no checkmarks for any piece marked adult that said: "Does this picture show a penis? Does it have a cookie? Does it have breasts?" and alias that to the tag system, that would be a great update and I'd support it.
At the very least, we should be getting rid of the gender associations. But sure, a new set of upload checkboxes that helped critters remember to tag things would be great suggestion, and I'm sure the staff would love to hear it. But that's not what the gender dropdown was.
And to your point, I'm really not trying to be dismissive about your suggestion above - it *is* a good suggestion, and would help a huge amount with tagging.
It wouldn't need to be present on every piece - if somepony marks a piece as adult, at that point they *have* to select yes or no on what (if any) genitals are in the piece. That's a great idea that if you don't suggest as a feature suggestion to staff, I will at some point when I get time write up and suggest myself.
hit the nail on the head really, and articulated why ive been kinda bothered by a lot of the commentary here :'D (side note, your icon is cute)
I love your icon as well :3
Tag your identity how you best see fit 💖 FA is not going to impose a "standard" to that. You're seen and you're valid.
You say uploaders weren't good about labeling gender before with the dropdown, but they were more diligent about it than the current state of new tags, and almost entirely accurate [edit: ok, maybe "accurate" isn't the word... "consistent"?] apart from some misclicks or whatever. Currently I've gone from being able to see most of the new submissions I'd want to see with just a few dropdown clicks, to having to make a tag search that takes longer, can't be done by category, and misses most new posts because again, you didn't establish any of the tagging habits you wanted before removing the ones in place.
I know the browse dropdown's not going to be restored, so consider this post just whining if it makes you feel better, but it's a downgrade, it's an own goal, it makes using the site clumsier, and for now at least a lot of new uploads aren't getting served in gender tag searches.
You can start by backporting tags from e621, where all the art is perfectly tagged, and they publish the database for everyone to download as a CSV file.
The tag interface is absolutely terrible. It's difficult to enter tags, there's no autocomplete, there's no separate field for them, and clicking on the tag buttons weirdely adds them to the blacklist. The pagination is terrible — or rather, there isn't any. When you click on an artwork, the forward and back buttons somehow navigate through the artist's gallery rather than the search results. The query is not saved in the URL, but in the post request. The number of pages is not shown. And so on and so forth.
But for some reason, you started by removing the gender field.
1: is typing in keywords/tags on submissions really that bad? i can get it for specific cases (dyslexia, ESL, limited vision/blind, etc) but like... ive been on the site for 16 years and ive always tagged everything, i tagged everything id post to dA back in the day, so on and so forth. tagging has never felt like a burden to me, and im curious why it is so much to others?
2: how is removing the gender dropdown, with inherently limited options entirely up to the discretion of a third party, less inclusive than encouraging people to use the pre-existing tag system to tag sex/gender/genitals/etc more accurately and freely?
Making people free to tag with whatever they want means that you now gotta account for every possible tag (you can’t)
And there’s at least six tags off the top of my head that could be used instead of ‘male’
And they count up to 5 million posts which have male characters without the tag ‘male’
as for the second, since gender dropdown was migrated to tags, that means that all the pieces missing gender tags didnt have it marked in the dropdown either, so its not like the dropdown was better in that case (edit: and... that also has nothing to do with inclusivity either...?)
I didn’t say anything about the inclusivity. It may be more inclusive, but now future uploads are not going to necessarily have that standard ‘male’ tag assigned by the system for people who did tag it as such. And using alternate tags isn’t necessarily ‘incorrect’, so a tag report wouldn’t do anything.
i dont disagree that standardization of tags and the lack thereof is going to be an issue until further systems are in place, its just not really relevant to what i was asking haha
if you can id encourage you to worry less about the complaints citing uninclusiveness (unless someone can like, actually respond to that point) and focus on the technical criticisms :(
The technical related complaints are still very valid and important to resolve. I just took those Pride comments hard.
Quite honestly I don't get people yapping about inclusivity either.
It's certainly more inclusive in the sense people can make whatever tags they want now... but that also makes it much more inconvenient to browse due to a lack of tag standardizaiton-
- which the staff are going to be working on. I just wish they did that first.
I also find it frustrating that the staff has no unified message. You've got people like Sciggles who is trying to help, but clearly the staff didn't work on this closely at all. Everyone is saying different things.
I'm trying to be more respectful to people like Sciggles who appear to be doing the best they can by responding, but it's clear they didn't expect this at all- which is a sore sign of mismanagement to me.
Unfortunately, it makes me want to find another website.
tbh should've push change to mandatory proper tagging stuff properly as well (and proper blocklisting to hide artists i dont wanna see/people i hate from search)
Again, all for the inclusion, but this removes quite a large chunk of the community here and honestly makes things much harder to navigate without an intuitive system backing it up. I really enjoyed using this site to find new artists, especially story writers in certain themes, but now I can't even do that without having to pick through even more things that I don't want to see now
Both the browse and search options result in seeing lots of undesired content in their current state.
Searching for a certain gender specifically still provides content with characters of other genders. Blacklisting certain tags is only slightly helpful, with blacklisted content still showing up in the search results.
Browsing with no gender option shows content with characters of any gender. Blacklisting tags/keywords is more useful in the browse feature, but undesired content does still sometimes appear.
As is, finding desired content while also avoiding undesired content using either option is much more difficult than it was previously.
No idea if this was helpful, but I tried.
Thank you to the mods for being patient, even when people are very upset.
When you mention "blacklisted content still showing up in search"- can you clarify that a little more for me? As in it's still showing you that content and it DOES have the blocked tag in it or it's showing because that tag WASN'T included in it.
That might read a little confusing...I apologize! Trying to understand better in what happened in your search efforts.
Content with blocked tags is not showing up in either browse or search. That is functioning correctly, at least as far as I can tell. No problems there.
When using both the browse and search features, the issue I had was specifically genders. Those are the tags/keywords I searched for and alternated between blocking and allowing. I didn't try blacklisting or allowing any genital keywords.
The issue is undesired content showing because the blacklisted tag wasn't included in the tags/keywords.
When using the browse feature, undesired content without gender tags still shows up unblurred. The search feature also showed undesired content due to a lot of content lacking the blocked keywords.
There was also the issue of having to sort through far more blurred content to find what I was trying to view. In some cases two thirds of the content would be blurred, but there would still be undesired content showing because it lacked the blocked keywords.
Based on my experience, relying on tags/keywords is currently much less reliable and far more inconvenient than the drop down gender feature when I tried to avoid or find certain content based on gender.
No idea if this is helpful, but I'm trying. Thanks again for all the mods being understanding. I know a lot of people are upset with you right now, but try not to let it get to you.
It is rather late (or early) for me at the moment so I'm going to get some rest and revisit this along with some other feedback to discuss better ways to approach this.
This is absolutely going to harm FurAffinity in the long run.
Please...ease up on your harsh comments a little.
And even if I include looking at all staff posts here instead of just yours specifically, that doesn't change much. At best a couple posts acknowledging that things were done in the wrong order, but no mention of even the possibility of a rollback to fix your mistake, or any sort of timeline on when the planned replacement features (unspecified better tagging method, merging Search and Browse) will actually be implemented. And barely the idea of communicating changes like this in advance in the future instead of just dropping them, but nothing about actually gauging community feeling on proposed changes before unilaterally deciding to make them.
As you can see, I'm not blowing smoke out of my ass with this one. There is a genuine disconnect here.
You may be mad but they're still human.
Just make it be a + sign they click for adding a character and that has the gender drop down list.
on the other, i can absolutely understand this change in the rare cases of music/photos/anything that doesn't specifically need a gender, it makes sense as a bonus tag but if anything i wish people didn't abuse tags half the time, they either flood it with "digitalart furryart furry furrycharacter" without describing any of the species/characters/franchises in their art, or leave it as blank and leave some really good stuff drifting in unsearchable winds
Well OF COURSE you did...
What an idiotic and stupid idea.
Although I understand the importance of tags and try to add as many suitable ones as possible, it now takes 10 times longer to upload an image (I'm not sure, but I think it takes me 1.5 hours to post one image on multiple social networks.). Not everyone has time for this, you know. Therefore, many either do not indicate anything, or indicate the very minimum. I can understand that.
Now "copy" tags from one publication and "paste" them into a new one does not work. Now every tag starts with a tab, so you have to constantly remove extra spaces and all that. I like systematization, but it's painful. A drop-down list of the most popular tags could make this process easier.
Older publications will suffer from such decisions. I'm not sure how relevant this is, but I definitely won't find the strength to add tags to old posts.
I don't think this is bad news. It's just that for me personally, this is another little thing that will make filling in tags longer and more painful so that everyone is comfortable. Meh. Have a nice day.
