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June 19th, 2025- Gender Dropdown Roll Back/Update
3 months ago
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Journal Start
Hey there everyone,
Fur Affinity staff has heard your feedback loud and clear, and have spent last night and this morning trying to find ways to better serve our users’ needs following yesterday’s removal of the gender dropdowns. It had additional consequences that had not been taken into account, which in turn negatively affected the browsing experience of many users. Following a lengthy analysis of the issues raised, we plan to re-introduce the gender dropdowns back while updating their behavior. We really cannot apologize enough for how this was pushed out.
Gender dropdown selections will now work as a convenient shortcut for adding the gender-specific keywords into the keywords field on submissions, or the search box on the Search page. We will be adding a limited subset of genders onto the dropdown menu to recreate previous functionality while still allowing users to search via keywords for any gender desired that’s listed on submissions. Any gender identities can still be added manually to the keywords, use of the dropdown isn’t required.
Additionally, the Category/Art Type/Species filters that are currently on the browse page will be added to the Search page as well. This allows for searches to now use a combination of filters that were previously only possible on the Browse page. After these changes have been implemented, we plan to merge the functionality of the Search and Browse pages (now virtually identical) together into a single page that can work as either, or both at the same time.
We will be pushing this update as soon as we can, and we are still open to feedback on this!
Lastly, Fur Affinity is staffed in large by volunteers. That said, that should not be an excuse for poor behavior. We do expect all our staff to respond to users with constructive and polite comments at all times. This did not happen yesterday in a few replies, and we apologize greatly for this as well. The moderators in question have been spoken to, and it has been reiterated to our entire staff that they are here to serve the community as a whole.
We once again want to thank the community for your feedback. We have been listening and we’re working hard to continue improving and to own when mistakes are made. We encourage you to continue sharing your constructive feedback. Thank you for helping make Fur Affinity an even better place!
Fur Affinity staff has heard your feedback loud and clear, and have spent last night and this morning trying to find ways to better serve our users’ needs following yesterday’s removal of the gender dropdowns. It had additional consequences that had not been taken into account, which in turn negatively affected the browsing experience of many users. Following a lengthy analysis of the issues raised, we plan to re-introduce the gender dropdowns back while updating their behavior. We really cannot apologize enough for how this was pushed out.
Gender dropdown selections will now work as a convenient shortcut for adding the gender-specific keywords into the keywords field on submissions, or the search box on the Search page. We will be adding a limited subset of genders onto the dropdown menu to recreate previous functionality while still allowing users to search via keywords for any gender desired that’s listed on submissions. Any gender identities can still be added manually to the keywords, use of the dropdown isn’t required.
Additionally, the Category/Art Type/Species filters that are currently on the browse page will be added to the Search page as well. This allows for searches to now use a combination of filters that were previously only possible on the Browse page. After these changes have been implemented, we plan to merge the functionality of the Search and Browse pages (now virtually identical) together into a single page that can work as either, or both at the same time.
We will be pushing this update as soon as we can, and we are still open to feedback on this!
Lastly, Fur Affinity is staffed in large by volunteers. That said, that should not be an excuse for poor behavior. We do expect all our staff to respond to users with constructive and polite comments at all times. This did not happen yesterday in a few replies, and we apologize greatly for this as well. The moderators in question have been spoken to, and it has been reiterated to our entire staff that they are here to serve the community as a whole.
We once again want to thank the community for your feedback. We have been listening and we’re working hard to continue improving and to own when mistakes are made. We encourage you to continue sharing your constructive feedback. Thank you for helping make Fur Affinity an even better place!
Comment posting has been disabled by the journal owner.
Your suggestion is taken into account for the list. :3
To Even, Nonbinary and gender fluid are two different things. 👍
What do you think it tastes like?
All joking aside, +1 here.
My fursona for example has a male and a female form so I can show what I am feel like at the time. But he/she can't flow in the art. So yes he/she is still genderfluid, but I tag my male looking form as male and the female looking one as female since that is a: what I feel like at the time and more important :b helps people to find what they want. Tagging both the same would mean people get male, female, even chars with both sexes all in the same search. And that may represent our gender: yes... but would it help in searching for art?
Maybe if we make "genderfluid male looking", "genderfluid female looking" and "genderfluid other looking" or something, but that would be rediculus if we do it for all gender and end up with 30+ options.
Trans would also need "trans male" and "trans female"
It's a complicated topic in the end and I fully understand everyone wants to Show His gender, so do I.
But I also think if someone for example wants to see nude girls I am sure most here don't care If they look at natural, trans, genderfluid or any other female looking gender: they just want boobs.^^ But if the search then also shows a lot of nude male looking fursonas because of male trans and male looking genderfluid and other gender it is like searching just "all gender" so the search is more or less useless again.
Hope I could tell my guess why some people here say genderfluid in the gender dropdown would maybe not help that much without hurting anyone. That was not my intent.
That would be my reason for genderfluid and non-binary being handy options to include by default. To me, it doesn't matter if it's visually depicted. I want to know what the character identifies as.
You can live your whole life without critiquing other peoples' gender identities, if you choose to do so.
If you don't like the "inconsistency" of non-binary which yes, given that it's basically an umbrella term to describe a lot of ways to identify and present, will have a lot of variance within the people and imagery, then just like... don't search for/browse by it? Nobody is forcing you to look up nb art. But your suggestion would force nbs into a gender/sex label that I guarantee you most if not all nbs would not want to be labelled with.
Like above, they can coincide, but they may not.
Also, trans isn't a gender.
Someone who is genderfluid may or may not identify as trans. Transphobia ≠ opinions pro or con of fluidity being a gender flag.
Why isn't anyone who's against genderfluid giving any reason why?
Is this parody? This has to be parody.
*Immediately makes an "attack helicopter" joke in The Year of Our Lord 2025*
If you don't want people to call you a bigot, don't be one.
(2) I blocked you because you're a bigot.
(3) You then proved my point by being even more of a bigot.
(4) As an autistic person myself, being autistic is not an excuse to be a bigot.
(5) Have I said bigot enough?
Hope that helps! :)
I absolutely love this, and am going to start using this.
<Insert "Yoink!" meme here>
Sex and gender are not the same thing. There are known three sexes (male, female, intersex). Gender as a construct has always been different between multuiple cultures, past and present. An example of this is some indigenous cultures recognize third and sometimes even fourth or more genders.
Your inability to grasp biology, science and cultures isn't helping your case and just makes you sound like every other biggoted moron we're forced to share the planet with.
But yeah, I’m also glad the fact they’re not self-aware enough to realize how insane they sound to most furries, makes it easy to avoid them.
https://www.returnyoutubedislike.com/
A browser extension that returns youtube's public dislikes
See e621 for an example of that within the furry community.
Cause I do not 100% agree with the idea of pigeonholing the crowd on the logic of only those who accept the content should watch either, that's a slippery slope that can lead to a echo chamber, contrasting respectful opinion is how you assure you reach unbiased reason.
You should be allowed to show disagreement in the face of content you don't like instead of being walled off solely on the idea that its not for you, I do agree to that as long as its respectful on both sides.
Also the Negative engagement argument is often times completely curbed by anti-brigading rules which stops a person or group of people from jumping a person and using such a system maliciously. Which fun fact E621 has quite a few of because they know this is a possibility some will use such systems like such. If brigading is happening its not because of a system of likes and dislikes its at that point moderation's fault for not maintaining civility when they need to step in.
They can use that data to see how a user is acting and that is one of the ways they nip bad social behaviors in a non intrusive way. Even without that degree of data checking it tells moderation that there is a lot of positive or negative activity here which gets there eyes on it so if bad actors are involved it hastens response time of moderation.
I also agree with Beefy you can add community elements to it to improve engagement to make it more preferred in community heavy spaces. So it can be another line of feedback besides just comments. I don't think its a bad idea if implemented correctly.
It's possible yet still kinda difficult to filter out things you don't want from browsing; the excluded keywords are very draconian and don't do any context checking. But very useful!
I say this because an example I saw of why removing public dislikes on youtube was a bad idea around the time it was being rolled out was bad or misleading instructional videos, a heavily disliked "How To" video was an indicator of a bad or unhelpful video and there are a lot of those on youtube thanks to content farms
Ugh.
I'm not a fan of futa content. I don't mind other folks from drawing it and will never tell them to stop drawing it, but I'd prefer being able to block it from searches/browsing. Problem is, here on FA there's a chunk that don't want me to be able to do that, thus those same people willingly tag everything else, but avoid tagging futa and types of content they know people will block (which is still denying what other folks do not want to see, which again is an odd mindset to have).
My theory now is that those same ppl that don't like the tag block system will end up using this refined one for species tagging/gender, but still willingly avoid tag blocking, meaning they get to have their cake and eating it too, while folks like me don't get proper tagging and are forced to see everything, despite the tag system existing, but never being used as intended...
Sometimes this makes me wish for community tagging, because that would at least have the tag system used more often, even if someone cba tagging their entire galleries, they could still have an elected person/friend tag for them in their stead.
YT dislikes were nice thing, too.
Dislikes in general can cause a lot of issues, but I at least think it's justified to have the option to dislike posts on sites like Twitter or YouTube since some people use these sites to make posts about news, or video essays/threads. It can help people recognize misinformation as an example.
But for a site on which people only share art, unless we're talking about these shitty political 'shower argument' comics which could contain misinformation or very harmful rhetoric, letting people publicly judge what art is 'good' or not doesn't seem that great of an idea... I'm worried what will happen is simply that beginners and people with unusual/controversial kinks will just get spammed with dislikes for making unpopular art. Criticism isn't inherently a bad thing obviously but just allowing people to dislike posts without having to justify why isn't really criticism imo. And I'm not a big fan of unsolicited art criticism in general anyway.
Dislikes on Bluesky doesn't seem that bad on the other hand, although I still prefer the app as it is.
Memo to site staff: "move fast and break things" is a thing Valley twits tell themselves in an attempt to feel cool, not a thing users actually enjoy living with the fallout from.
But I scrolled to a random spot on this page and saw your response, and can't stop myself from pointing out that you have a logical fallacy in your statement.
"move fast and break things" is only five words and twenty-six characters, but "do stupid shit and waste resources" is six words and thirty-four characters, so it's literally NOT easier and more concise to say. It's more accurate, but it's not more "concise".
Also...
Do the people running this site not have a test environment (something like "beta.furaffinity.net" or "prerelease.furaffinity.net" for testing these changes before they roll them out and fornicate everything up?
With how often they're apologizing for pissing people off, you'd think they didn't do any testing prior to pushing new versions.
Gonna assume they're back.
Like, if you used the female category for your art, all images were tagged female. Is that not a good thing?
And I wouldn't even be complaining about this if they hadn't gone and messed with it without consulting anybody, so my sympathy on this matter is exactly zero. They effed up, they can damn well fix it. (And I'm not even one of the artists who chimed in here with literally thousands of submissions to fix!)
We're actually working on something for this very specific issue. It was pointed out to us in the last 2 days (like a LOT of things), and it's one of the team's priority right now.
I obviously cannot give an ETA since it's still brand new, but we're working on it!
I hope viewer-suggested tags is also on the radar, this new (and much appreciated) tag blocking system doesn't help with untagged or mistagged posts.
That's a longer-term goal/plan, but it is one of the solutions the team is looking at once we have a few more steps in towards a full-on tagging system.
No ETA, especially not after the lessons we've learned these past few days which have altered some of our plans and timelines, but we're looking at different options and how best to implement them!
Thanks for sharing your idea, even if we already had it in store! Always good to know what the Community wants (even if we can't implement everything). :3
That's basically the long-term plan.
We need to shed a lot of "technical debt" and update/upgrade a LOT of systems in order to get there.
This is basically one early step in doing so with a small tech footprint item, which also happens to allow us to resolve a pain point for a good portion of our Community.
I hope this gives you a bit of hope for the future. :3
PS: Hot dang, you get yourself a watch. Amazing art (painterly style is a weakness of mine)! <3
I've had enough of having to play nice with you people. I don't think this decision was handled very well by the staff. But far too many of y'all have proven that someone asking you to take basic consideration for others into account when you upload submissions, results in you throwing conniptions like spoiled children who weren't disciplined enough. Your opinions don't deserve to be given the time of day, and it sickens me that so many people are giving it to you.
As for the rest, I simply do not care if you think my opinions aren't worthy of consideration.
Holy shit, they made an entire ass journal over this.
And you and your little kemonomimi bitch friend think you're the good guys here. Fucking amazing. Enjoy y'all's mutual block with me.
Please feel free to remove your tags, but do understand that it is essentially the equivalent of de-categorizing your images from the old category system, and it will make it difficult for people to find them when they filter by gender keyword.