I really get the intentions, but removing the gender dropdown menu entirely in the browse function here takes it too far. I simply do not believe that it is an indictment on any queer person who may have a "standard" discernment on their own sexuality to filter out genitals as a proxy for gender or whatever the issue apparently is.
Why would you remove a basic useful function?
I'd rather not switch only to tags unless there's some proper tag enforcement. Half the stuff on the site is mistagged or not tagged at all.
First- I don't really care about tags changes... I already use a few tags when posting my work
Second- Outright removing the gender dropdown seems like a stupid change that should probably be reverted. I'm sure the gender tagging system can be reworked without absolutely tanking the 'Browse' button's functionality. I do get that I can use the 'Search' function for specific tags, but forcing that change seems like kind of a pain in the ass, and a step backwards in terms of ease of use. It's not a dealbreaker, but... it's a bit annoying.
I do hope that someday we can *request* tags for art if either they aren't tagged, or dont have enough tags to filter properly. I still see stuff I'd rather not because the artists either dont tag at all or dont use enough to filter effectively.
Its still SO much better though! Thank you for all the work youve put in!
Awesome, thank you!
If I want to look for hyper men, does this mean I have to be forced to see women if I am gay?
Searching by tag is frustrating to deal with, as hiding specific tags does not work for me at all, for some reason.
I find this change excludes more people more than it includes. It's downright descrimination based on sexuality!
I'm genuinly upset by this.
Or make it so the change only affects the new layout. I see the change already affects the classic layout for some reason.
But if you are dead set on this choice, know that you are going to need moderators to add tags FOR people, because again, LOTS OF ARTISTS DON'T USE TAGS.
I'm really not happy about this sexuality descrimination. I REALLY don't want to go back to using e621.
I don't think I can feel safe hear anymore because of this descision.
Hiding tags is nice and all and a great feature for this site, but I would like to see some male art if I trust the particular artist not to draw something I don't want to see. It wouldn't have been as bad a change if I could block tags specifically in the Browse feature so I could still emulate what the site was providing me before, (and if more incentives were added to tag posts accurately) but that functionality is just gone now. Browse is not nearly as useful now.
The truly inclusive thing to do here would have been to make even more specific gender categories. For the males, make groups for femboys, hulks, and just average normal guys as well as an "other" category. For the women you can do something similar. That makes the Browse page inclusive to whatever preferences someone might have. Yes, the groups are subjective, but so are the specific choices of art in the Category and Type tabs. If you have to come up with language to describe them that avoids stepping on any toes, fine. But people come here looking for art that fulfills their specific niche (and avoids their specific triggers) so it's more useful to come up with categories that will meet people's demands rather than quibble over the 10% who don't feel like their niche is exactly included. (And they can submit a ticket suggesting it anyway)
Lastly... how is evolving society even relevant? The terms male and female are biological and are used in reference to the two particular modes that 99% of humans fall into. The vast majority of the furry fandom is likely interested in characters who have the characteristics of one of these two modes, and a plurality (if not a majority) are also disinterested in the characteristics of the other one of these modes. It was extremely helpful before to sort characters by these modes.
Guess I'm not using the Browse page anymore when I come to this site...
Removing gender filtering on the Browse tab is such a boneheaded idea. Clearly not one thought out.
You're saying that your grand idea here is that making it harder to filter our basic browsing function by gender/gender-presenting is an improvement?
So if I ONLY want to see female or female presenting tiger art, I gotta go to the search function and pray to dog that every artist out there has used tags, which we know gadang well they don't?
JUST UPDATE THE LISTINGS ON THE DROPDOWN.
Male/Male-Presenting
Female/Female-Presenting
Nonbinary
Multiple Characters
Etc
Etc
Etc
Ironic that a feature meant to feel more inclusive has never left me feeling more isolated and excluded as a user of the site: Not everyone wants to be subjected to all genders when browsing adult art. Users should have been left with options for general non gender specific searches (Ex. People just looking for fan art or tame art) or opt in to be more targeted, which is how it should be.
On top of that, now it becomes a hunt and peck through the tags for what was once a very clear indicator for stories. Who is the TF subject in the piece? Who knows now. I do not want to see species get the same treatment either --- would have much rather seen tags of certain categories grouped together in a logical way to help with browsing (ex. Tags can be declared for species and they are kept separate from other tags vs. being lost in a sea of text).
Really hope this change is reverted until a combination of tag standardization and browsing options are expanded.
I guess my current idea would've been a multiple choice box with some suggested tags ("male", female", "non-binary" etc. but also custom field an user can fill if they want to include a gender that's not on the list, and it should not be mandatory because not every piece features characters, and tagging stuff as "not applicable" is kinda redundant.
ANYWAY, even in its awkward incarnation, the gender dropdown was way, way less of a problem than the absolute mess that is the "Category" dropdown. And the "Theme" dropdown. I could write an essay on why those two dropdowns are unworkable messes, but I'll spare you.
But let it be known.
I hate "Category" and "Theme" dropdowns.
ALSO. Did you know that when you are submitting a submission, you are asked to choose a "Theme" but when you use the Browse function, the dropdown is named "Type"?
I can be hired to do a full heuristic evaluation of your interface for the low price of 10 fanarts of my characters and 1000 photos of hamsters eating food while wearing tiny hats.
edit: the hamster photos can't be sourced from the internet, they need to be fresh content just for me.
When I want to brows and find new artist that catch my attention I always went for female and hyper or inflation. do you know how bad it feels to know that when talking about inclusivity they never consider that some of us don't like certain things and would rather ovoid them and while yes the key word system can do that but browsing was simple and easy to do now it fells useless and it's things like this that are making people consider blusky and teligram as there main site more and more some have moved back to deviantart and are going to furrynetwork. the simple truth is by making this change you're only pushing more people away than making them feel welcome and if this is truly about inclusivity then making us feel unwelcome should be the last thing you want to achieve with this.
TLDR: don't fix what isn't broken and if your going to change something then have a good alternative ready to go.
Brilliant logic, no complaints here!
Genuinely would you not just update the terminology, rather than remove it...? Who thought this up? Who approved this lol?
The only legit complaint I've seen is that it slightly makes the browse page a little harder to use, but lets be honest here, a LOT of people didn't use the drop downs ANYWAY, and left it on the default "any" even when there was a single character in the image, and who ALSO dont even bother to add a single tag either. So you'd STILL be getting those pics in the browser AND search pages regardless unless you blocked untagged pics! Which wasn't even a thing until recently!
People are fucking nuts man... I'm so sorry y'all gotta deal with this.
:V Come on.
we could do that yes but it not only greatly limits what we see but it also hurts the artist with multiple characters because now if a story focuses on a female character but it has a single male in it and has it tagged correctly well some people wont see it and then the artist and story writers don't get the recognition that they deserve.
the problem isn't that they removed the gender option it's that there isn't a good alternative and that means everyone suffers.
sigh.
it's also a lot more cumbersome as some submitters relied solely on categories whereas others relied solely on tags (ie: some art is only categorized as something, and not tagged). this makes it harder to find content!
I'm not saying don't update the infrastructure at all or not implement solutions, but I am saying have the infrastructure in place first or at least close to being put in place before making drastic changes. This way the changes can go through, and people who simply want to use something familiar to them can still do so, because not everyone wants to fill out the search tab with so many inclusions and block so many things just to potentially get what they're looking for
The tagging system just isn't at the level where it's half as useful/user-friendly (certainly not e621's level). it doesn't even autocorrect people to only use one term for men/male/dude/andromorph. categories (or e621's correction) are better because they offer clarity for terms.
it'd be far better to revamp it in place of removal:
masculine (1-2)
feminine (1-2)
other (1-2)
intersex (both genitalia)
3+ people (only masc)
3+ people (only fem)
3+ people (all)
it'd be even better to have multiple categories (ie: gender, genitalia and character number), or allow selection of multiple genders (for example we could select all of these at the same time: male (cis), male (trans) and andromorph).
however even the lil revamp would be more than enough.
this is also a better system as it allows you to change the terms if one becomes popular/easier to recognize. unlike tags which are a bit harder to change
Actually unhinged lmao tf is wrong with you
No, it won't. If people didn't use tags properly/at all, gutting the drop down won't make them go "Shit, guess I'll tag my stuff now.", especially when they didn't use either.
I have 14 FA tabs open in FF right now, all of which were opened to art and haven't been refreshed since before this update.(dont judge, I have a problem) Of those 14 pieces of art, 9 of them have no tags AND still show as "any" in the gender field. And these are just the ones I've had open in the last couple days. There are plenty of artists out there who have hundreds of uploads like this, with no tags or a gender option chosen. Those pieces still show up in the browse section regardless of what you have selected.