Though I definitely agree that tag/description abuse is a thing that happens (I remember, several years ago, officially reporting several Pokemon fanarts because the submitter felt compelled to duplicate a list of ALL Pokemon names in every piece's description, fouling up the Search) and at least the major cases of it DO need to be cracked down on.
Tags really only see their full potential when you have a way to browse/search that field specifically (for comparison, over on dA this can be done by searching for "tag:keyword" instead of just "keyword", it works!), otherwise even just random Description chatter can technically get false positives -- like, just because I randomly mentioned "TwoKinds" (the username) while describing one piece does not mean it needs to show up in a Search for Twokinds (the comic) fanart...
I wouldn't care if it was harmless, but since it does affect search results, it should be taken more seriously.
It's possible to limit search to only looking at Keywords using the "@keywords" command in Search right now!
Example: https://www.furaffinity.net/search/@keywords%20tomboy
Not specifying that command will indeed search through all fields.
And when specifying the command after other terms, the terms before the command will be looked into all fields while those after the command will be limited to the Keywords field.
Example: https://www.furaffinity.net/search/?q=ball+%40keywords+dog
I hope this clarifies a bit how Search works. <3
It seems silly to say out loud, but it means a lot that y'all are helping make the site more accessible for folks like me instead of bending the knee to people who just want to make stupid jokes in the tag section like this is 2014 Tumblr.
imo, it would probably help to have a reminder of some of these rules during the upload process because I reckon most people don't bother reading the tos/aup.
Also, "the automatically added tags broke my joke, please roll these back" feels an awful lot like https://xkcd.com/1172/
Unfortunately, this means that you must at least try to not violate our Code of Conduct and Upload Policy while using the site we provide to you, and not intentionally break rules as a form of protest.
marrying of church and statemerging of browse and search. And then they tell us not to abuse all that extra room ripe for abuse like it's a forbidden fruit. That's what really bothers me. I, for one, went back and nixed the abuse on my old posts, but I know some people who will abuse tags even more.They need to revert the changes, completely. Then have a town hall on the Discord server to discuss moving forward. They’re trying to ram these changes through, instead of listening to the people that make this site what it is.
Instead, we have staff attacking users and management forcing through changes like a big tech company.
(Also, chatrooms aren't exactly known for keeping a public record of whatever serious discussions happen time to time.)
Most tech companies these days hate history. Support your local libraries and the Internet Archive.
glares at youtube making changes that prove controversial then never rolls them back
And now there's just, no subtitles, nothing
Some YouTubers will plug in their language to aid people with poor hearing, bit no translations unless they pay a translator or know the language
On a related note, I saw a modern McDonald's next to an 80's Pizza Hut on my ride today. Guess which one looks more attractive.
Point is, homogenization is never really a good idea.
An even bigger sin is when YouTube redesigned the UI so when a video is paused, the menu bar overlaps and blocks subtitles. It's been years and they still haven't fixed that.
I would know because not only have I seen it happen on YouTube
But I've also played Roblox since 2016/17 and have seen everything go to hell there
I'm glad that the staff listened, though. Big ups for them.
either way, it's nice they did go back on it though.
it looks like they've gathered feedback in regards to the way users ARE using the site and altering the current features to accommodate that even more, so this is definitely a nice step forward. curious to see how they'll handle this situation down the line when they make tags more central to the site
People are passionate about the things they fill their day with, and complaining is easy.
I hope the team uses this opportunity to gather feedback on changes, and learn not to push updates designed in a vacuum. There is clearly a strong sentiment for being able to find art with a consistent searching and filtering as while as a strong desire for more enforcement on content missing important tags. Hopefully when they do the merge of Browse/Search it's done thoughtfully and with lots of feedback
Thank you for listening.
The site would work a hell a lot better if tags were consolidated so people weren't looking for the right variant of a word.
I love being able to reliably look up tags on e6. It works well for finding specific interests I have.
Having that function on a site like FA where I can follow the artists and comment directly on their art would be a dream.
Also centralized community-applied tags is one of the reason I'm using FA over sites that use those. There have been multiple issues on sites like e621 where artists had to fight over stuff like what the gender of their characters are with people who had decided it fit this or that tag. Sure I guess it's useful if what you want is to just feed in a string of tags and be fed back images that match exactly what you have already decided you want, but if I'm being honest to me personally the process and it's effect on how people use those sites tend to feels quite reductively instrumentalizing at best, if not outright disrespectful at worst, towards the artists.
I think what we need is to replace all the dropdown lists with ones that are just about as long but where you can select as many as you need, have a list of sensitive subject matter that must always be tagged, and then bring on a whole category of staffers whose job is to sniff out old untagged submissions and apply any relevant mandatory tags to them. Since we can't reasonably demand that everyone go back through thousands of posts and tag them, especially people who left the site ages ago.
The only people that have an issue with it are usually the type to disagree with the "tag what you see" approach.
I cannot stress enough how poorly this was handled, so thank you for taking the time to fix the issues and communicating again. Hopefully this leads to better communication and better updates in the future.
While this should not have been as big of an issue as it was, I do appreciate you guys taking the time to fix what was a botched update.
However, I do need to say this loud and clear: During the whole incident, COMMUNICATION, BETWEEN STAFF, TECH, AND USERS, WAS AWFUL. This is something I hope is not repeated in the future, even if it means all of us including me has to drill it in staff's heads not to repeat it. Please do not repeat that mistake.
I'm glad you took the time to listen and I hope to see the feature readded in a more complete state later.
Thanks!
I feel pretty disappointed at how quickly the community coalesced around using gender as a proxy for genitals - there was a lot of downplaying of the gender issues with this dropdown.
To be clear, if I upload a trans male character, can that character be tagged as male and placed in male categories? Or are users going to get mad at me that I'm putting a trans male character into the (quote unquote) "normal" male category? I feel really disappointed about how critique of this was structured and about how determined the community was to lean into a cisnormative view of gender and body presentation.
And I don't think that was all the criticism. But it was a lot of the criticism and it makes me feel worse about the community of furries on this website.
I tagged pieces as transgender and used the transgender categories even though they made me feel a little weird, because I convinced myself it was an issue of representation and pride, and I just don't believe that's true after seeing the broader community reaction.
My gender identity and the identity of my characters are not going to be somepony's shortcut for physical attributes. I'm just gonna tag characters like Max the Eevee as male, he's going in the male category - and if critters have a problem with that they can either learn how the tagging system works and block genitals, or they can make their transphobia explicit instead of just implied.
In a different political climate I might be more charitable, but the complete lack of real concern from critics of this change about the kind of environment they were reinforcing and the complete lack of understanding and downplaying about that effect - it makes me feel worse about the community here. And I think I'm coming around to the idea that accommodating that community is harmful to LGBTQ+ rights. I can't think of any comment section I've seen recently that did a better job of reinforcing "we will always see you as your body."
Not just that they want to hide genitals or see only specific kinds of relationships - that's fine - but the reinforcement of "no we will tie your body to your identity, and how dare you ask us not to do that?" Fuck that.
and like, for context--i'm someone who wasnt really affected by this. I've never used browse, i dont really post art yet, search always worked fine for me--even better after the recent blacklist feature. Yes i'm nonbinary, but i also try (fail) to avoid art with the genitals i have bc of dysphoria
this update, before this rollback, did not benefit me personally in the slightest--but hell was i happy to see it! How freeing and liberating to do away with these neat, ordered, insufficient boxes that forced people to choose something potentially inaccurate or nothing at all. How nice it would have been to those who were upset by some of those term labels to not have to see them, and those who have reclaimed those terms could still have used them as usual with no issue. Maybe it wasnt perfect, what with the site being a work in progress and all. Maybe it would have inconvenienced some users--but is that not worth the amount of joy and acceptance the community would have gained?
...are people's happiness and self expression not worth a minutia of perceived inconvenience?
as someone who doesnt post at this time, i am not affected by this rollback. In theory.
but i am...sad. I'm tired. I feel bad for the people who were trying to do a good thing here, and were shouted down for doing so
and more than anything else i am....disconcerted
One of the appealing things to me about the furry community is that I didn't have to wonder as much about whether when somepony uses my pronouns they're rolling their eyes secretly or something. I don't know, it's hard to put into words. But feeling like gender is a constant *presentation* is exhausting, and I liked being in a space where I didn't have to perform, and I still think the furry community is great, but I feel less confident now that I don't have to perform gender here.
I am super glad this is being done in a way that lets me keep using the browse function, while not undoing the progress made. It would be a step backwards to return to locking gender down to only what fits in a dropdown! I appreciate the hard work!
BUT again, the fact that the staff without prompting saw the dropdown and were like, "you know what, this is problematic" and recognized it as mildly problematic for all the right reasons - that has done a lot to increase my trust in your decisions going forward about how the tagging system will evolve. I get nervous about how tags centralize and how the systems evolve for exactly these reasons, and it means a lot to me that there's tangible evidence that the FA staff is thinking about these issues, and I just want the staff to know that. I am grateful for it, I trust the staff more now because of that. <3
To use my own browsing habits as an example: Browsing for the categories [Male, Transformation] *used* to show exclusively Male-related, Transformation-themed pieces. But if all the new system is doing is searching for the "Male" tag you added to everything with the change, it's now also not filtering out Female at the same time. "Male" is a very different tag than the "Male_only" that it previously functioned as. Not to mention all the synonym tags that you have no control over people using in the future.
I'm confused. When you searched male gender transformation, how were you filtering pieces where a characters starts male and transforms body types? Sex transformation is a really common transformation type in communities I'm a part of, do you expect us to just not use the male category for that?
Edit: Oh! Or I misunderstood you. I didn't. But also those were the minority because I would specifically use the Transformation category, not TGTF, so ignoring what I wasn't looking for was easy to ignore. Not the case if categories just being secretly tags is going to show all [Male] and [Male + Female] pieces.
Sometimes this is good -- if you want normal TFs featuring a male subject, maybe you aren't interested in also having TGTFs or multi-subject TFs mixed in to the same set.
But sometimes it's also a problem. For one, there's way too many Species options for "foxes", and because it's a dropdown with every option mutually exclusive, there's no one option to select that will match all of them as a group.
For example, if I search for the tag "male" then it gets everything with that tag regardless of other tags, sure, BUT if I want to search [b]exclusively[b] for the tag "male" then it will not only filter for that tag but it also (temporarily) blocks all non-"male" tags in the "gender" tag group.
I feel like I had very different experiences than other critters using the browsing tab on this site. Male category pieces could have female genders in them.
I agree, you seem to have had a very different experience with the system. And frankly, your reaction to other people not having that same experience in these comments has been extremely hostile in nearly every post I've seen.
I think it really misses the point of what the critique was, and assumes that the previous system was something that worked universally, and holds an alternative system to an unrealistic standard at the expense of marginalized communities. Yes, that makes me upset.
If the entire defense of this system is "it worked for me", then I don't understand why my response shouldn't be, "it didn't work for me."
Honestly, it really sounds like you're getting so hung up on the terminology (which I don't want to diminish, please don't get me wrong), that you're completely disregarding the actual functional blow this change made to the site. You've said yourself that splitting the Gender category into Gender and Sex would have made you happy, so advocate for that instead of defending nuking the Gender category entirely.
To flip this back around on you, if you understand why critters have a problem with the community reaction to improving the system, you could also advocate for an easy change (have a checkbox for penis and a checkbox for vagina) - a change that would not only avoid the entire problem, but would also address all of your problems with exclusivity between options.
Penis/vagina/null are pretty much the only genitals you're going to run into, so switching to tags and moving the community towards tagging genitals would address your problem of "but how do I search exclusively for just penises in my porn?". Unlike gender, if genital categories were standardized you would have at most 2 or 3 tags to exclude from searches. It would be a complete non-issue.
But you're not advocating for that, you're not submitting feature requests for that or suggesting it in threads. You've put less time into a constructive solution on this than I have. When it's explained why the terminology can be a problem and why using gender categories is an issue (especially rigid categories like what we had), your reaction isn't to advocate for a solution that would solve all of the problems, your reaction is to say, "but it worked for me, and whatever your improvement is needs to not inconvenience me."
Yes, that will cause me to have an emotional reaction, congratulations. Because it reveals something about how seriously (or rather, how not seriously) the community takes problems that affect transgender members.
But we're still talking about a really limited subset of tags - this is not something that would require a list of a dozen negative tags in every search, exclusive searches would be easy. The community would either standardize on a list of "high-level" genitals or would standardize on a low-level list of commonly searched genitals like "humanoid_penis"/"humanoid_vagina" and critters would filter on those tags.
I should mention again that the male/female categories as they existed previously also wouldn't filter out cloacas or ovipositors (or female penises or male vaginas). So we're already at the point where we're describing a system that works strictly better than the previous one.