And for those uploads that DID use the gender option and but didn't have tags? Well, as they explained in this very journal, a tag of the appropriate matching gender is now added to the piece automatically. So now, so long as the uploader used the drop down menu, those pieces now have a tag on them.
This is probably going to be ignored, but I strongly suggest that this change be rolled back.
"Also, we are going to be forcing you to search by tags now if you want to see specific content that used to be accessed by simply using a drop-down."
Are we being serious right now?
Second, I think they underestimated just how badly limited FA's incredibly primitive and antiquated tag system (SoFurry had a better one even back when it was still called Yiffstar) is for filtering, probably due in no small part to the fact that FA only gained tag blocking of any kind earlier this year.
They basically jumped the gun and tried to switch to using tagging for everything... without upgrading the tag system to be capable of everything (or upgrading the search and browse tabs to better take advantage of tags). Massive case of putting the cart before the horse
Submit a feedback ticket explaining the issue - tickets get more consideration than mere journal comments. Be as detailed as you can.
This is why bunch of good artworks go unnoticed tagged like "oh" "my" "god" "I" "am" "so" "tired"
2. The limited options of the dropdown were making people feel left out, and adding to it would have been a frequently-moving goalpost.
That being said, this change was definitely rolled out prematurely (should have been saved til AFTER tagging and the search and browse tabs were upgraded). And it fails at inclusivity due to all the labels that got foolishly left out of the conversion to tags, so it definitely needs to be rolled back.
If you do not wish to see 1 gender in a fetish thing, but want to see it in sfw, it's not going to work. Also true for if a submission has multiple genders.
Especially if a gender identifier is two words, and someone forgets to underscore it, or spells it as a singular word.
Also because now Browsing is...significantly worse, with no improvement to the Search function. Right now, I'd have to bookmark a butt-ton of specialized searches and hope that everyone tagged what I'm looking for properly.
Regardless, I am still incredibly appreciative of the work you all do! ...Even if I am of the opinion the gender change is a miss.
So, how do you like the lack of gender filtering? Cool, right? Progressive!
I’m just going to pull the trigger on these pranks. They decided to go full tag system WITHOUT ANYONE KNOWING, they took it all out because they had outdated/offensive terms in the gender menu of FA. Fuck... How about removing these terms????
The gender search was personally convenient for us because we could mark the CORRECT sex of the customer’s character. Because often people are too lazy to write or copy the tags, they just put it in the gender column and that’s all. And visually you can’t always understand what gender the character has because they can be non-binary personalities in general, and that’s ok I want to know and see it before loading the work.
But now it will be a real pain in the ass, because everything has to be written in tags now, and the simple copying of the tag they have not yet fixed - THEY ARE COPIED WITH HUGE SPACES BEFORE EACH WORD.
Not to mention what the search should look like now if you want to find something specific...
"@ title rednef @ keywords ! male" SO FUCK
It’s like people who are looking for sexual kinky content will sit around and deal with FA, tags, searches to find what they like.
I hate writing tags, it’s the most miserable fuck in the world. I don’t know half of the terms, I don’t know half of the gender, my customers don’t always use tags, or don’t write gender on the referrals, in short it’s just fucking.
Removing such a gender filter on FA is like removing the gender filter on a porn. People are furious, for different reasons😕 (I convey the people’s indignation)
I could swear they announced this idea around the same time they announced the intent to phase out the species dropdown.
"they took it all out because they had outdated/offensive terms in the gender menu of FA. Fuck... How about removing these terms????"
It wasn't just about that. It was also about the dropdowns being clunky on the backend perspective and a nuisance to keep updating.
But you are absolutely correct that FA's clunky, coprolithic, everything-has-to-be-entered-manually (IMO the biggest factor in people being lazy about tags - this problem doesn't nearly as prevalent on SoFurry) tag system is NOT fit to replace the functionality provided by the legacy systems. I think they were in such a rush to migrate to tag use that they overlooked and underestimated just how badly limited the current tag system is (the tag field has a CHARACTER LIMIT). Probably doesn't help that we didn't have tag blocking at all until this year, and the search and browse tabs are also years overdue for updates.
I like the general idea of this change, but FA was not in a fit state to execute it well. Not even close. And they bungled it even if it was.
And if you filter by tag it will take it away all the site not just the kinks you need, there was absolutely no need for this ,the dropdown options were simple and starightforward and kids were already using the tag system to include all the extra made up imaginary sexual identities they needed, PLEASE PUT THE DROPDOWN FEATURE BACK!!
This just makes all the browsing and searching process more annoying and convoluted, the previous option was simple, easy and straightforward.
If it's not broken DON'T FIX IT
This just sounds to me like another example of sacrificing the normal majority in favor of the most noisy minority
I feel bad for anyone using browse mode, especially once they delete the species dropdown as well.
But perhaps it might be beneficial to overhaul how the browse page itself works?
One: Put the search feature *in* the browse section. Having it separate just feels convoluted to me. Have it all on one page so that you can browse newest, but also have the search functions right there.
Two: Have a text field where you can type in tags for excluding images with those tags. I'll be frank, I had no idea how to exclude tags from search before now. I don't use the search feature often, but perhaps making it a bit easier and intuitive for people to exclude what they don't want to see would be beneficial? Since a lot of people aren't aware you can do the ! or - to exclude tags, maybe having it so you just type in the tag you don't want to see, while basically automatically adding the modifiers for the user would be helpful.
Maybe that might help, if it's possible?
Frankly, something like that should have been in place before this was rolled out.
The exclusion field is an addon to that vision that I very much like. Making sure to pass this along. Thank you!
1. add a the gender tags to type and let us search by two types not the best solution but it was the first one that came to mind.
2. the page number is a place you type something in so just add one of those boxes but for tags. honestly if the gender was replaced with an empty box to type in what you want I doubt the staff would be getting nearly the flack that they have it would have been a slight bit more inconvenient but it wouldn't make browsing feel like a chore like it does now.
3. honestly if the staff want to do right by the community than they shouldn't have put this in motion without getting the communities feedback on it first this is a suggestion for everything going forward. Decisions like this effect everyone here on the site and there nothing more frustrating than feeling like your voice doesn't matter so for things going forward that are a change to the site I say you inform us of it and then put it to a vote let the community decide if they want that change or not before you do it. just making decisions like this before we can give our input make it feel like we don't matter when FA is supposed to be a community so please pass it on to your team the idea of letting us the community vote on such changes.
On that subject, Deviantart changed it format to "deviantart.com/USERNAME". The previous still work for backward compatibility, but change the formater the new one would be great to be accurate (depending of it break things, of course).
Else, I aslo recomande you to include Bandcamp into the options, it would be very usefull for the musician ones. Format: "USERNAME.bandcamp.com"
When I "browse" it's to see things I don't know about yet.
I don't understand why you would want to remove or replace Browsing. It has a distinct function from Searching.
I think it would be a good idea to roll back this change and instead set up the tagging system first. Now that people are aware the drop down may be removed hopefully it will encourage them to tag appropriately.
Before this will work submissions need to be tagged.
That is why there is a focus on also wanting to get a recode from the ground up done to make these things a lot easier to handle...
I do hear you though and what you're suggesting and am gladly passing it along to the team for discussion.
The dropdown, though it contained outdated or mislabelled terminologies, was and still is user-friendly and a quick way to filter what content one wants to look for and those one doesn't want to see because it does not match with your preference. This decision to remove it entirely has created a new problem that goes far beyond just language. The issue now isn’t just about terms, but about the overall functionality and ease of searching for content on the site. It just needed some updates.
Tags, on the other hand, are a lot less reliable — not just because many artists don’t use them properly, but because they rely heavily on users knowing exactly what to type. There’s no standardization, so now we’re left guessing what exact word someone used for a character’s gender. For example, just trying to search for "male" could involve a dozen variations: man, boy, guy, macho, dude, or even slang like daddy or dilf. And that’s just in English. Many artists tag in their native languages, so in Spanish you might see chico, varón, muchacho, pibe, tío, chaval, and so on. On top of that, there's no moderation on keyword tags, which means we might see trolling, offensive terms, or spammy self-promotion slipping into the system.
Personally, I must say that this is really a huge downgrade, one that was totally not intended to be, and it will most likely affect my browsing habits here.
From what I’ve read around here and on Bluesky, a better solution is to remove the problematic terms. And rather than a single dropdown, what about a checkbox?
But on that note, trying to make the tag system do everything while it's still in that sorry state is jumping the gun. So yeah, this is a bad idea. Checkboxes would be a better replacement for the dropdown than tags, especially with as rubbish as tagging is rn. And would be more convenient on the search and browse end.
One of the things that keep me hanging on to FurAffinity still almost daily after all these years is the simplicity and ease of use. Deleting the gender option is such a disaster to me. You realize that most people consider themselves having a gender and it being a very integral part of their self perception and preferences? And even if they don't consider having one even the absence of it can be important of being defined as something to be able to search on the website... For a repeated task like this one that some of us do daily it is much more effort to go into the search site, type in "@keywords" every single time for your gender and sort by date for all users etc etc just to search artwork of a specific gender which most of us will do every single time they browse for anything on this website.
Wouldn't it be much more user friendly to just simply, finally, after all these years, add just a a couple more unfold-menu options for very commonly searched for options? Maybe even one more selection field for solo vs. multiple character artwork (because I never thought of "multiple characters" being a gender anyway, so I am kind of glad that is solved now)? FurAffinity did not shy away from adding an ever growing list of species to the species unfold menu year after year. Now for some reason get rid of the gender option altogether just because the list might end up being too long. The species list is REALLY long compared to what might result from adding options for sexual identity/biological sex.
The reason for having those unfold-menus is to reduce the necessity of typing many words to 2 simple mouse clicks. I simply do not understand why we have to abolish the concept of gender or it's counterparts altogether from the browse page. It is so damn essential. I do not think having to go to the search every time now for this very basic essential is an improvement. I would even accept two more separate unfold menus for sexual identity and biological sex or something along those lines.
A small thing I wanna add beyond this: You can't please everyone. If you try to please everyone a UI, long term, will fail. You have to know your target group/the people using the site the most and what they look up the most and design the UX accordingly. If you are being inconsequential with that you end up with a niche user group finding everything perfectly fine and leaving the majority of users behind confused.
"The species list is REALLY long compared to what might result from adding options for sexual identity/biological sex."
You must have missed it, but they announced an intention to phase the species list out too.
The team seems to be a bit hung up on the idea of streamlining the site by making tags do everything because that's how more modern gallery sites do it. And I think they're underestimating just how much more effort trying to achieve the same thing with the current, coprolithic tag system is (especially without updating the Search and Browse pages to have quick-and-easy selection of tags like those gallery sites usually have) and how limited the tag system is for filtering, and how badly something that streamlines the site on the backend (which is one of the big motivating factors here) can detract from UX on the frontend.
has it occurred to the higher-ups in the furry fandom that being different is cool
and the ramifications of eliminating a beloved piece of history, Ship of Theseus style
This would be a perfect solution - expanding the list.
I'm an artist and I work a lot with my clients and it's important for me to know what gender and/or biological sex the character I'm working with is and how to mark them. I can't always find a character reference in the client's gallery or specify the gender. Some clients don't update their galleries and the character's gender is impossible to determine visually, but I need to mark my art because it's important for search. I don't want to be rude to characters for whom gender is an important part that needs to be marked in search. And often my clients find it easier to just click a couple of buttons in the upload menu than to type in tags. And for me, it's easier to look at the "Gender/Species" bar to mark the same thing in my gallery.
Also sometimes I need to upload several pieces of art in 1 day and endlessly typing tags is terribly tiring and, frankly, sometimes it discourages me from updating the gallery at all, simply because I have to search and write words. It only seems like "Hmm, big deal, just write words!", but oh my god......I don't have that much time to type tags with absolute precision.
All that being said, even for those with the benefits of Modern... they should have upgraded the tag system and the search and browse pages before rolling this change out.
It's been semi-regularly mentioned in journals, usually those that are about tech stuff in announcement journals, since then, that Classic was no longer updated and was considered "legacy".
And of course, that character limit is another problem with trying to make the current tag system do all the lifting.
cool
I got to withhold judgement until changes to the search and tagging system come in, because they are really outdated to and need some spruce.
Exciting times hopefully.
Was not fun waking up with "Gender are gone!" And "FA removed gender, has Donald found us?" messages on my phone and in the journal tab. Got me a hell of a shock for a moment concidering what is going on with the gender topic in generell at the time.
And you have the nerve to call this an improvement?
This is an outright stupid decision at best given your options, and outright pandering to practically nobody at worst.
Not sure what you mean by "little icon in the top left"?
Do you mean the FA logo that brings you back to the main page, or the "Browse" link? Or something else entirely?
Also, are you on Classic Template, or Modern? If Modern, which skin are you using?
If this isn’t reverted, I can see a lot of people leaving the site. Browse was always a better way to filter for content users want than the complete mess of keywords.
As Upload Policy 1.2 states, we do not specifically "police" the gender section/keywords.
While there are extreme circumstances in which we might do so, these are very much extremely rare exceptions and not the norm.
Otherwise, we do try our best to make sure users do not abuse the keyword system, and respond to reports/tickets as quickly as we can.
I hope this helps a bit. :3
I just wanted to provide you with the exact policy regarding this, in order to make sure it was out there, both for you and foxpup (and anyone else reading this). <3
Sorry if it came off some other way. ^^;
And we're aware of the now-mildly-confusing wording of the policy; but still, thank you for pointing it out!
It's been added to the list of potential policy updates we're looking at. I can't give you an ETA, but I'm fairly certain this one will easily pass review. :3
Updating it or adding a custom/multiple option would have been better.
I will now need to use extra characters in the tag field to include something that I was able to pre select before.
Sorry but I'm not on board with how this was implemented.
A custom or "undisclosed" option for both fields so either can be searched for or blocked too.
I WANT people to know what gender/sex my characters are AT A GLANCE.
Not only because it's important to ME but also because I want people who enjoy my content to find it and who doesn't to be able to avoid it.
This change was absolutely asinine and a total downgrade and not as inclusive as you think.
Apologies if this is blunt but I care about this website and I want the staff to know how I feel about this change without any sugar coating.
Updating the terms, removing old ones feels like it would have been better than just, hoping users will tag correctly amoung numerous other tags I have to now hope are/aren't included with this change. People already didn't place the gender in stuff before, now, even less will remember to since so few tag art as is already.
Good sentiment, poor direction.
why not keep the dropdown and make the dropdown auto-fill a tag instead? too many alternate tags will appear (do I tag f/f or lesbian???? gdi)
I'm all for inclusivity so... like... put more inclusivity in the dropdown...
This is just lazy. No one wants to spend time teaching furries to tag properly 😤
Bring back the gender drop down list.
If people don't tag their uploads, that's distinctly their problem.
PLEASE FIX THIS!
And that's besides the fact we get to the fact that searching for certain stuff is now going to be more difficult than ever, not to mention some pictures will be unsearchable (mainly those posted by artists/users who are either deceased or have permanently retired their account).
People are often not tagging well and removing the gender drop-down seems like a step back instead of a modernization.
And I think a lot of people, myself included, would prefer the drop-down. Maybe with some additional options.
And if you are still keeping that, expanding the keyword limit would be mandatory then
While i feel like the removal of the drop-down will be very shaky and unpopular at first, i do think it's a step in the right direction for furaffinity (maybe not the most ideal step- but a step in the right direction regardless)- especially for addressing the rampant intersexism that's so deeply baked into the community it's almost impossible to talk about without getting yelled at by people arguing that it's their god-given right to use slurs and perpetuate incredibly harmful and fetishistic stereotypes that only hurt and exclude intersex people from what's supposed to be a very loving and accepting community because they personally don't see or care about the effect it has on them, and thus don't think it's harmful at all when it very, very much is. (er- not the kink type of fetishistic, the descrimination type that makes people view those of certain groups as exotic objects to be oohed and ahhed at by 'normal' people, that should only be acknowledged or seen in that singular context, and not as the very real people they are. unfortunately in this specific situation those two types of fetishistic... are very, very intertwined).
As always, i'm really hoping to see more improvements to the blocking systems in the next updates (specifically the ability to completely hide works both from blocked users and with blocked tags) but other than that one thing, FA staff have been on an absolute roll with these updates! always appreciate the work you do to improve the site, keep it up and running and help address issues in the community, even if others might not at times :]
(i feel compelled here to mention that the intersex tag itself should remain if the hard H is replaced- replacing a slur relating to a specific harmful intersex stereotype with a term that's not a slur and means the same thing *without* relating to said harmful stereotype doesn't mean intersex bodies in general should be removed, too!)
Equally worthless, perfectly valid, 0 thought needed for people who already don't tag. Mandatory tags solve nothing.
Anyway that is all bad decision that will rebut most user just for the sake of one term that could have been remove or modified. yep great.
See ya.
Sure, you can go to search and manually type out a filter to make it only the gender you want to see, but it feels like a lot of faffing about when you could've removed the outdated term from the drop-down or just renamed it.