A quirk of dropdown selection as opposed to tags is that every option in a dropdown is mutually exclusive with every other option. This can be good or bad depending on the use case, but in the case of gender filtering was almost universally a positive. Will that behavior be restored?
After that, any time a user wants to filter by a tag exclusively, the system must not only filter for that tag but also basically block all other tags in the same group.
A) splitting out the categories encourages critters not to tag gender.
B) the gender categories were not 100% effective, I don't know where critters are getting the idea that they were.
C) any norms that can be used to enforce categories can also be used to enforce tags. We never had category suggestions. They were always optional.
Community norms for tags are going to take a while to build, but where filtering is concerned, a tag based system is usually going to be a strict improvement over categories - it just is more flexible, we can argue that FA's tagging system is half-baked, but obviously a tagging system is going to eventually provide better filtering controls over categories, because it'll support more granularity.
And yeah, a lot of critters don't tag pieces - but again - there are no controls for enforcing that uploaders use categories that don't exist for tags. Whatever method existed for enforcing community standards for categories should work just as well for tags.
It’s not fair to toss these terms aside, because a minority of folks don’t like them. It’s like when you get queers get pissed when older queers use the word “fa**ot” (censored to not offend). It’s not yours to decide how someone identifies themselves!
Also literally where "for many years in the community?" I've only ever seen the H-word used that regularly by cis queers who love jerking it to the idea of TF-ing their genitalia, but refuse to respect actual trans and intersex people. And are either "uwu no pawlitics" or have rancid political opinions besides that.
Comparing this to reclaiming the words queer and the f-slur is extremely bad faith on your part, and proves that you don't deserve f-slur reclamation privileges. And it's not just you. A lot of self-righteous cis gays and enbies these days really should have f-slur reclamation privileges put on the top shelf until you learn to behave.
Y'all keep swearing up and down how callouts are necessary to improve ourselves, yet when someone makes a deserved callout against you, you snap back and tell them they're not being nice enough, when it's not your place to do so. Real sick of this shit.
"Herm" being off the future dropdown is due to the controversy and also partially us saying, "This is NOT every possible gender tag; just a few we figured people who filter via gender on Browse would want." People identify with problematic terms all the time and nobody really has a right to stop them, so we encourage them to tag their characters as they see fit because of it. However, having outdated terms people are uncomfortable seeing on the dropdown of "recognized" genders is...not great, either. Hence...why we're moving to keywords for gender.
We knew this would be controversial, and we agree that the first step was very imperfect, given the response. We're hoping that our new plan for step 1 as we overhaul the keyword and category system will satisfy more users than the original version did. We don't believe in doubling down on something for the sake of it IF an alternative can be done.
Not saying that critters shouldn't use a tag they identify with, but taking a hard look at "which genders are we going to include as the defaults, and does that list have the potential to cause harm with which terms we choose to present to every uploader."
Reclaiming slurs is great, I fully support that, but I don't think commonly used slurs should be the default options presented to new users. Critters who want to use that terminology to describe themselves should definitely have the ability to do so, and that's a big reason why a more flexible tagging system works so well for this kind of fuzzy identification. <3
i personally do NOT like to be boxed into "trans male" even though i am a trans male. i like to just consider myself male. so i just dont participate at all due to it :x
I now know, much more clearly, that if Max the Eevee shows up in a male category, there are users on this site who will be offended about that.
I'm not trying to expose anypony to anything they don't want to see, but.. fuck, that is just such a bad feeling to have, particularly given the current political climate around trans rights both in the US and the UK. I used to be able to say that only e621 was doing that bullshit, and now I know that a large portion of the community on FA sees me the same way that the e621 staff does - that my identity is "lore", and that my "real" identity is what's in my pants.
If it helps, I tag my trans male characters with "trans" and "male" among other tags. So, they will appear when someone adds "male" as a keyword.
I think the issue in general is if we want to go for purely a tag-based system there needs to be standardized tags, community tagging, and a minimum tagging requirement. I know not everyone will be happy with that, but it is a necessity when it comes to searching for art.
There were problems with this rollout. But there was a lot of transphobia in the response to this rollout.
I feel like I unwittingly supported their argument. I don't. I support my trans/nonbinary homies.
This is a tricky position because there are extremely real concerns that critters can have, and in a different situation I might be responding differently. I'm not upset about any of the real concerns that critters have - they should be addressed and we should do what we can to make critters feel safe. It's the same way where like.. some of the community reaction I saw gets in the way of more constructive conversations like "how do we keep critters safe who don't want to see specific genitals, or who want to be able to search for relationships and pieces that are affirming to their orientations (not necessarily the same thing, but both real concerns)."
And that fucking sucks, and I'm sorry about it. I think the transphobia gets in the way of addressing some of these real concerns - I want it to be easier to filter genitals on FA: part of my criticism of the old system is that without othering trans critters, I don't think it does a good job of that, and I want a system that more reliably handles that filtering.
Personally, so long as I can filter by genital type, and folks don't feel pushed aside or other'd, I'll be happy.
This. Shades of e621's bullshit about "the 'gender (lore)' tag should only be used for transgender characters, not cisgender characters."
Just come out and tell us that you think we're not really our genders.
I'm just happy they have them now so the endless discussions in tag histories about what gender a pic should be tagged as is at least now solved.
I would say they should indeed expand the lore tags to not just apply to trans people but to all genders and while we are at it, include sexualities too so i can actually find orientation play of lesbian characters without having to add a bunch of tags to exclude gay men when looking for gay-to-straight orientation play content.
I'm not going to get into an e621 argument (I have enough critters mad at me already lol), but I don't think e621 has ever actually been Tag What You See - I think that's an excuse the site uses to avoid criticism. But the site has always had exceptions to that rule forever, it just treats TWYS as something immutable when it is convenient to do so.
I think if e621 was TWYS, gender wouldn't exist outside of the "lore" tags at all. Gender isn't visible. But even ignoring gender, if e621 was TWYS, policies like "text can imply digestion in vore" would be different. Implied reformation wouldn't exist. Character tags would work differently. There wouldn't be a humor or a politics tag.
I think e621 should admit what everypony already knows - that their tagging system is just as subjective as every single other website and tag what you see is just a way for them to avoid asking more difficult tagging questions that other sites handle by engaging with communities and coming up with constructive solutions.
I agree with you that (at the very least), lore should be expanded. Seeing how they handled that has been a big influence in shaping my opinion of the site. If e621 was genuinely making an effort to separate "lore" from other tags I would give the site more credit, but it's very difficult for me to treat the site like it's operating in good faith when they made the "lore" category, stuck specifically transgender tags and incest tags into it and nothing else, and then have left it that way ever since, and added specific deliberate policies that cisgender characters shouldn't have lore tags added for their genders. I just don't think those are the actions of a site that actually cares about building a tagging system, I think those are the actions of a site that wants to put transgender characters into their own special category so they can continue misgendering them.
With how much I criticize that system, it's very very weirdly ironic that the solutions I've pushed for (having gender be a completely optional tag, and instead relying purely on physical tags like genitals or descriptors like "buff") are more TWYS than e621 is.
But it's like you say, the system could be expanded to be more consistent and to feel less like a complete afterthought, and I'd be more likely to assume good will from e621's tag moderators if I saw that happening.
E621 does try to engage with the community to decide on things for tags, it's just that the discussion ends up a huge mess everytime. I remember when they removed the "filth" tag. It was done after like 9 forum pages of discussion and spawned another 15 pages of forum discussion after they did it, and that isnt even a controversial tag or anything, it was an incredibly messy (hehe) tag with lots of mistagged things in there and a lot of overlap with other related tags already, it made sense to remove.
I wasnt there for the discussion about the lore tags for gender and stuff so i dunno how exactly it went, but it probably did not go great and that is how we ended up with a halfbaked system for it that kinda works but is far from ideal
Being really clear here: I don't think the majority of furries agree with those movements. I think even the critters saying "what's the big deal" would most mostly call that shit what it is: transphobic nonsense. So this is not me saying that everypony that says "what's the big deal about having a separate trans category" is transphobic.
BUT, it is a problem if we're having a debate about language that lines up almost identically with the debate the transphobes in the real world are having. That should give us pause.
When "male" and "female" are used both as broad gender categories, and are split up by very specific physical features, we can expect that critters will start to confuse the broad categories and the specific splits. That would be less of a big deal, except for.. *gestures defeatedly at the world*
It's not that surprising that trans critters are more sensitive about this issue right now. This is a community that is being constantly told on a daily basis by a significant portion of the country that they don't exist. For a good chunk of them, being able to come into furry spaces and just have a place where they can escape from that even for a little while is really valuable; so of course they bristle when gender tags get brought up, or if critters shrug and say "what's the big deal, it's just words."
I can't begin to describe how freeing it felt to me when I got into furry spaces and I was able to just.. not have a gender. It felt so good to not have that bullshit over me. And I know I'm not the only furry with that perspective, I know I'm not the only furry who loves that identity in the furry fandom does not need to be a performance: that we don't need to prove who we are. The debates about the language (and I'm sure this is unintentional from the critters bringing up) open wounds for critters. You have to understand that these are not just words for a lot of trans critters, they are representative of a world that is actively hostile to their existence.
I can get the pain points from the people who were utilizing it, but if the majority are solely using it for genital/body searching we may as well just change it to 'body type' and be done with it for now until a better system is in place and it's ready to be removed again. Least then it's more clear. At least in some cases. There will always be grey areas.
I have yet to hear why that wouldn't address almost every (legitimate) concern aside from the transphobic ones.
There was valid criticism (poor communication and the update was botched and unfinished) but several of the comments I saw where... not savory in the slightest. Honestly made me lose some respect for several users here, and the community entirely.
That said, they did state they are going to be reimplementing the change in a better and more finished way later, I believe.
Pushing back on cisnormative and harmful language has nothing to do with forcing critters to see stuff they don't want to see. But the primary way I'm going to manage this moving forward is genitalia. If critters are going to use gender on its own to try and filter out transgender characters, then their filters aren't going to work on my stuff. I'm done with accommodating that nonsense.
On the other paw, if you use genitals as a filter, my work is already being consistently tagged. Again, let me know if you ever find a piece in my gallery that isn't properly tagged; it's possible for me to miss things, but I do put a lot of work into this - far more than many other artists do.
I really hope that in the next updates there will be something that will help to promote many artists
i think that part is important, bc it would be really easy for people to abuse keyword suggestions to harass people
It's still in a more "design" phase, but one of the options the team is looking at is Community Tagging.
We're nowhere near a solution, as many MANY steps have to be made before we reach that point, but it is an option on the table for when we reach that point, amongst a few.
And obviously, the implementation will need careful testing and consideration whatever option we choose, so that will likely slow down rollout a bit.
But it's a concern that we have for the long-term.
I hope this satisfies your curiosity! :3
Speaking of which, another option could be having textboxes on the upload page. Things like species, gender, etc. that are open to any type of input. Then those inputs get automatically converted to tags. That way, no one feels left out, artists are prompted to at least keyword the basics, and FA gets its all-keyword system. Everybody wins.
A roll back means the whole update is undone, not part of it.
This "bandage solution" you speak of is a good compromise and a good foundation for slowly transitioning to the aforementioned tag system in the future. If anything, it's a step forward in multiple ways. The guts of the site will simply behave slightly differently + the search is getting an upgrade
Won't approve of...a system that is widely present on other gallery sites....sure...
Preventing FA from implementing tagging is pushing back all effort that has happened past 9-ish months, which was put into improving the site, and setting the grounds for a QoL feature that people asked for for over a decade....I don't know how effective that console of yours will be, but the matter of fact is that people who use this site want this change, regardless if the path is rocky.
I'd wait until they roll-out this update and then make an opinion on it. From the sound of it, it should work as before with some added flexibility to search, and being more intertwined with keywords.
Thank you for listening to us.
A big reason that this change was a problem in the first place is that the tagging system is still extremely basic - it's missing things like a tag library (so people can use consistent tags for a thing, instead of a half dozen synonyms), suggested tags (autocomplete when typing), and a proper limit for tagging (if there's any limit to tags, which there realistically shouldn't be, it certainly should NOT be a character limit; that makes no sense).
I would recommend spending a lot of development time creating a full-featured tagging system and then rolling it out all at once; it's these half steps during the work-in-progress stage that are upsetting people
So taking the time to do it once, and proper, is more preferred.
Tags solve all of these problems, and the only gripe I have with tags is there isn't any aliasing or autocomplete for them yet. I saw people throwing tantrums and removing the tags that had been added to their uploads as replacements for the gender field, among other things, which tells me a lot of the opposition towards the change was overblown and deeply unserious.
Either way, though, thank you for the work you do. I just wish people here would give changes more than a day before screaming bloody murder.