Boycott FA+, block their ads, don't give them a cent. Use other websites.
The worst is that some say "You're not happy, then use the tag and shut up" without wanting to debate. It's like that and nothing else. It's just hurt to see the website starting to be like that, especially that things was going to be better when fa+ started and all the new updates.
It look like we going back even before the website was created, nothing else
as a guy who likes all varieties of men, i fully agree that the gender categories were half-baked and needed a revamp (not being able to dual search for cis & trans men sucks ass). however as someone who primarily uses browse, it's still a very useful feature. i just want to filter specific categories without encountering beluga bombshell boobs.
if you're not aggressively bi it just removes browse's functionality
Yeah, those exist, and there's WAY too many of them.
Not what you felt, not what you interpreted, but what I actually said.
If you can’t do that - and let’s be honest, you can’t - then this isn’t about protecting anyone. It’s just about you staging drama to play the moral authority.
Throwing around serious accusations without evidence doesn’t make you an ally - it just insults the people who actually face real transphobia.
The best way to improve furaffinity is to hear/read what the users actually want instead of making changes no body asked for. I moved to this site because this is where i can fully express myself with unlimited freedom of what i want to draw and what to see on the site. But by removing the drop down, I feel forced to see stuff i don't want to see, even when using the tags.
Again, I appreciate that the staff are doing their best to help improve the site, but listenening to the people who use this site would help improve it more. Please revert the changes or at least learn to not remove the functions people rely on.
Idk how good of an idea this is but it’s what I just thought of
It also creates a weird line in the sand in terms of cis and trans characters. As an example, if someone puts "female" in the tags for a ciswoman and then differentiates by using "transfemale/transfemme" for a transwoman, that comes off as implying that being trans is somehow different and "other" from being cis, and most people aren't going to use "cisfemale" or "ciswoman" for searching in keywords.
I used the dropdown to apply gender tags without worrying about language that could be hurtful/harmful or othering because the dropdown helped gently tell the difference between a cis and trans character for ease of artists/viewers.
I'm sure there were better solutions than this one.
If you don't enforce tags, don't rely on those for search.
This works on places like e621, because tagging properly is mandatory. You just made search worse for no good reason.
This way the muscle memory can still be there but utilize the more flexible system!
It's just that those willing to say it out loud will get censored.
And while I understand there's an intent to add tag filtering to Browse, why on God's green Earth would you REMOVE a function before you have the replacement prepared, hamstringing Browse in the meantime for those of us who used it regularly?
FA doesn't have standardized keywords and every work around I've seen here is less convenient than just using the drop down menu.
Next time you do a change like this please give some time to the users before suddenly adding tags to their works as well. I do not like tagging my works with several keywords because I do not look for maximum engagement. Now I have to go and remove the tags that were added without me wanting to have them there.
Change the gender dropdown to Genetailia options (Checkbox if multiple) and NOT remove it?
Its not difficult to remedy old code and update to a new language, as someone who works in it very often, maybe just get people who know how to do the job well, and optimized.
Enforce a dropdown checkbox for SET Tags, not anything the uploader wants.
Update the search so its not using Boolean function... not every furry is in IT.
Change the ticketing system, add report buttons to posts with a popup with your normal dropdown ui and have it submitted, and notify an everyone tag in whereever its stored to force engagment sooner rather than later (All Support type teams are like this, pinging an everyone usually pushes people to look at it sooner)
If you want to make your site better, run through testing and live testing with beta testers on a private DEV ENV Test domain that testers can use, Spicychat.ai did this well and its constantly improving and faring far better than this, with less staff/programmers.
Consult your community before pushing changes, Documentation is key, AAR's with incidents are KEY, transparency is not just replying to people with your defense, or agreeing, or blindly saying what they want to hear to shut them up.
I want to see this site succeed, but the way things are going, I might as well move to deviantart or post all my stuff to JUST my discord channels.
Oh and on another note, if a browser extention made by some random dude can do a lot of the blacklisting features, why cant a full team of people implement it...? seems odd as to where all that FA+ money is going, and the donations... hmmmm.
Take this into account and maybe get a project manager/Lead for implementations, and create a design/architecture committee.
There are 50K posts tagged as ‘big_breasts’ but not ‘breasts’
It’s not misogynistic to not want to see breasts. You’re exaggerating to an extreme extent.
We both want the same thing, standardized tagging, because problems like the one outlined above are going to continue to happen until this is remediated.
Don’t call your peers bigoted when it’s a mere preference. It’s a terrible look for you.
Don't look for logic here, honestly.
Homophobes are still alive and well even in a predominantly queer community, Awesome!
As many have said, you kinda did break the browse function.
When people had niche genders or multiple characters they already chose the "multiple characters" or "non-binary/other" or even "non-specified/any" gender and put the specifics in the tags.
From my perspective, you just killed the browsing for no reason.
I like looking at the newest art, I log in multiple times a day to check out the new submissions.
A big problem with using search, is that I can only choose "1 day" as an option if i want to look at anything specific.
I would be OK with the change if I was able to sort the search by newest.
Please listen to the community backlash on this one.
At least roll it back until the search is improved
Having a separate drop-down for gender and sex, or using checkboxes to tag as many genders as needed.
That´s why I think removing the drop-downs was a mistake
If someone has a character that´s a trans guy and they include them in NSFW situation pre-transition,
while properly tagging it as "trans male"
they will still show up in searches when someone types in "male" and you bet some people are going to throw a hissy fit about that.
In the old system this issue could have been avoided.
But there are issues with both systems.
I think the checkbox system would be the best (easiest to avoid transphobic bs), but this move was a mistake for multiple reasons
The sentiment seems to boil down to "just use tags lol", but that means you're taking away an intuitive field for browse and replacing it with more burden on the user to write additional arguments into a manual search string/expression instead.
In terms of usability, this feels like a definite step backwards, possibly a jump backwards given the communication blunder about it too.
As a content creator who used the original drop down correctly, and also used it to browse specifically for content I want to browse for, this does not feel like an improvement.
Give me back the ability to filter gender in the 'browse' menu =/
If anything the gender one was the leaat problematic of the bunch.
it's a step in the right direction but also a botched attempt at trying to fix up an old and inefficient system that should've been left in 2005
Second, people don't tag properly. Which is a massive problem everyone is dealing with.
This isn't about your tolerance, this is about tailoring things to each individual's preferences.
Imagine if a gore fan used this logic and called people weak pussies for not being able to handle a few snuff pics popping up in their porn search.
The reason people are upset about genders being migrated to tags is that this was done without sufficient development to ensure that the filtering mechanisms stayed in place for future uploads, and that categories/species arent enforced as tags and so cannot be reliably browsed using the same search features as tags. It was like building the roof before building the foundation. Now users are left with a shitty, half-baked functionality while waiting on promised updates that should have been ready before the functionality was pulled in the first place.
This whole thing wouldn't be an issue of FA would make tagging appropriately mandatory for users. Right now the best we can do is use tag blocking and just scroll past things we don't ant to see, like how 95% of the rest of the internet works.
Though that still is a sign of quite a few artists not caring about tag system at all.
Adding to your comment: it's okay to have preferences and be frustrated by how this update affects your ability to browse according to those preferences. What's not okay is commenting things along the lines of "eww now I'm forced to see BOOBS and VAGINA", it's just plain rude. This update isn't a personal attack against anybody's preferences, it's just a half-baked update that was pushed too soon, so there's no need for anybody to publicly express their disgust about the things they don't care to see. It doesn't change the situation, it just hurts the onlookers who see it.
Do you guys even run any of these changes by your userbase before enforcing them?
This is not the website to be trying this sort of thing. Go back to the dropdowns.
Also why no tag blacklist still? Why can't we block artists we don't like? Every other site has a blacklist but we are unable to figure it out and are forced to see gore and ych spam in searches.
I think it's a change in the right direction. The better solution here would not be to bring the gender dropdown back, but to make it possible to Browse by tags, which I think they will eventually try to implement. It would've been better to roll out the change more gradually to give people time to transition and to give themselves time to develop the feature, but they are volunteers, and even companies where people are paid to do this right, mess it up anyway. Give them some slack.
I'm cancelling my FA+.
There was no consultation on this.
Dragoneer hasn't been gone a year and they're already changing things.
WHY NOT HAVE BOTH???
Dropdown menus help people find things they might not otherwise think to look for.
This is EXTREMELY unfair to people who relied on that feature.
-DOWNGRADE!-
I know you have more you're planning on but I hope you realise that this change isn't adequate for a portion of your userbase. Having to learn tagging is fine I don't mind that. Just more disappointed that I can;t use that feature anymore as I VASTLY preferred it to search.
I submitted a feedback ticket already but the keyword system isn’t perfect. Even when I blacklist a certain keyword I’m still seeing art I don’t want to see because people aren’t tagging their submissions properly. Having the gender tab in the browser function was much more straight forward
That's in addition to the issue that categories cannot be keysearched like tags can, meaning that even if i wanted "@keywords "female", "muscle" for example, it wouldn't show all entries tagged female registered under the muscle category, only those that had 'muscle' as a tag. If categories and species were backported into tags like the gender dropdown was this would solve half the issue, the other half being that there is not consistent enough tagging and no policy enforcing it
And on top of that, you can't search from within Browse results. So yes, Browse is actually unusable now, because there is no way to filter by gender on that page.
If I want to look at something why should I go through hoops and loops when the browse system was already okay? Remove the offensive terms, update with some more variety. Don't just remove it outright with no previous feedback.
Also I'm not cis or straight so don't think this is me saying it from a bigoted pov.
My point of view is this:
My familiarity will image boards is tag based and that intuitively makes more sense to me.
It can encapsulate everything, gender, themes, whatever NSFW topic, ETC.
and that will also help filtering.
And proper tag alias's it will help. And auto complete of tags would help.
(Context with the second post is about the low usage)
The problem is familiarity. Personally I'm ready familiar with tagging so it just clicks. And whatever FA has feels clunky so I'm personally perfectly fine with moving towards tags
I'm gonna put my final points here.
I find the change more functional . I wasn't aware of the feature in the first place. But tags make more sense. Just need to have some actual tagging enforcement
I had 694 submissions to sift through when I started. I omitted from my count posts like YCH bases that have no features, going live pics for streams, patreon ads, tons of characters on a single page.
I counted posts that had any type of gender identifier from female, male, trans, nonbinary, etc. along with abbreviations like bbw, bhm, and the like.
Out of the 310 posts I checked the tags of, 117 used some kind of gender identifier in their tags. 193 did not include gender identifiers at all, but did include a ton of other tags related to the post. And only a small handful in that 193 did not put any tags whatsoever.
And I'm sure if you were to analyze everything submitted after the update went live, that trend would continue where people are simply not tagging their submissions properly. I wanted to bring some tangible numbers to this fight because things not being tagged properly is the number one complaint in this comment section and I honestly didn't have anything better to do with my morning lol.
I mentioned it in a response to one of the staff way up the thread but I wanted to reiterate that the main reason people are pissed off right now isn't simply because that option is missing from posts, but it's missing from the browse section.
I'm just going to paste it here as well so all of this is in one place:
Jesus Christ... All of you staff are not comprehending the problem in that WE DON'T WANT TO USE THE DAMN SEARCH JUST TO BROWSE.
The convenience of just clicking a couple drop downs trumps any combination of words we have to type in a search bar. You're taking a feature that most people use and tossing it in the garbage in favor of something that is far more cumbersome. Took about two clicks to get what I want in the browse page, in this new system if I wanted to browse by gender, I'd have to type it all in and just HOPE that everyone is using the exact same keywords that I put, instead of having it all nice and neatly categorized with a simple click. For example, If I want to search for male fatfur art, I am now going to have to go to the search bar instead of the browse page and type in: @/keywords male fatfur fat fat_fur fat-fur immobile blob obese overweight over_weight over-weight weightgain weight_gain weight-gain food stuffing tubefeeding tube_feeding tube-feeding overindulgence over_indulgence over-indulgence feeder feedee gainer chaser chub chubby superchub super_chub super-chub musclegut muscle_gut muscle-gut and so on and so on.
How it WAS working is that I'd click fatfur and male from the drop downs, hit update, and done.
Do you see why people wouldn't want to do it the other way? It's a thousand times easier to do the drop downs in browse.
Like, we're going to have to keep personalized lists of every single variation of a tag of a specific theme just to throw them in the stupid search bar when we want to casually browse by gender now. That's insane."
I apologized for being abrasive but I needed to make sure it was understood, and looking through all the tags in the posts I skimmed this morning, there's a ton more I missed in my example list that I would have to add to the search bar if I simply wanted to browse by gender and try to include the wide array of art art under a single common theme.
People shouldn't have to completely format a search bar, generate search urls to bookmark, add a hundred keywords, minus a ton of others just to temporarily remove them without having to update their blocked terms over and over, memorize a string of commands, or go through the insanity of this comment here: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal...../#cid:61142016 JUST to casually browse this website by gender. Because that's exactly what you'd have to do right now. It is now needlessly complicated to casually browse new art and posts because you guys removed a single drop down menu, instead of just removing the problematic terms until the new system is ready to take its place.
In the end, people are pissed, guys. Looks to me like the majority don't want this change and it's not simply because "change is hard." It's because this was a bad update. That's all there is to it. You'd get a lot more good favor rolling it back and starting over once the new browse and search function is ready to go.
It truly is that simple of a call to make.
I would like to note that, as you say, saving requests to bookmarks would indeed be inconvenient, especially on a phone. But if saving is implemented by the site, then it is very convenient (I use this in some mobile clients).
And the cheat sheet on how to search should be next to the search bar, not in the comments to some obscure news item on the site.
But it's still useless with currentl quality of tags that are currently used on the site.
It just needs to be done and ready before features are removed, there should be a "One month till THIS update is implemented!" and then a "Next week, here it comes!"
You can't make a few mentions of it casually here and there months ago and expect people to okay when it drops. Who the hell is going to remember that? lol
And absolutely no updates should be made to the site unless the replacement is fully developed and ready to be pushed live. That's site running 101 right there. This entire fiasco could have been avoided if they had just been patient, and people would have been way less angry. I mean, you're not going to please everyone, plenty would still be upset, but I'd personally take a handful of angry furs over pissing off half of your user base lol
Whether it's me searching art, browsing the art pages or even uploading my stuff, I tend to rely a lot on the dropdown menus to fill the needed menu because it's the visual clarity that makes finding and categorizing certain themes, formats and the likes more convenient than having to type the same keywords over and over again, especially when uploading multiple pieces of artwork at the same time.
The functionality of having to recall and learn multitude of functions to for a precise search can be quite harsh, especially when the overall search/browse system gets finally overhauled completely. Simplifying often helps to clean out the clutter.
If FA is going the route of tagging like r34 and e621 (considering FA recently put in a blacklist feature, this seems like the path it's going towards.) then it should also implement community tagging so users can add tags to an uploaders submission so they may be tagged properly.
Additionally, what is going to be the solution for the uploaders who don't tag properly? For example, I have female blacklisted but what about the artist who tags it as woman, lady, girl—anything but female? Am I going to have to blacklist every feminine word under the sun just so I don't have to see that content? It feels like a very inefficient system.
I have one real comment: I have never seen, and can't imagine, tagging/keywords/labeling/whatever you want to call it being really useful without (1) a curated set of tags; and (2) allowing the community, not just the original poster, to add/edit tags.
Some posters will never tag their art. Many won't tag thoroughly. Many will misspell or unintentionally misuse tags. They'll use a word that applies to an element but I expect a different one and don't find it. Fully tagging a complex piece can be a real effort. Even though it seems a small ask, some uploaders won't even do a minimal job of tagging, but doing a thorough job can actually be a big ask. And if it's possible to abuse a feature, someone's going to do it.
Mods can change tags, but there are a lot of new posts and an intractable number of old ones. It's not reasonable to expect a reasonably-sized group of volunteer mods to do this, and it's certainly not reasonable to expect FA to have a large group of paid mods. But if any random reader who comes across a tagging error can easily correct it themselves, assured that it's OK for them to do it, without having to use an interface that seems really obscure or awkward to them, and a good fraction of them actually do it, things should get better.
It's not a simple problem, and a poorly thought through solution will create more problems that might be worse than the problems it's trying to fix. But IMO it could work, and just relying on posters and mods to do it can't. The benefit would be huge, so I think it would be worth working on, even though it's a huge effort.
And before you say that people don't tag stuff properly - people who don't tag stuff properly never filled out the dropdown menus either, so nothing changed.
Ultimately, the 'browse' section doesn't get much use from me anyway and never did. You have so much more control just using search instead. I wouldn't be surprised if the browse and search tabs get combined together into one later down the line.
And no, "@keywords renamon -male" is not an functional replacement. That failed to function aproximately 10min after this change, when the first artwork of a male Renamon was uploaded with the tag "mm" instead.
"@keywords renamon -male -gay -mm -mxm -mf -mxf" etc. This is a disaster for trying to filter by gender, both because tags have synomyms, and because tagging doesn't ensure gender explusivity like the dropdown did unless you put in significant extra work.