Edit: Ah, so it still uses tags behind the scenes. I should have tempered my disappointment and actually read the announcement in full. Still feels like a messy compromise, but what can you do.
Tags DEFINITELY introduce new problems, though, such as cases where you might want two options to be presumed mutually exclusive.
Plainly spoken the removal from 'browse' baffled me quite a lot.
I would actually want to see the 'Browse' page improved through allowing keyword search, implementation and exclusion of that and broad category choices. Optimally with a text input field for search as well.
More options to reach the same goal is generally a more user-friendly way to handle things.
I personally use both and see both sides. Tags are great and will make things far more searchable, I can't wait. But also casually browsing and being able to filter that down is also a big use for me, and something that makes this site unique! So having the ability to use categories with search is huge, as is being able to tag/exclude tags from browse is also a fantastic change!
Thank you so much for listening to feedback, I think with the next update it will all be better then before and address everyone's concerns!
Adding the ability to select more than one and thus removing the basically useless 'multiple characters' option would be good too.
THIS, honestly!
But their plans for tagging in the future sound even better tbh. I really look forwards to the future system.
The problem was that the function got removed without anything to replace it, which is like removing the light bulb in a room without having a replacement. This way it's both making it more convenient but also easier to understand. It's an improvement!
As artists (and writers, musicians, any kind of content creator) we tend to believe things should center around ourselves as we are the ones that provide content, but we're nothing without the people to watch, fav and share our work. :) Happy to be a FA+!
I think if that tagging system just got more importance, was easier to use, and people learned/forced to tag properly maybe then stuff like the original proposed change would've landed better.
People though need to not be assholes about stuff like this though, both users AND staff, obviously.
Overall, it's greatly appreciated, and I really hope that you don't fumble an execution of an update this badly ever again. Communication is key, and it also helps to have the replacement system ready to go before you cut any core features of the website.
Hopefully at least things like "herm" will be gone from the list tho
There is literally no correct solution where people are happy xD
It’s complicated.
And before anyone brings it up, there absolutely is a difference between Hermaphrodite and Intersex.
This has to do with one single thing: you wanting to dictate how other people are allowed to depict themselves.
You are literally doing the exact same thing as transphobes who deliberately misgender people or call them by their deadnames.
If I decide that I identify as something you don't like, you don't get to change my identity to suit your wants.
YOU are the problem, not the people who identify as a herm.
This has nothing to do with them calling you a particular thing. It's about them having the option to call THEMSELVES that, and you're upset that they want the OPTION to exist!
There's nothing Social Justice about this, you just want people to not have a choice to DECIDE FOR THEMSELVES WHO THEY ARE.
This is one hundred percent you trying to control how other people identity themselves.
I'm... confused why you're making this assumption. o.o I'm not uspet at other trans and intersex ppl using these words, friend. Like, in the same way ppl who aren't queer cannot make characters who are queer and then reclaim anti-queer slurs, a white dude can't make an ethnic minority character and refer to them as slurs. Do u get me? ;×;
You are also refusing to acknowledge that this isn't about people being bigots, it's about them wanting to have an option, and you are offended that the option exists.
I'm not bothered that you don't like using the option. I'm bothered that you want the option taken away entirely. It's not your decision to make whether or not someone else should have the right to use said option.
You do you, but do NOT expect me to also do you.
edit: oooh. i see. carry on.
I don't understand how some people get through life if they spend this much free time arguing about trivial shit that really doesn't effect them directly at all.
I don't refer to my herm characters as intersex because the specific case of hermaphroditism - having functional male and female parts - applies to them. Heck, they're even capable of self-procreation, but that happens off-screen. Intersex doesn't quite imply that. Again, furries are inherently fantasy/sci-fi, and in fantasy, I can do whatever the yiff I want.
So yeah, I don't let it affect me - I own it - but I do advise that you be careful lest someone a bit more sensitive/prudish/dare I say puritanical get upset. Then again, you can't please everyone.
But hey, let's add "futa", "dick girl" and "shemale" up there too then. After all there are some people who identify with those terms.
Weird how people who claim to be the most accepting and inclusive of others are the ones who are most trying to dictate what forms of self expression and labels people are allowed to use in fantasy for their own fantasy characters!
(Until a proper tag system is in place I mean).
It would be nice to have a dropdown for sexuality so we can organize our stuff as straight, gay, lesbian, etc would be cool.
The comments in the previous journal made it clear it's what people were using it for anyway, gays looking up their stuff, straight looking up theirs
I mean I'm glad they switched things up when a percentage of folks were upset but I saw just as many people shrugging at it going "whatever give [X] feature instead" lol
Eh.
I guess whatever makes people feel better at the end of the day.
ultimately i still think gender usage at all is silly imo (i get *why* though, trust me), for tagging. it really *should* just be genitals. its way easier that way, but! i am deep in my bubble of breaking down cishet ideals, and it was (but shouldnt of been) surprising to learn a lot of people still arent
at the end of the day it is still nice to see FA rework the tagging system and modernize it to a much more sensible form of tagging and searching :3
my art gets finished and then gets uploaded much much later, i would forget by then! so no. i dont feel it fair to just and argue wtih me about this when you arent working MY job specfically or and arent me and dont know how i operate. its much easier to just... not tag a gender. so i dont. i tag genitals and other content in the images, but not genders, cus i dont know them
It does make things a little bit more complicated for me (I have to make decisions about when to use "them", or only refer by name, etc..) - but ultimately my job as an artist is partially to make clients feel comfortable and safe around me, and if they don't want to commit to a gender or a set of pronouns (which are not necessarily the same thing) - I'm willing to accommodate that.
It sounds weird, and it surprised me too, but it's far more common than I expected. Just my own anecdotal experience with offering commissions. I have some theories why, as a nonbinary/agender/otherkin/thingimabob I understand the appeal of "I don't want to *be* gendered." But I don't actually know what the reason is for sure and I think it would be rude for me to ask.
I understand the genitals concern and the concerns in mature pieces, but being able to see multiple genders in SFW contexts and to deal with it is a prerequisite for living in the world. Is it really important that SFW pieces have dedicated categories for men and women?
But people on the internet, especially those chronically online, need something to be mad at. Maybe being upset at stuff like this helps them ignore the trash fires outside politically. Who knows!
so ultimately i think more moving towards tagging being the main system for searching as an ultimate + from FA cus ppl can operate better the way they want to :3
But the issue isn't so simple as that. Obvious you mentioned not tagging fully in regards to SFW earlier but as you know there are tons of people that don't accurately tag or make any attempt to tag NSFW content too. In both cases people wanting tagging to be as accurate as possible are absolutely valid to want that. It's certainly not a big issue if I come across SFW of female characters for instance, but just because it may not be an issue doesn't mean that's a valid reason to choose not to take stuff for the sake of improving search quality and the site experience of other users.
You also said you would find it weird to be asking your clients the gender of their characters but I just can't agree with that. I'm speaking from my own experiences obviously but I've never had an issue with an artist wanting to know how to identify my character nor have I ever seen friends have that issue. And if you were truly just uncomfortable with asking there still would be the fact you can probably more often than not find that in a bio or on a ref sheet regardless.
I'm coming at this from the perspective of somepony who *did* tag transgender characters because I believed it was being used for discovery and description. And what I'm realizing is that a large portion of the community wasn't using the tags that way. Tagging systems don't exist separately from the communities that use them, and particularly in the current political climate, seeing how critters are using and interpreting tags is absolutely going to influence which tags I add.
I'd also say that in order to have accurate tags, we have to understand what a tag means. And saying "what physically does a male look like" is a complicated question that can very easily stray into transphobic or sexist areas. It doesn't mean everypony who's trying to answer that question is transphobic or sexist, but I can't pretend that the overall debate doesn't have some problematic vibes.
If you're looking for references for a *male* canine anthro and a trans-masc anthro that hasn't physically transitioned comes up, is that incorrect to have in that category? How do we make your search more accurate without putting an asterisc next to that critters gender or othering them? I would argue that the way to make that search more accurate without the problematic elements is for the community to use terminology specifically related to physical attributes, not gender.
If you're searching for a ref, "masculine" might be a better term for us to have as a community standardized tag instead of "male". Or "buff". Or "femboy", or any number of other more specific terms than one that is frequently used interchangeably with gender and physical characteristics. These are all decisions we could make as a community, we don't need to standardize on the tag that is being actively used in comments right now in a cisnormative way.
Or at the very least, we don't need to try and enforce that tag as a physical category or require its usage. If critters want to tag their work with their genders, I'm all for it. But if a tag is irrelevant to a piece, (and gender is irrelevant to many SFW pieces) - if a critter doesn't want to add it, then great. There are other ways we can approach that problem if we're designing a tagging system.
My takeaway from the comment sections under this post and the last post is that a substantial portion of the furry community isn't using male/female correctly - they're using them as a proxy for "penis" or "vagina."
And the backlash I see about these changes (to me) shows an unwillingness from the community to correct or evolve that usage if it in any way inconveniences them. That's a harsh thing to say, and I understand it has a negative tone - I don't know how to word it with a positive tone. It's genuinely a harsh critique of the community.
I don't think there's a way to have this conversation without having an open and earnest look at how we internalize body types and the way that we tie gender to physical attributes. I don't want to be mean or harsh about that conversation, but there's no nice way to say that people are using tags in a cisnormative way. I don't know the nice way for me to say that people haven't thought through the problematic aspects of using a category in that way. I don't know the nice way to express how harmful or hurtful it is when somepony shrugs and says (even very innocently or very politely) "well, but it worked most of the time, right?"
Having a deep conversation about any of these issues (and having an honest conversation about how this can impact trans communities) isn't possible without examining some topics that are going to be painful to examine. I'm not trying to start arguments, but I don't want to pretend that those harmful aspects of the debate don't exist.
And ultimately it really does to me boil down to - either somepony is going to use gender as a proxy for physical appearance, or they're not. Either they understand why it can be hurtful to do that, or they don't. And any conversation about tagging standards or what words we use has to start from an understanding of the impact of those words, or else it's not an open and earnest conversation that's actually addressing the problems.
I'm not trying to get rid of tags or force anything on anypony - I am reacting emotionally to a bunch of critters very politely telling me (and I'm sure they do not consciously mean to phrase it this way) that my gender expression is abnormal if it isn't matched to a physical expression.
Thanks for trying to promote people tagging their work, even though you had to change your initial plan I think this one works out better. So some progress did come out of the change you made!
I get the impulse to migrate to move away from backend-clunky legacy features, but they shouldn't be removed until after newer stuff has made them 100% redundant. And tags are nowhere near close enough to doing that, especially not the "show this and only this" filtering a lot of people relied on the dropdowns for.
And hopefully you remembered the most important step of the rollback (and why nothing less was acceptable): restoring the lost "other", "any", "multiple characters", etc. labels that you erased from submissions en masse.
And if it is just acting as a curated tag list as I asked about above, you still haven't solved the problem of synonym tags, that weren't a problem with how the dropdown worked previously.
The only difference will be if people don't tag new uploads as "Male" - either manually with a tag, or with the dropdown category we're bringing back which will add that tag automatically when selected. This is, of course, the same problem one would have if someone didn't use the dropdown in the original system, making it a problem that persists and not a new one.
Previously, selecting "Male" from the dropdown was effectively (from the user perspective) doing a search for "male_only". Will this still be the case, or if a piece is tagged with both "Male" and "Female" for multiple characters, will that show up too now?
I'm not saying this negatively, but it does kind of come across as a solution looking for a non-existant problem. If instead, the new gender identity thing was a supplemental feature that is optional, meant to facilitate gender expression for those that wish to more tailored to themselves, rather than replacing what is/was already there, there'd have been little to no backlash over the announcement coming after implementation.
Instead, there's a backlash that is quite warranted. Some of the comments, not so much, but can't be helped due to how it was presented.
For my part, I'm done with this stupid game. Gender is not genitals, period. If I upload a trans male character, they're going in the male category. I will also tag their genitals, and critters who want to avoid those genitals can learn how the tag blocklist works, or they can deal.
But if the perspective here is that critters expect me to add an caveat to every time I specify a characters gender so that they can put in literally zero effort to understand transgender concerns or build an environment that makes transgender floofs feel welcome - that is not a perspective that I care about. The entire point of this is that there are cisnormative externalities to using gender as a proxy for body type, and your response to that is to shrug and say, "but it makes things more convenient for me."
Like I don't want to be mean about it, but this is the exact kind of comment that I'm talking about. I want to be part of a community that does care about this stuff. I want to be a part of a community that does think about how things like this impact the real world. I want critters to put in the same amount of effort that I do as an artist to try and keep each other safe and welcome. And if gender categories aren't going to be a part of that, and they're going to be explicitly used as genital filters, then fuck that, I refuse.
Cool, so if we had separate "Sex" and "Gender Identity" fields would you be happy? Would that get you to stop attacking everyone who's user experience on this site was harmed by the unannounced change, and is just trying to get what has been basic functionality for the last 20 years back?
Having just a Gender category was suboptimal, yes. But it's what we had. And replacing it with literally nothing was the worst possible move.
"vagina" doesn't work?
I mean, whatever you want to use, you can use. But I'm not playing this game, I'm tagging my male characters as male and my female characters as female regardless of whether or not they're trans. I'm tired of explaining why cisnormative standards are problematic.
"If you search "Male" now, you will get everything tagged as "Male"
Does this mean everything containing the "male" gender tag will be shown when using browse, even if other gender tags are listed with the content? Because if so, that sounds like it will still result in people seeing undesired content.
Actual animals should be at the top instead it starts with "Airborne Vehicle" and a buncha fantasy nonsense.
I've seen so many untagged pics that did use the dropdowns, but the dropdowns aren't blacklistable so I'd still see art I did not wish to see, adding those as tags would improve functionality of the site and the blacklist
Bonus: all those options would become standardized tags that most of us crave
I also do like being able to search by text in titles and descriptions still alongside tags.
You're gonna catch flak from lazy people and those terrified of change, but keep going anyway.
In regards to community tagging, I'm not against it but it should require uploader approval. Because people do engage in malicious tagging of others' artwork. This would allow those only willing to put in minimum tags effort in to outsource tagging, while minimizing the *flashbacks to e621 moderation fights with malicious tagging users*
It was years ago, mind you... So it might have been reworked since then. I don't know.
meanwhile I'll be over here enjoying stuff for the artistic merit and style
EDIT: I'm agreeing with you, if that wasn't clear.
that said, this is a step in the right direction and i hope to see the feature reimplemented properly later on.
Also when are we getting a user filter in the search, that basic feature has been missing this whole time from basically only this site.
Getting rid of the dropdown menu and using tags in general also made the UI simpler. Websites like e621, Weasyl, Inkybunny, so on and so forth have had no issue with tags and you can restrict tags in the FA search anyways.
All in all I feel like it was people just not liking change. People need to accept that change is needed and things need to be updated. There's much bigger issues like fixing the blocking system and being able to completely filter out tags you don't like instead of seeing blurry images all over the front page of FA.
Having more options is not a bad thing, removing something that is usable for the sake of neatness however is. If I don't want to use keywords or tags when I upload a piece I've commissioned then I should have the option to use the dropdown menus instead. Change can't be forced, it has to be accepted and progressive. Not sudden and dramatic.
I'll have to disagree because the "over usage" of tags is fine to me because it allows me to curate the content I want to see. I don't like E621 because they upload art there without the artists permission but if I'm looking for a very specific pose for a commission, e621 is the best place to go find stuff like that.
People really should tag things, especially fetishes because FA should be a place where everyone can feel safe and enjoy what they like and remove what they don't.
Even though it is a perfectly normal and alright term to use for certain characters?
How about from now on you make polls about changes / removals / additions, just to see what the MAJORITY of the community wants?
Oh right, most would vote against bad ideas that you want to enforce because of a minority.
Aaaaand polls/democracy don't override people's rights to basic human dignity and decency.
Intersex interest groups don't want or like it because they associate derogatory experiences with it. Which is to say, they want to change your language so that they don't have to.
Dignity and decency have nothing to do with that. At. All!
As per wikipedia:
"Hermaphrodism is not to be confused with ovotesticular syndrome in mammals, which is a separate and unrelated phenomenon. While people with the condition were previously called "true hermaphrodites" in medical literature, this usage is now considered to be outdated as of 2006 and misleading,[7][8] as people with ovotesticular syndrome do not have functional sets of both male and female organs.[9][10]"
Further reading, be sure to check the works cited:
https://isna.org/faq/hermaphrodite/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermaphrodite
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
In other words, I wholely reject your argument. I hear it, understand it, but I reject it none the less.
Labeling people hermaphrodites did not end with their bodies, but would gay men would be labeled as "psychic hermaphrodites" in an effort to stigmatize even cis gay men, for examlple. To the Powers That Be at the time, since sex and gender were so tightly intertwined, it was a tool to remove any hint of nonconformity to heteronormativity, especially if the target leaned towards femininity or womanhood.
To spare you a further diatribe: no, it absolutely does carry a centuries-old stigma, one that meets at the crossroads of gender, sexuality, human biology, among others. I encourage you to do some more research on the subject. I know it's not easy to break old habits. I've been there- I practically grew up on SL and furry spaces where the term was very much used and had to grow out of it myself. It's also not a matter of policing your speech/self-ID, because while individuals may be free to self-ID as per their wishes, that is very different from a hub website codifying it.
Here's some more resources:
https://isna.org/faq/history/
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/.....ersexsocietyo/
I'll give you credit though, you're a lot more respectful and sensible than some others who have replied.
I've done my research, extensively at that. But I stand by what I said, regardless of how negative it appears to others. That's a concious choice I've made and I'm sticking to it.
Even after the scientific concensus has shifted away from the slur--average people have not. I have had that slur used against me as a child by my peers and even adults. Find another term or just call your characters what they are: intersex. Unless they can self-fertilize, they are not hermaphrodites and that is a scientific fact.
I have Scizophrenia. Do you know the "cure" for it was back in the 50s? Lobotomization.
There's treatments and medication now. Society as a whole learns with much time spent doing immoral things before change starts happening.
So saying I use a word for selfish and callous reasons is discriminating, under the guise of not want to be discriminated against.
You can play the victim all you want, say what you want about whatever, I'm not going to enable a victim into changing my language because of the bad experiences they've had.
People asking you to not use harmful language is absolutely not discrimination. Arguing so is extremely bad-faith and intellectually dishonest.
Please try to apply this logic to other historic situations: was advocating for the end of segregation really "discrimination against whites?" Absolutely not, and to say so would be absurd. Repealing homophobic laws and pushing homophobia out of vogue was/is not "discrimination against straights." And intersex/gnc folks asking you to not flippantly use known harmful terms is not discrimination against a furry porn connoisseur.
Not necessarily aimed at me, because I'm fine with not being able to hold an intelligent discussion steeped in respect and comprehension. What I said privately is context as to why I'm not bending the knee on this particular issue.
If there's only whining and discrimination confronting me, then there is no incentive for me to reconsider my world view.
What I'm saying is, you're fine. Those that call me a racist, a bigot, and all sorts of disgusting things is who I'm standing up against. It's not because MY language has words that other people see as derogatory slurs in it that I have to be the target of reverse bigotry.
Racism isn't only aimed at blacks by whites, goes both ways. It's just that some forms are more visible than others.
Discrimination is indiscriminate.
Lastly, was there a necessity to lobotomize psychiatric patients with mental health conditions/disorders? Hell no! But it was done none the less because society's morals hadn't deemed otherwise at the time. Why was World War II a thing? I don't think I need to say anything on that subject, as you hopefully understand where I'm coming from.
Would I think of myself a furry if medicine hadn't moved passed lobotomization? No. I'd be a vegetable in a hole somewhere, robbed of any personality I may once had. So, while I understand that hermaphrodite is considered a slur nowadays, the way that message is being delivered at large doesn't really promote a change in attitude or perspective, either in me or parts of the general public.
But heaven forbid you have to treat them like people while objectifying an exaggerated version of them to get off.
You can tell someone that you don't like a word they use, but you can't force them to not use it. With or without supporting arguments is irrelevant.
I've already submitted a ticket for verbal abuse with the messages made on this journal.
And I said "by my side" as I felt a kindred spirit in you. ;3
And I have Schizophrenia, so I'm used to voices other than my own constantly gaslighting me into a desired reaction. XD
They always fail, and it speaks to me a lot more about them than they would like to reveal. Because I'm incapable of hating any one person. I'll hate behaviors, but not people.
Side note, behaviors don't make people. People create behaviors.
What makes me honestly sad for people that are so hung up on specific negative words is that they haven't come to the realization that it isn't the word itself that is the problem, but the intent, emotion, and often times hostility behind it all. You can change what words are used but the problem remains.
Guess the Star Trek utopia is not for this humanity.
Oh you have ADHD, I'm so sorry, If only there was medication to help...Oh wait there is. Since you want to continue, lets. I had to spend years in spec-ed classes and also had to take speech therapy for 3rd to 5th grade because I couldn't talk like a normal child. After that I was removed from the spec-ed class and be with the "normal" students under the condition of only if the class had a spec-ed assistant in said classroom to even try to feel normal. There is no medication to help with all my issues which is fun.
So excuse me if I don't share the same opinion as you and don't find words offensive like you. I have more important things to worry about in life than "Oh no mean word being used"
And that the whole point was to address the fact that the word that was originally the subject of discussion was harmful in that context in the first place, whether or not anyone was trying to reclaim it.
But you skipped right past the point and enabled a far right asshole who just wants to jack off to f******i porn without having to acknowledge or respect intersex people and the history of their mistreatment by THIS VERY OWN COMMUNITY.
The online porn art space has a long history of objectifying and mistreating intersex people and those trying to reclaim the term are currently outliers. So if someone wants to self identify as that or reclaim that term, power to them. But its still a slur that the broader intersex community has loudly and continuously rejected. That has been used to exclude and dehumanize intersex people.
It is a term that has been historically used to enable and justify every atrocity imaginable. That is STILL used by people in what is supposed to be an inclusive community to objectify people. All while intersex people are still the targets of medical violence and social exclusion irl.
The person you jumped in to back up isn't trying to defend reclaimed slurs, they are trying to defend using slurs as someone with no right nor reason to reclaim them. Using every single excuse that the far right has used to justify exactly that behavior since 201X. Because removing that slur has made it harder to easily find that objectifying content.
And they aren't the only one. There are a LOT of people right now who still do not respect the intersex community or trans identity losing their minds over this change and putting their bigotry on full display. And you somehow decided someone trying to address that was a worse bigot.....for not personally sharing in you reclamation of what is objectively a slur.
We aren't going to see eye-to-eye on that word because of my own experiences but if you're that easy to recruit by far right weirdos you need to sort out your priorities.
Herm is NOT a real thing in humans everyone is right. But these are furries. Theyre not real, this is fantasy. Characters who HAVE BOTH FUNCTIONING SETS OF SEX ORGANS for FANTASY WORLDS in a FANTASY SETTING should not have to abide by real life medical terms. My best friend's characters who were born as try hermaphrodites in their own world and story are not the same thing as actual intersex people. Them existing does not hurt intersex or trans peopkr because the characters aren't those things. They are fantasy herms in a fantasy world and I am honestly so shocked the furry community cannot get their heads out of their dictionaries to be okay eith someone's fantasy creatures having a term that isn't related to the real life issues at all.
Fantasy creations are a way to express oneself, and thus judging them through real world perceptions grossely insensitive and disrespectful. To go a step further and say that one thing shouldn't be part of any community is downright discrimination.
If I started using any other slur to refer to fictional species it would still be an offensive slur.
Especially if that fictional species was an objectifying exaggeration of people to whom that term refers and trans people.
Because there's an ENTIRE history of how the trans and intersex community have been mistreated by communities using that term by reducing them to parody sex objects while still supporting bigotry against them. Allowing them to exist in a sick parody in porn, while supporting violence and suffering against them irl.
Then please red the definition of acceptance, inclusion, and discrimination. Thank you.
It's a term that has been used to dehumanize and commit violence against people up to an including genital mutilation, and is a slur as such.
You sound like the average white racist getting upset when told you can't say the N word.
It's the same exact excuses of fear mongering about how some oppressed minority is trying to control us by asking the bare fucking minimum of respect.
And it's just bigotry. You're bigots. And your bigotry has no place in the furry community.
just like its my right to call myself and my community queer
This is an issue of a long history of porn communities objectifying, mislabeling, and belittling intersex people and communities. And a broad call from intersex communities to remove that term and others as the default.
There's nothing wrong with me labeling myself as queer, but if straight people decided to start a whole genre of fictional porn and labeled it "the queers" while simultaneously disrespecting my community it would be an issue. And that's the kind of issue the intersex community is dealing with.
This is honestly how the change should've been implemented really, the drop-down are good for a standardised tags to the lists and leaving the rest to users refining the tags where the drop-downs are lacking. Which is how a chunk of us were having to deal with it for when we didn't fit neatly in to the gender drop down anyway... :V
That said, this is the level of change you should've announced first, then implemented a week or so later, not implement first, then announce.
Make up your mind in either direction, as long as you remove the fucking trans fetishising slurs
Y'all have no right to wave the trans pride flag on bsky and play allies when you're actively allowing and encouraging the usage of terms that fetishises and objectifies us.