I don't know how you keep doing it, bravo
Who's dumb idea was this? What happens when people upload a submission and don't add a gender keyword?
Excuse we had the gender dropdown.
So for everyone, they either have to go back to every, single, solitary image and manually input gender into the search tags or forever bar themselves from being searched on gender basis.
And for those who’ve died or retired?
No option whatsoever.
"To ease the transition, we have automatically copied the old 'Gender' field (except for Any, Multiple Characters, etc) into the keywords of submissions that didn't have it already - over 15 million of them."
I don't like the change because of how it makes Search (not a great function on FA) load-bearing, but at least they did make it mostly backwards compatible.
I am considering cancelling my FA+ and encouraging others to do the same.
This was not okay to do. Removing functionality has never, ever, EVER ended well.
This change has made the site far less usable for me.
The drop down menu should be preserved.
Taking away choice is a net detriment and this was a bad move.
People who don’t want to use the gender dropdown menu are free not to use it, but everyone else was happy with the way things were.
Please change it back. This feels like a violation.
TL;DR summary: The motivation and reasoning for the change are good, but it wasn't communicated or implemented well and the usability of FA has massively decreased for me as a result of the change.
Up front, the positives: Making gender less restricted by letting people tag it however they wish is a good change, especially given the... "dated" terminology some of the limited options had. Automatically appending the old gender dropdown selection as a tag is a good way to avoid losing information in the shift as well. In the abstract I do like this update, it's good and necessary.
Unfortunately there's also the negatives, mostly the Communication and Implementation of this change, and the Usability of the site afterwards.
First, Communication. Instead of telling people in advance this was coming, it was just implemented live with no communication whatsoever. This post wasn't even up until a whole day had passed from implementation, leaving a lot of people confused on what was happening and if it was intentional or not. There should have been an update post made at the same time as the update or even before it was implemented. Ideally before to allow for community feedback in case some functional issue was missed on the dev side.
The Implementation of this is, to be frank, questionable at best. The "Minimum Three Tags" system that's been mentioned several times in the responses should have been added before this change, since as-is you're going to have a lot of people that just ignore the popup at the top and don't think to set a Tag for gender (as can be confirmed by a quick check of recent uploads). Heck a lot of people don't even set tags at all. Tagging and Searching on FA has always been questionable at best. On top of some artists just not doing it at all, there's the complete lack of standardization and some commonly added tags being literally unsearchable. For an easy example, "TF" is still an unsearchable tag thanks to being only 2 characters, yet many artists keep applying it to their works instead of "transformation" which is actually searchable. As has been mentioned a few times, it also didn't put any tag for the previous "Multiple characters" category which is going to result in a bit of a mess even when Searching finally gets useful.
Which brings me to the last problem: Usability. I'll be blunt, this account mostly exists to browse smut. Previously that was pretty easy for me to do, I'd just go to the Browse page, select a category and gender from the dropdowns, and get a nice display of all the most recent art of the type I'm looking for. It wasn't perfectly comprehensive, but it was more reliable than Search and was easy to use. A few pieces that weren't properly selected, like someone accidentally marking a Male (He/Him with the description explicitly calling him Male) work as Female, wasn't hard to just ignore and keep browsing. But I'm not into guys, and now any time I want to use Browse it's more than half stuff I actively do not want to see. So Browse has been made near useless for me, at least for my typical NSFW browsing. There may be plans to unify Browsing and Searching in the future, but for now they're still different functions that find different things.
Which means the best way to find something is the Search feature. And FA's Search feature leaves a lot to be desired. It's notably more complicated to get the same functionality from even if tagging were perfect. Instead of one to three dropdown clicks, I have to fully type in every part of what I'm looking for. And as everyone knows, tagging on FA is anything but perfect. There's unsearchable tags, spelling mistakes, spelling differences (just adding -ing to the end of a word can determine if a tag shows up in a search or not), differing names for the same subject, and particularly forgotten tags. The latter is pretty common because you might expect that the dropdown selections for a work like Category, Type, and Species would be searchable fields, but they don't seem to be. Many, many artists will set those and not add a matching Tag because they figure that those would be included in a Search. For Transformation work in particular there's also a really bad situation where some artists will just tag a work "TF" and set no category, ensuring their work is never visible in anyone's attempt to find transformation content on FA. If improvements to searching and tagging had come before this change then I guarantee you there would not be even half the backlash there is now.
Sadly at this point if I want to browse and find new art it's far easier for me to go over to e621. Searching there is easy: There's autocomplete options as you type in a tag, tagging is (mostly) standardized and fairly comprehensive, some tags imply other tags ("Canid" will grab all dogs and wolves, for example), and personally the syntax is better. This is a real shame, because FA's been THE furry art site for ages and was a great way to find artists and for them to have all their stuff in one place. e621 isn't great as a personal gallery for artists, and has the classic problems with "tag what you see" and trans characters. But now it's actively easier to search there and follow source links back to here than it is to just Browse FA directly.
Overall, the theory and motivation for the change are good but the actual end result is not. Mostly because of how bad the existing Tagging and Search systems are, and them now being load-bearing for finding content people are looking for.
It’s off to e6 I go!
"These drop downs are limiting in many ways, it's not really a system that works so let's remove it since there's already a replacement in tags" -> People upset because drop downs were how they used the browse function
So let's say a manual list of gender tags was curated and turned into a drop down which only exists to browse, not when creating a submission.
"Drop down added to browse function" -> People upset because too many submissions have no gender tags
The only way I see this working is if one used the "Gender tag dropdown" in the browse function, any submissions without gender tags would be excluded. Which doesn't seem different than the "old" way of people just leaving the default "any" and thus not showing up on specific searches. But if you then said,
"Please include at least one gender tag on posts, even if there's a specific tag for no gender" -> People upset because they now have to use a tag
Tagging really is a double edged sword. It's absolutely more of a mental load to add them in a submission for some people than others, and I'm personally the kind of person that does not care about discoverability/searchability and has a higher mental tax for trying to come up with tags, descriptions, etc for posts. It was easier for me to write my own tooling for uploading a gallery on my website, specifically so the only info I'd include is the artist name, than try and write a description for every image I wanted to post. Thankfully, I'm just a commissioner and not an artist.
But if you want people to find things, it has to be organized somehow, and the answer to that is ultimately tagging in one form or another. A drop down is just a category of tags where only one option from a list is allowed, but you see what every option is when picking.
If you try to "outsource" the tagging, i.e. have people who just tag posts based on rigid standards, you end up with disputes over the standards. You end up with e621, which has it's own pros and cons. e621 already exists, I don't think that's a good idea here personally.
I really do not think there's a single solution for this kind of thing. There's things that can be done to make it less painful, things like tag auto complete/suggestions or other "show me my options" UI things when making submissions, adding more Browse options even if they are just aliasing search functions, tag aliasing and tag implications so one submission tag caters to 3 different ways of searching or filtering for said tag, etc etc. All of which have probably been mentioned here, all of which probably require a lot more work to implement than we think, and most of which probably will happen in some form at some point. With time and effort, from staff/devs/volunteers/etc who hopefully are not burnt out from putting in the time and effort.
I get why people get so vehemently upset when something they have used and enjoyed for years changes, especially if it changes in a way they don't like. I am frequently one of those people. But I think everyone has gotten conditioned into thinking the only way to respond is to bitch and moan and create the biggest stink possible. Because that's the only way to get a large company who otherwise doesn't care to change something, by making the issue "viral on twitter" because everyone is shouting about it. Community websites like this are not VC backed platforms, and for better or worse I think it's important to have a lot more leniency, patience, and just generally not be a dick about it. Unlike big companies, in this case the people building and running the website also, actually, for real, want a good website they enjoy using. It does not exist to make money, though it will ultimately need to make money to exist, but it exists first and foremost to be a good website. Corporate platforms exist to make money, the website is a byproduct and it being good is very optional.
Then again, the only people who read this far into the responses are either people looking to vent steam, staff, or someone about to write their own reply into the void. 👋
but i think there was a way to go about doing this that would have resulted in a less exciting comments section. changes like this should really be announced with detailed descriptions of what's going to happen and when, so people have time to register any concerns they have and otherwise prepare for the change
personally, here's the concern i would have liked to be able to register in advance: as far as i understand you can use the search page to find artwork by tags (including gender) and you can use the browse page to find it by the dropdowns (including species). at the moment if you want to find art with a specific gender *and* a specific species, furaffinity just doesn't allow that, because the two interfaces to filter by tag and by dropdown are separate. of course an artist can just add both gender and species manually in the tags, and in that case you can use the search page for both. but i saw earlier in the comments here that someone reported they tried searching for "male shark" and got less than half of the relevant results, which suggests that most people are not currently doing that
if i were in your position, here's what i would do next. or at least, it's what i would *want* to do, assuming some issue i don't know about doesn't make it impractical:
1. make a post acknowledging the issues. if possible, temporarily revert to the old system while working on implementation of the next two points
2. keep the gender widget on the upload page, but change the function. rather than having a separate gender category controlled by the dropdown, it should serve as a quick way to automatically add relevant tags. the reason i think this is better than just removing it and requiring people to type gender tags into the tag box manually is that it encourages uploaders to specifically consider gender tags as something they might want to add via the ui design. i think this will help solve the issue that many people aren't currently tagging gender, and it will reduce the likelihood of e.g. someone tagging an image "woman" or "f" when the canonical tag is "female". i would have the options in the dropdown as "male", "female", "non-binary", "not applicable", and "other/multiple". the options "male", "female", and "non-binary" would add the relevant tag, "not applicable" would add nothing, and "other/multiple" would bring up a little box for the uploader to manually type in gender tags
3. keep the gender dropdown on the browse page, but change its function so that it filters images by tag. the options here should be "any/none", "male", "female", and "non-binary". hopefully this would improve the experience of trying to find art for people who are used to the old browse page
4. there probably needs to be some kind of tag aliasing system, to fully eliminate the issue of different people coming up with synonyms for the same tag
5. i guess from reading staff comments here that the goal is to eventually replace *all* the dropdowns with tags, so there is a single unified system. that makes sense; i think each one should be handled similarly to what i've outlined in points 2 and 3
6. once everything is fully migrated over to tags and people are used to the idea of handling everything through tagging, i think *that* is the time to consider more extensive updates to the upload, browse, and search pages. regardless of what those eventually looks like, i would want to put them together and then provide them as an opt-in beta for a while, to work out any issues while people who are not into beta-testing continue to use the old interfaces
anyway, hopefully all of this doesn't come off as presumptuous. i imagine it's stressful sorting through 1700 comments of mostly angry people, and i don't want to contribute to the stress. i thought this might be a helpful suggestion and if not, very much feel free to ignore me
This isn't a catch-22.
So heres what should have happened, you keep all the dropdowns, but they are just secretly highly specific tags to avoid confusion and keep convinience of using them, the browse looks the same but is now just using those preset specific tags in secret behind the scenes. Same with uploading you keep all those dropdowns but instead of setting a seperate value they once again set a specific tag and forgetting to set them just sets no tags, theres also a huge bonus to this because you make it easier to tag things with less spelling mistakes.
Ok so problem solved right? Nop because theres still a huge problem they done, every single one of those auto tags they did has completly failed. The old option of male isnt really a 'male' tag, it should have been 'male_only' at thats what it really represented for a piece of art.
And to the people happy the options removed and think its now more inclusive? Its not, you ALWAYS could set your own custom tags, nothing was added, only a highly used feature was removed. And you better pray what ever your thing is, everyone knows and agrees to tag it correctly and the same way or your will be cursed with needing to do multiple searches because they want to make all things keyword based.
Like if you guys just worked--and properly, routinely communicated with the userbase as you go--on the more time-consuming, intricate updates like tag minimums, user tag preferences/filters, a robust and sensible fusion of the browse and search features, etc... implemented those updates in a smart, steady way, y'know give users time to acclimate and adjust... then, at the end, remove the dropdown menus in a cleanup phase when people are used to the new system. Well, in that process, only an extremely minor fringe would've been in dissent (you ultimately can't please everyone even if you did this update process ""perfectly"")!
Also, this is just a morbidly-hilarious observation moreso than anything, but choosing to get rid of the Gender dropdown menu during Pride Month falls into "out-of-touch executive move" territory so hard.
These people could easily add any gender tag(s) while using the Other option in the dropdown.
But no, instead you decide to kill a very useful feature, especially for us legacy site users, basically rendering the whole 'Browse' part useless. And no, 'Search' isn't really a substitute for this. Not even remotely.
As a side note, I really appreciate you all getting rid of the outdated gender language along the way despite the feathers it has ruffled. One thing that might help streamline is being able to save search queries as feeds so that users don't need to retype search queries a bunch and can share their feeds.
Reminder once again, that all previous art that had properly used the dropdown have had that option moved into the tags - so they're searchable - and you can simply combine it with any other search that you had previously done, like "(guilmon|gabumon) vore -female"
If people are not adding the gender tags, that's on the artist and not on the site or the admins. The tagging system is there to be used, and choosing not to use it only hurts the uploader be limiting their own reach. People can't find your art if you don't tell people what's in it, after all.
I do agree that we should have a standardized tag list - maybe a dropdown on the upload page with genders, species, and other common tags that you can just click on to add to the keyword list - like Derpibooru has.
(Also, for reference, you can't use hyphens in keywords, and keywords must be more than 2 letters long. This is why searching for "ho-oh" does nothing, and why the automatic tagging used "non_binary" instead of "non-binary", since you can't search for the latter)
Overall, this is a stepping stone toward making the keyword system better and pushing for people to actually use it instead of uploading art with no keywords at all. The browse page is a legacy feature, just like the classic theme is, and there's no guarantee it'll stay as is in the foreseeable future.
Noting that I'm agreeing with you here. Just making it known that failing to find someone's art through search is the uploader's fault and not FA's.
Sorry I couldn't help myself.
https://www.furaffinity.net/control.....roubletickets/
We would have to troubleshoot a few things with you and ask a few questions about your browser to help sus out what's going on. It's best handled in a ticket. :3
And before anyone says “oh, but e621 uses a tag model” I refuse to use e621 because of how janky the interface is.
HAPPY PRIDE TO ALL INTERSEX AND DYADIC TRANS PEOPLE! 💛💟💛🤝🏳️⚧️
Ultimately.. I think this would be counterproductive for the site. Especially in the long run...
At the end of the day, I dont care about the opinions of people who, if pressed, would be upset if a "race" category with ****** present was removed.
Just tag your stuff. It is not hard, either on desktop or mobile.
Now I can’t browse for male inflation.
Three mandatory tags won't solve much. People will find ways to be lazy, and for some the most important tags to put likely won't even be gender.
Typing in a description and tags can be tedious process compared to just drawing, and people aren't exactly rewarded just for doing it, so don't expect a change like that to suddenly encourage people tag things correctly.
Also the gender drop-down menus weren't perfect, but they were convenient filters for the most recent kinda art people preferred seeing. Search exists but again, I personally find it clunky and I prefer the focused nature of the dropdown menus when looking up what my peers are doing.
Anyhow, it seems FA staff doesn't seem to understand how it's users use the site, which is a rather bleak outlook, not looking forward to any changes after this.
Please bring back drop down menu for regular, non-anime addicted, internet users.
Maybe if one is browsing on a phone or an HD monitor. On a wider 4K, the banner is not scaled to cover the entire width of the browser.
I don't like it..
When I used "Browse" yesterday, I had to go through several times more material than usual to get through 2 days of posts. Having that menu option allowed me to browse far more easily and quickly and to curate my own experience on the site.
The moral impetus behind deleting the menu is good and noble but it can surely be better implemented, especially in a way that doesn't diminish practical use of the browsing option.
So now if I go through the browse section, I get a bunch of blurry things from my blocked tags, some random stuff roughly near what I wanted to filter, and a whoooooole host of shit I don't wanna see because your users can't be fucked to use proper tags. Gonna implement forced tags to enforce this change? Looking at some of these comments I'm seeing people complaining about the possibility of having to use at least 3 (OMG SO MANY, HOW COULD ANYONE POSSIBLY BE EXPECTED TO PUT 3 OR MORE TAGS ON THEIR SUBMISSIONS?!) but like...seeing hundreds of Adopts, YCH's, Stream Reminders, etc that aren't labeled with shit so they show up even if I have those things blocked are goddamn annoying, and that's not even getting into the weeds of individual arts that I don't want to see because of stuff like Tits and shit.
Do better, this shit is backwards.
(Half)Jokes aside, thank you for all your hard work! 💜
Oh, thank goodness, this decomplicates a lot. I've wanted to contribute to the FA-Banner thing when it was announced, but the next day I opened the site banner in a new tab, and discovered three whole additional inches of scenery on the right side. This implied there was an unclarified asymmetrical "safe zone" I'd have to design any banners around, and that made my head hurt.
We are locking comments at this time as we are working on getting these edits live, and much of the conversation seems to be turning into unhealthy arguments against our trans/non binary/gender fluid community members and we will not tolerate this behavior.
We have collected an adequate amount of feedback and productive communications regarding this topic. We will have another announcement post when everything is live again but we will not tolerate users harassing each other or spreading hateful ideologies. Thank you.