I get what you mean to say, but isn't there a better way for yout to express it?
I'm a woman, and I loathe the 'cis' label being put in front of it, when I don't identify with it. I didn't ask for it, but people feel the need to add it to the term female forcibly anyway.
But, y'know, whatever! I'm not gonna let other people ruin my day over it. If you don't like the tags that you say are slurs, then just put them on your block list, and don't click on any pictures that are blurred out. That's the whole point of the block list, is so that you don't hafta see tags you dont like.
Regardless, I dont appreciate your blatant attempt at trying to accuse me of being something I’m not (and good luck telling me Im a transphobe when I have trans OCs, and trans friends and family that I love).
I don't see what everyone seems to be getting their panties in a twist over.
What you had, worked. Don’t fix what ain’t broken, as they say! Just go back to how it was! There was little need to change!
Was worried that there was gonna be a "doubling down" scenario which it looked like it was going for a while.
Still VERY much appreciated that you'll be reverting the change! I only suggest that maybe get the community feedback first on ideas you folks might have for site changes? Like taking suggestions on what folks would like to see!
I'm very happy to hear this. I always wondered why those options weren't available on the search page. Go FA team!
I mean, if I upload a commission sheet to announce that I'm looking for work, but because I don't have nearly as much material to showcase in my gallery as others might, meaning that unless I abuse tags and keywords in order to be noticed, I'm SoL and no one will take a look at what I do.
Essentially, I'm asking if there's going to be a dedicated section/set of keywords/tags for YCHs and adopts, reminders, etc under the unified search & browse feature? Because to me, I don't think both are equal or at parity with the other in terms of discovery for those that don't submit creative work very often.
I feel like I'd be at a disadvantage under this Search & Browse paradigm since I'd like to be able to post what I write and receive comments about a story or another, but I never do because I don't abuse tags / keywords, or upload at a time of day that has low enough traffic that I'll have at least one or two people give a passing favorite.
In short, I don't feel like there's any incentive for me to upload some of my work due to the lack of interaction / engagement with what I decide to share. I feel left out, and that I'm faced with a brick wall of invisibility. Primarily because I don't post regularly, which means I won't be seen by anyone, leaving me not wanting to even try, etc. Hence, as a novice artist, I feel shafted and somewhat unwelcomed because, despite my account's date of creation, I only recently started my creative writing. Not having a "small time artist" section is a deterrent for someone like me to want to continue being an art creator.
Trust me, I fell for ya, person I don't know. Sometimes you have to put your nose to the grain stone to hope for the best.
Filtering for "Male" needs show only male-centric pieces as it did before, not every piece with the "Male" tag, even if it also has conflicting tags such as "Female." Unless you actually keep that behavior functional, Browse is gone as a feature of the site.
Some of us like to use it on occasion, and for the people that don't like to use it, then... just don't use it? There was even options added to be more inclusive, so I don't get what the problem is. Just add more tags if you have to, it can't be that hard, unless... Unless there's a complaint of there being SO many identities, that you'd rather not bother, so just say so IF that's the case..
Let's be realistic here: NOBODY will EVER be able to truly be all-inclusive, even if you try.
I think taking away the drop-down was a really poor idea, because at the end of the day, what you're really doing is starting a path to ostracize a lot of people that might actually really like to use it-- which includes people of all different identities, not just straight people who also happen to like their own biological sex.
Tagging is better there 'cus the current system sure as hell ain't helpful unless your submission fits neatly in to it.
Ideally the gender drop-down should be more like a checkbox drop-down, let people pick multiple "pre-filled" tags then fill in the extra info if/when needed (E.g. agender, genderfluid, etc.)
Shove it in the same format (checkbox list not just one specific) on the Browse and Search pages to filter things down for what people want to see from that list (E.g., checking Multiple Characters, Male, Non-Binary would bring up those submissions with all three) and leave the rest to using the search page (Aforementioned gender identities not currently in the list that just fall under any/other/not specified)
Personally not been a fan of filing as "other/not specified" so I had to be tagging it on my work anyway so no matter what nothing's changing for me :V
I've come across pieces that I loved, but it was accidental, as the poster never bothered to put a single tag on it where I absolutely would've found it otherwise.
YEESSS, I've been thinking that a checkbox-type option would be really good as well!! Especially as I've made more than one multi-OC piece and I kinda hated that I had to be so general with it, but, at least I still manage to put the proper tags on them (or I try, anyway). Checkbox miiight not be the perfect solution, but I think it'd be a great start.
But yeah, kinda same here. Not much is changing for me either in those regards, as I'll still try to add appropriate tags anyway, and go out of my way to avoid searching for things I dislike.
My personal silly grievances would be that people would start tagging things that don't actually align with what they're posting, and thus, would find it's way across my feed, where otherwise, the blocking feature would've blurred it. (I sorta hope that mandatory taggin miiight help with this, but I wont hold my breath)
This way if there is a guy, a girl, and a trans person they can all be tagged with three clicks and make it more searchable/blacklistable depending on user needs
Also, please fix the search engine. It straight up doesn't work right... most glaringly, it doesn't even retrieve results with all the tags, just the most common one.
Can you provide me with an example of a search that hasn't worked for you, and some expected results?
We've done loads of testing internally, and results were very satisfactory.
Obviously, we might be missing something, so sharing your query would absolutely help us debug. :3
Will the full functionality of the Gender dropdown actually be restored, or it is acting purely as a shortcut for tagged search? Specific example: By the previous behavior, filtering by "Male" was functionally equivalent to searching for "male_only", and would not show submissions with female characters unless it was poorly tagged. Will this still be true, or would a submission that's tagged both "male" and "female" for multiple characters be shown now? Because if that's the case... then this rollback doesn't actually fix the problems the change caused in the first place.
The changes back to the old dropdowns lists will not change the behaviour with search that you currently are experiencing. This will remain the same; the dropdowns will provide a normalized way to add tags to submissions in order to minimize error rates.
My personal tests over the last 2 days have provided search results for only the "male" search with 3-12 pictures per 100 that were not "only males", averaging about 5.
Changing the search to "male -female" improved this to 1-2 images per 100; usually either due to an alternate word for woman (like "girl") exclusively being used or the submission depicting a woman within the picture with the uploader having not tagged the non-male character (which was an issue prior to the dropdown change as well).
Further refining the search to "male -female -girl -woman" yielded marginally better results, showing only non-exclusively-male images that were lacking tags (which, again, was an issue before the update and therefore has not changed) at nearly every single search instance.
Obviously, the variation on the results will partially depend on time of day, uploads that were cached by the search between searches, and other options such as using relevancy instead of time as a sorting criteria, etc. This is not something we have control over.
Note that we are also looking into backend search system updates/upgrades to better address the synonyms usage with tags, which should hopefully limit, if not resolve, the second scenario. I unfortunately cannot provide an ETA as this is an extremely recent development still being researched on our end. But it is a priority change for the team at this time in order to address Community concerns in that regard.
I will also note that you can bookmark the searches above, which will automatically display the updated search results upon loading. That way, you do not have to rewrite a satisfactory search query over and over to get to the results you're looking for.
We are aware that the URL updating only happens when a query is entered on the top search field of the site, and not on the side text box on the Search page; this should be updated and addressed with the next update.
This should provide you with an experience with near-parity to what you had with the Browse page prior to this update (which I assume is what you used?).
I hope this helps address at least some of your concerns, and provide an avenue of solution, even if it is not exactly what you were hoping for.
Still extremely disappointing that you've not only broken the existing feature, but you're phrasing this as a rollback to the old behavior when it's explicitly not, with this clarification.
Also, you're not speaking out of turn, I appreciate it personally.
I hope this kind behavior and thoughtfulness continues into the future!
You can rest assured that the odds of such an unfortunate situation have been greatly reduced, going forward.
The team has been doing a post mortem of the event, and we've identified gaps in our processes that led to... this. We've already fixed a few and are in the process of continuing to fix things so the risks of a reoccurrence are as low as possible. We obviously can't guarantee 100% it will never happen again, but we're taking steps to try to make sure it doesn't.
I hope this reassures you. :3
My only issue with the drop-down change was that it seemed to be otherwise unannounced.
I look forward to the described changes and hope they can be implemented soon.
The team has done a post-mortem of the event, and we've identified the gaps in our processes that led to this issue and are in the process of fixing them.
While we can't 100% guarantee it won't ever happen again, the odds of it should be drastically reduced going forward.
I hope this reassures you. <3
I never expected the FA Staff to actually admit they were wrong.
If this all comes true, you might earn an extra 10 Respect points from me.
I haven't seen the rollbacks yet, so I reserve the right to praise them yet, but I'm hopeful that this will teach them to ask the users more and live up to their claims of being more transparent going forward.
That's exactly what the next update, which will return the dropdown, will be doing.
We opted to add them back in order to normalize how the most common tags are added while the Tech team works towards a better tagging system (which is a LOT of work). This should help minimize typos and "variety" in tags, which can lead to some issues with people finding the submissions they are looking for.
It's still possible to add custom keywords in the "Keywords" field, in case there is a gender/species/etc. that is not covered by the dropdowns, as was the case before our previous update.
I hope this answers your question! :3
This kinda stuff is why I still champion FA. Thank you again for moving to code this in
If you guys going to continue improving the keyword/tags experience to a point that you can search comfortably with it, then I think you can reintroduce the idea of removing the dropdown, but until the entire system is in place, its better to do it this way, or at least, that's how I personally feel.
thanks for the swift response.
Here's an idea: what if those who aren't uploading characters in their art piece have a "no character available" in that drop down option? That way, it doesn't have to display "any" there.
I understand the intentions, but removing a good feature was not the move tbh.
Like, not everyone would like to see dicks or vaginas or something when they are looking at a specific theme, you know?
If anything, this whole thing has actually done a lot to inspire faith in the overall administration of FurAffinity - mistakes happen, but open acceptance and ability to admit to error and sober understanding of why a community was annoyed, combined with finding a middle ground, shows maturity and understanding of why it happened. This is what good leadership looks like
I use it a lot to discover older pieces of different themes, and it'd be a shame if it went away, since Search does not allow page selection
Worded a bit obtusely. Will I be able to browse new submissions in order from newest to oldest, with the Female gender tag, without having to filter out a bunch of other tags, or no? Because it was already painful to wade through a bunch of obscenity looking for artistic and casual nudes under "Mature", when so much material that objectively needs to be tagged as "Adult" seeps through. And now I have to come up with a convoluted recipe, removing tags that may or may not be there, so I don't happen upon an orgy of people with various sets of plumbing and persuasions? Why would I want to subject myself to that? Go scorched earth on that issue instead before trying to reinvent the wheel, please.
Say it louder for the furry websites in the back.
The team is taking steps to address the situation that happened, when the change was pushed before an announcement was made.
Needless to say (but I will anyway), the whole team is very aware of what happened, what went wrong, and where our processes broke down.
While we can't 100% guarantee it will never happen again (emergency updates might be required that force us to push an update/fix before we can announce it can happen, unfortunately...), we are doing modifications to our internal processes to avoid this as much as possible.
I hope this reassures you somewhat for the future!
Thanks again!
- Fender's journal; Oct 30th, 2024 - 2.7 Hold, Apology, and Open Letter
I'm sure I could go back farther to find other examples, too. To be completely frank, FA Staff already have a poor track record with things like this. So no, combined with the unwillingness to actually fully roll back this extremely unpopular change, I have to say that trust in the team is likely irreparably broken at this point.
Yes, we are removing the "deprecated" terms from the dropdown when the update drops.
I hope this reassures you. <3
I genuinely apologize for this. x_x
Don't be like dA when they ditched their entire category system for user-supplied Tags.
The current system does not allow for something like this, unfortunately. This is why we are trying to move towards tags, as we're otherwise limited in what options we can provide and the frequency at which we can realistically update them.
If you have a non-listed value, it is suggested to enter it in the "Keywords" section of the upload page, as it is there for basically that exact scenario.
I hope it helps! :3
As well, implementing the drop down categories in search is actually really nice!
Initially I was very annoyed by the drop down removal, however, after thinking about it....manually adding the appropriate gender tag isnt as big a deal. I think just being a creature-of-habit and uploading regularly, change was kinda disruptive.
I think I was just more annoyed by this change being sort of out-of-nowhere. I did appreciate that you were able to apply gender tags retroactively to all the submissions- because otherwise this would have been much more appalling. But in the future I think it would be better to give a heads up on these planned changes. I know this probly took a lot of resources and effort from many of staff, so thank you all for your time and I hope this is something we all learn from.
Then won’t this still depend on people using keywords for gender? I’m seeing many posts today with gender not being used as keyword. And doesn’t search use the entire story, for example, then if a gender is mentioned during the story, then it’s not the same as the drop-down.
The search has never worked well for me because many stories will include the words I’m searching but the stories are not based off of those terms. I’m I explaining this well?
But seeing the way a lot of users commented on the last announcement (and are continuing to comment on this one) making it very obvious that their idea of "gender" is "genitals and nothing else" is incredibly gross and I had really hoped the furry fandom had outgrown that shit by now. That some people came to the conclusion that trying to get rid of offensive, outdated gender terms is somehow *anti*-Pride is frankly baffling.
Some men have vaginas and some women have penises. Get over it. Or go whine about it on sleazy art theft boards like u18chan or whatever. If a trans man tags his self-representation as "male," he is tagging it correctly.
Tag blocking is a thing here now. But even with the best tag blocking system in the world, you're gonna see stuff you don't want to see. If you're "just here for the porn," you're presumably an adult. Grow up and act like it. Scroll past the stuff you don't want to see.
A suggestion for the future. next time you want to do a major site wide update maybe make it known first and then let the community vote on it before rolling it out. it would make things less stressful for us and would be a lot less work for you.
You can use the "Keywords" field when uploading a new submission; what you're describing is basically the best case scenario for its use.
I hope this helps! :3
I’m sorry so many reactions were so raw and harsh.
The dropdowns in general have always been inconvenient and rather impractical. It's about time we just ditch them entirely and use tags, and then, we won't be limited to what's available in the dropdowns (and we won't have a whole messy combination of tags + dropdown info)
And I myself proposed the idea of finally switching to only using tags, which would probably require a better tag system based on some examples.
Also Rule 34 is a porn site, FA is a site for everyone, including those who want to look at porn- which is just as respectable as any other art.
This is such a bad play and it is continuing to damage trust in your userbase. I know we've all heard we need to give you all time but I just do not understand why it is so hard to actually TALK to your users and do what THEY largely want. It should be obvious if you want people to feel included, valued, and respected as members of the furry community and this site that it's the way to go.
I'm not going anywhere but this continued oversight of what the actual people using this site want is continuing and I feel we are still being treated poorly. I don't even care about the gender dropdown personally but it's BAFFLING to me why features keep being changed without the aforementioned promise of being open and transparent. Wholly disappointing that nothing ever seems to change.
Thank you for listening to users now though. I do hope you continue to do so in the future...
I do deserve the heat for it and not understanding the issues it would have caused to users. I like to believe we have done a large amount of good since Neer passed but I can understand and appreciate how mistakes can ruin the good too.
This was something that had been in the talks of doing for a long while along with species for years. I'm now doubting myself if it was brought up in the townhall but regardless if it was it was still pushed through without full understanding of how it would affect those that rely on browse filters.
I am taking this incredibly to heart. I don't want to be ruining the progress and promises made to be open and transparent.
I am sorry.
Honestly, I think the town halls were a fantastic idea and make just a quick synopsis that gets posted after of everything talked about and plan changes posted after would help (I think you did that, but I don'tt remember the drop-down menus being mentioned as a talking point on the recap). I think if you and the rest of the team just make sure to reach out here and talk about upcoming changes (not just on the discord) it will help.
Trust is a fragile thing, I really do believe it can be brought back and I wholly believe you are coming from a good place and this is just an oversight. Legitimately, thank you for all you of my criticism does not come from wanting to beat you or the other mods down, but to express concern that this trend has still happened. I think just talking to us before any changes will really be what helps. You'll never please everyone, all you can do is try to do the best good!
Regardless of my criticisms and people's frustration I think overall you and the team are going a good direction the majority of the time and it's just these are two big things the community feels strongly about (the tos and the gender dropdowns) and I hope you and the team can take this and stride. Thank you for all you do and I really hope you have a lovely weekend whete after this you can detach a bit and relax and enjoy your weekend <3
I agree with NamelessImp and I appreciate how much FA's staff tries to do the right thing even when it's not clear what the right thing is.
The real advantage I see when it comes to removing the dropdown is that it keeps FA out of the ever turbulent and harrowing waters gender terms reside in.
If FA continues with making the gender dropdown and isn't going to include "herm" in it, I suggest they put the term "dualsex" in the dropdown and have it return "herm" results as well as "dualsex." I have no idea if this is a term every herm would be happy with, but it's descriptive, and the herms I've talked to so far like it. It even has some fun possible puns.
I'm happy to support the term "dualsex" and help to foster it since I like it, but I think all this is moving faster than any big discussion I can have with the trans herm and herm-character-having intersex communities I'm part of.
"Dualsex" was proposed by someone who was initially extremely mean to me, but they were from the specific intersex community who was trying to get the gender field changed and both they, and a few other herms, including me, think it's a good alternative. Fem dualsex, masc dualsex, enby dualsex, etc. Just another little tag and you can describe any character who possesses both sets of genitals intuitively without using the contested term herm/hermaphrodite. Plus, oh the dual-wielding jokes that can be made. <3
But because of the mistakes poor timing it makes the larger prior mistake look worse, sadly when it happens the only option is just to own up to it and improve it but thus far transparency is better as the announcement is proof of that. In the old administration mentality it wouldn't even be elaborated I imagine...
My concern is actually not so much about the tagging situation I just roll my eyes at that at worst its just a minor inconvenience, nothing to be seriously hung over about but understandably people will be annoyed or upset in what I would consider impersonal clerical errors, but they happen.
My major concern is the community response it appears select have taken the relevance of the topic and dragged it into a debate about genders and some of those in debate are clearly doing it not in good faith when this is about the clerical errors in the tagging system...Id advise elevated moderation in the journal comments in the mean time, and after the next journal I feel it would be worth considering on locking the comments on this one.
I think comments on Fender's Journals is a net positive but sometimes elevated moderation is a must, and I feel it is one of those times sadly...
Make your choice, either be community driven or make thought out decisions. Because from your behaviour the last *indeterminate time period* you really have shown to be exclusively talking down to people.
Stop being condescending and admit you have no idea what the hell you are doing.
I'd rather have completely dry and exclusively technical changelogs.
"plans to re-introduce"
I better hope you can take the tags you have now created and put them back into the Gender field without breaking stuff.
I'm not a part of the whole neo-gender / pronouns discussion to begin with, and in my case LITERALLY the only reason I ever used the "Gender" dropdown box at all was ... simply because it was there, as a standard part of the submission form. I fill out fields when they're relevant, just because it's good diligence on my part as the submiter, nothing more. Yes, it's an optional field, but most of my pieces are non-gender-specific anyway and I never personally assigned any importance to that field.
It just feels weird, as one of not so few furries who dislike the hyper in your face sexual aspects of the fandom. Also it's weird that kids uploading art also have to scroll through all that. 😑 and yes I know fetish can be non sexual. I still don't want to be forced to scroll through it each time just to label it with the most basic tag... QwQ
1. It's on almost all the time unless I wanna see nsfw
2. If you read the above you'd see i was talking about the uploading information under the category "Theme" and requesting General Furry Art to either be at the top or somewhere else—not anything to do wiih the browsing itself :/
Man reading comprehension really is a dying skill lmao
Regardless, there's a better way to have this conversation that doesn't involve packing your messages full of passive-aggression and snarky comments. I think your point is a valid concern, but the tone comes across a bit puritanical, especially when this community has been thru a lot of "Ew, make the front page normal and get rid of the disgusting kink-loving freaks" recently.
generic passive-aggressive insult lol lmao
In the future, for the sake of everyone, please communicate ahead of time if you plan on making a change this big that really affects a lot of users. It wouldn't hurt to get the community's feedback first, no? The motto is "Better safe than sorry!".
Of course... you cannot please everyone instantly but there is always a way. I do feel like the change were made impulsively due to the recently received complaints (which are still 100% valid), but thinking it through should still have been the priority instead of pushing whichever nuclear options this was.
This whole thing could have easily been avoided if you would have run through us first.
The second motto "In case of doubt, just ask!".
I know some people consider certain tags to be derogatory, specifically hermaphrodite, but it does have its use in circumstances where an individual actually has both male and female reproductive organs. Gynomorph and andromorph only cover the external appearance, not necessarily the reproductive anatomy. I do t really like the term futanari for my character as it brings to mind a lack of testes.
Just my two cents, I like that you are gonna keep the whole custom gender ones in the tags as the gender spectrum is evolving as we allow it to be explored again.
What was fine one day, is bad the next, and might be fine again the day after.
Now, I've never heard of Herm/Hermaphrodite being used as a slur before, but the term is a scientific/biological thing. Some characters actually are Herms, like Chakats.
I don't think it should be removed from the list, just used correctly alongside other genders added to the list.
I hope the Staff don't remove it completely as an over reaction.
Hermaphrodite is still a viable option for many characters on the site.
If Herm is a problem, sure, get rid of it. Just leave us with Hermaphrodite in exchange.
Instead Of A Drop Down List?
Also For Species My Sona Is A Cat-Sidhe... Which Isn't In The List Of Species...
So It Would Be Nice To Have This Species In That List Too...
I don't get the attachment to the crusty old drop down menus, especially the species one.
I know it's only a few extra seconds spent, but it still is pretty annoying to scroll past a bunch of randomness so I can choose "rat" or "beaver" for example.
Oh, and the countless species that aren't even on the list they would just have to be "Other"
They've got duplicated entries (how many entries for foxes again?), incorrect sorting ("Displacer Beast" under "Mythology" NO IT GOES UNDER POPCULTURE BECAUSE IT'S D&D), missing various fandom creations (no "manokits"?) ...
...this is one dropdown that really needs its internal conversion to Tags. Yes it can (and should) stay to some extent, but...
i should clarify, as a genderfluid/non-binary person myself, i fully appreciate the change and its intentions. the only criticism is that i think it should've been cooked a little longer and maybe had some sort of method for good tag standardization rolled in at the same time, plus maybe some changes to make browse tab more bearable.
second, for clarification since it's apparently coming back in a different form, one thing that's always been confusing to me: why did/do we have a gender drop down for *music??* as a musician myself i've been using the drop down to represent any characters in the cover art but i'm not sure if thats intended or not. is it meant to be for vocalists? what about if there is no vocalist? it's kind of confusing. if i've been using it wrong let me know and i'll fix the tags myself, i'm just kind of unsure of what else it's supposed to be for.
after giving it more time i will not continue to give that patience. i've realized that a lot more of the people than i wanted to believe are a part of the backlash out of very blatant and evident hatred against transgender, non-binary, genderfluid, etc. people. i would go as far as to say most. literally look at the more recent comments, a lot are FULL mask off about it now. i wanted to be respectful, say "maybe the bad vibe from all this vitriol i'm seeing is just me making too big of a deal out of it," nah. literally just scroll through a lot of the more recent posts, it says everything that needs to be said. :/
reeeeeeeeeaally doesn't help that this basically shows that FA staff just let a partially-transphobic backlash push them into rolling back ostensibly a positive change for transgender and non-binary people on pride month, and these changes that would have made the site better for everyone in the long run by working towards a more robust tagging system no less. it's just awful all around and especially bad optics-wise.
-Korb
They're redundant and frustrating to use since an upload may fall into more than one category. I'm in favour of phasing them out entirely and modernising the tagging system.
So thank you guys for taking us seriously. It means a lot to know you all care enough to do that <3
*cough* would be nice if it was put back in classic as well *coughcough*
I'LL LEARN TO USE MODERN ONE DAY I SWEAR...
Like, I'm here for the art, I don't care about all this other shit, why does it need to be RIGHT in your face? Having it all tucked in under the post is so much cleaner.
The mini gallery not being under the post anymore is a huge thing I dislike as well, and it's just completely gone when I'm browsing on my tablet. I'd love an option to put it back under there.
Journal lists are gone as well on mobile with Modern. Have fun wading through a bunch, only to discover you can't go to the prior 25.
The best we can do is make trouble tickets for UI issues, or take screenshots and (with their permission first) email Sciggles with the visual proof.
I'm glad you've decided to undo what was ultimately a shortsighted and unprepared change. While the options on the dropdown menu could be overly restrictive, removing it without standardized tags and, really, community tagging, was a mistake.
One suggestion: in InkBunny's uploading interface, it sorts keywords into several categories, such as gender, species, themes and kinks, and miscellaneous tags. Something similar would be very helpful if FA is going to make keywords more important in the future. The 500 character limit on keywords for submissions can also run out pretty quickly for things like writing submissions featuring several characters. . Having a longer character limit would be nice, or exempting certain types of keyword like gender, species, and category from the limit.
hope this trend of peoples voices actually being heard continues
I got caught up in what I thought were positive simple changes that turned out to be a mountain of damage that was in no way intended for harm or anything like that.
We need to do things right.
To clarify the difference - If I were to search for "Male", I would get every submission that has had "male" added to it's tags from the original update, yes, but I would also get every submission with both "Male" and "Female" because they include multiple characters. The benefit of the dropdown in this situation is that every selection on it is mutually exclusive; by the old behavior if I filtered by "Male", I'd only see male-centric submissions.
The wording of the announcement post concerns me that this behavior isn't being restored, which means you're not actually fixing the problems caused by the rushed update, just slightly hiding them.
Similarly with Themes being treated as abstracted search terms instead of proper categories: How do you actually search for "Transformation", when nearly every TGTF submission is likely to also use that as a tag, and rightly so?
Also, the issue you listed with with the transformation category has always existed and was unaffected by this update, but you could also fix that by hiding TGTF as well.
But most people seemed to prefer the old system, so I guess that's how it'll be 😕
-Korb
I apologize if I'm not making much sense, sudden changes like these always throw me off and having to remove tags that were added to my drawings without any previous notice this morning sucked, haha. I love the species field and while it doesn't have all species (I personally always wanted a fairy/fae option) I use it pretty regularly on my art.
Alternatively, they add a button next to the dropdown to make it clear that simply selecting an option is not enough, you must specifically "add" it to the tags. This is needed as a technical measure to differentiate between when a user is simply browsing the list to pick one option, vs. browsing the list with an intent to pick/add several options in sequence.
I'm lookin' forwards to the Browse/Search merge, hopefully it works well. Thanks for your hard work, y'all!
Same kinda goes for images where there's clearly one main character, the focus of the image, 100% female, but there's some onlookers in the background who are male so the artist marks it as "multiple characters" and the whole image gets yeeted out of the female category for it.
The wording of this announcement concerns me that we're still losing that behavior, if all the new dropdown is doing is abstracting search terms.
I am glad that the dropdown stuff will be returning. Having things like that for convenience is important, in lieu of community tagging. While I don't use the browse options the way others do, I did at one time and that type of thing was important for me. The reason is a matter of 'consent' in the same sort of way that fetishes are a matter of 'consent'. If people are browsing for indulgence, being surprised will have a much more negative impact on someone than positive, so to speak.
Art is a place where anything can be willed into being, and anything can be changed however the artists want. As such, showing clear intent with topics like gender is extremely important. Everyone from all perspectives should want knowledge and consent to be at the forefront of this discussion. More information is better than less, and ensuring that it is convenient both to provide and to filter is equally important.
This is a place of art, fetish, and sexuality. Art is inherently selfish, both for those making it and for those consuming it. If your actions impede the consent of others, it's going to cause issues. It's not a phobia thing, it's not about IRL people, it's about indulgence and consent. Please ensure that FA's systems remain convenient to label (eg; non-typing options are more convenient than manual entry) and convenient to browse (eg; multiple layers of filtering on browsing and searching).
I hope this is also a lesson to staff on how important tag filtering is as a feature for people. The username thing broke Filter Affinity and the person who made the extension has passed away. I hope that you can accelerate features that involve the ability to filter content on the site.
You "consent" to being exposed to diverse ideas about gender in art by using the site in the first place. The ability to filter is important, and having a robust filtering system is a good thing, but at the end of the day, this has NOTHING to do with "consent" and everything to do with self-expression. If a trans man is using his character as a form of self-expression and has tagged that character as "male," he has tagged it correctly, regardless of what his reproductive organs happen to look like.
But on the technical side, if someone wanted to see for example exclusively Female-only art because they have a negative reaction to seeing a penis, that used to be an option; the dropdown filters were mutually exclusive with each other, which meant if you filtered for "Female", you would get no "Male" results. Changing the dropdowns to just be abstracted lists of tags breaks this, because how you'd get the "Female" results you actually want, mixed in with all the "Female, Male" results as well. And working around that with purely tag-based search requires a laundry list of exclusion terms to catch every possible male- and penis-related tag that someone might use.
Nothing can fix people not tagging correctly. But this change makes it harder to find the content you want to see even if everyone is tagging everything correctly.
By the way, this site has grown past a place of visiting for the sake of being exposed to a wide range of artistic ideas, no matter how you might feel. Some might, but... People come here for many reasons and it's mostly selfish stuff at the core. I do wish it wasn't, but it is. People come here to sell art. Buy art. Find fap stuff while horny. Things like that. As such, unless FA wants to shift its audience, it instead has to be accommodating to it. As I said in my post above this one, basic gender filtering is like the number one most important feature of dating sites and porn sites because of the mental state and the goals of those visiting.
You don't get to dictate what other people express for themselves as the "ideal." If a trans man tells you "I'm a man," he's not lying to you - trans men are men, and trans women are women. And they are men and women "outright" - just because they don't fit into your neat little puritan boxes of what you think a man or a woman is supposed to be doesn't change that. They are what they say they are. Unless you're planning to be intimate with them, their reproductive organs are none of your business. If I draw a man with a vagina and tag it "male" because the person who commissioned the art tells me "this character is male," then I have tagged the character correctly - and that's how I will continue to tag it. If that offends your delicate "gender conservative" sensibilities, that's a YOU problem.
So you mark male and female if both are present, instead of having "multiple characters" as a gender.
But eh, at least Browse is usable again. Fine, I guess, though I do realise it's a quick band-aid that will be removed in the future again, 100%
Also thanks for addressing some weird staff comments during the discussions.
I guess we all might have learned from that and just let us do it better next time.
I won't be reiterating or repeating the points that had been made in comments above and on the previous update (the mods have seen enough of that), but, yeah, kind of frustrating that I'd like to touch my penis to new artwork containing penises on the browse page only to find that the dropdown that would filter out the not-penises is still not there.
(No disrespect for my transgender friends. I get the reasoning behind wanting the change and want you guys to have your way too.)
So whether you prefer to search by keyword or by a dropdown menu, both options still query the database by its tags. Best of both worlds, same results.
That is an ideal approach. Something like this perhaps? https://jsfiddle.net/qj4gtb0e
If the new system really is just abstracting tags in a search query, then the "Male" 'filter' would also need to add potentially hundreds of negators for every possible variant of "female" "mf" mxf" etc to actually replicate the behavior of the old dropdown, and similar for every other option on the list.
On a tangent, please look into the alias system. It bothers me to an unreasonable degree that my name, which I have no intention of changing is printed twice.
I am not Adaa Adaa
I am Adaa
Thanks :3
It is functioning as intended. The reason it repeats is to prevent issues with impersonation and scams. Unfortunately, bad actors will attempt to set their display name similar to an artist's and attempt to dupe customers to sending them the payment instead.
So yeah, when people try to say FA is primitive, it tells me they have no idea of how dire it was
AT least, staff have reiterated multiple times that tags are the future and will be improved
I hope with future updates we can keep useful functions and find ways to amend them so that nobody will feel offended.
I love centralized tag systems, and I hope to hell that's what the ultimate goal is, but you gotta give the community a sufficient advance notice, as well as clearly state what is being implemented (whether it is the whole change in one go or steady, incremental adjustments to the end goal) by what date.
It ain't perfect, there will be people who still feel blindsided because they just don't pay attention to the site updates no matter what, but if you communicate it proper, you can avoid an overwhelming fiasco like this one was! Well, and don't add to the negativity by doing goofy optics miscalculations like killing the gender dropdown during Pride Month, but that's frankly a minor consideration to clear, concise communication's major consideration.
I also maintain y'all should work on and implement the hard, larger parts of these changes first. Will make the smaller stuff like getting rid of the dropdowns not cause this reaction when people actually have a system change to acclimatize to rather than just losing features and breaking systems they're used to because that was the "quicker, easier" thing to do first.
People make mistakes, and I appreciate that you quickly put a fix in place while updates are happening in the background.
I say the site does what it needs to independent of that, because it's always gonna have loud backlash no matter what it does, or even doesn't.
Some of y'all need to re-evaluate if you're a furry who's discriminating against queer folks of any kind. Talk about friendly fire.
Making the tagging system as robust as possible is beneficial to everyone, and that appears to be the goal even if there have been issues with the implementation so like. What has everyone's hackles up?? Chill tf out, jaysus.
However, we want to be very clear about something: We are not apologizing for trying to be more inclusive to those with different gender identities. Fur Affinity values inclusiveness of all different kinds of people. Using this comment section or our discord chat as a platform to disparage diversity of gender expression goes against our site values and will not be tolerated in this discussion. Please refrain from making further such remarks, or you will not be allowed to continue participating in the discussion.
And thanks for drawing a line against transphobia!
You do need to develop a pretty keen sense of FA's jankiness to know how to use Search effectively. But, in an age of fuzzy search tools that try to be smarter than the user, I do appreciate FA's oldschool "strict but fair" approach that shows you exactly what you ask it for.
I would recommend everyone go to their site settings and change the default search order to date (Whyyy is the useless "relevancy" mode still the default?). Also set it to "All Time" and uncheck any upload types you're not interested in for good measure. And set it to 72 submissions per page too, why not.
Next, look at the search help page and try to wrap your head around some of the logic operators you can use. The OR operand is pretty useful if you wanna search all your interests at once, or if the thing you're interested in has many synonyms. For example I like looking at pooltoys, so I search: pooltoy | pool_toy | "pool toy"~2 | (@keywords inflatable) because people tag things inconsistently. Yayyy!
You can even make one big giga search term that groups together all your interests but excludes the things you don't like.
(interest1 | interest2 | interest3) !(dislike1 | dislike2 | dislike3)
If you engineer yourself a bespoke search query that meets your needs, you can bookmark it for easy access. But only if you do it in a very specific way. It only works if you enter your search query into the search bar at the top of every page, hit return/enter (don't get tricked into clicking on the magnifying glass - that's not a "Go" button, it's a link to the search page 🤦), and then immediately bookmark the resulting page.
...Okay, after typing all that I definitely understand why people are using the outdated Browse. But try being a janky search pro! FA: Make it easier?
Browse categories always felt like such a legacy feature and search could be modernised with aliasing, shortcuts for frequent tags and tag groups during upload, etc etc.
Allows you to browse content of specific themes that always feels fresh, by jumping to a random page
page (number) is still a variable sent in the request and you can still modify it. But there's no way to change it with the UI any more.
FA has such a long history of art, it'd suck if it suddenly made so much of it almost impossible to discover because they want to streamline two similar features that haven't achieved parity yet
I get it being unpopular and poorly implemented, but people are just.... loudly and repeatedly assuming the worst possible motives on the part of the staff and devs. Arguing and snarking at everyone who was supportive of the change and egging on everyone upset by it.
And that's not even getting into all the meltdowns people are having over the idea that they might inadvertently be exposed to a vagina once in a while (as if that doesn't already happen with the current system).
And THAT's not getting into the super-gross bigotry and transphobia that people are crawling out of the woodwork to reveal in response to the change.
That being said, it's commendable that you found a solution that will work for both camps. And I hope you will have no issues implementing it. Thanks for keeping FA running!
There's so many circumstances where multiple are applicable most obviously in pieces with multiple characters but also sometimes in the case of individual characters so if it's going to be a shortcut to add gender tags it would help alot to tailor the UI element to be that specifically.
plus no offense i find the extra gender bs rather cringy and pride month really brought the worst out of that and tends to split communities in half ... rather violently
i just hope you don't go the way of Nexus Mods and start blanket banning art just cause it dose not fit or support your ideologies
i always figured Furaffinty was a website for all to enjoy not just a select few
Making efforts to update the gender categories to replace terms that make people feel like shit with terms that are less discriminatory is a good thing, so i'm not sure what your apprehension here is.
However, we want to be very clear about something: We are not apologizing for trying to be more inclusive to those with different gender identities. Fur Affinity values inclusiveness of all different kinds of people. Using this comment section or our discord chat as a platform to disparage diversity of gender expression goes against our site values and will not be tolerated in this discussion. Please refrain from making further such remarks, or you will not be allowed to continue participating in the discussion.
Well you (as in FA staff) should. They're doing a bad job of it.
I'm a gamer from the prehistoric age (NES era) and I'm non-binary. What'cha gonna do about it, kid?
You could also introduce an option in the dropdown with a custom field to fill in.
-Male
-Female
-Non Binary
-Other (Please specify): ________
>> We will be pushing this update as soon as we can, and we are still open to feedback on this!
I have immediate feedback here: I'm all for merging the Search and Browse pages, but if staff believes making the two features functionally identical to each other is the correct way forward, then you have missed the point.
Tags are not filters, they're search terms. If we want to search, that feature is already there. Dropdowns are filters; they are mutually exclusive to each other in the same category by the very nature of dropdowns, and in this case that is a strength that is not easily replicated by tags.
To clarify with an example: If I filter for "Male", it's because I want to see only male-centric submissions. This is not easily replicated with tags, where in addition to searching for "Male", I would also have add exclusion terms to every other gender option to account for pieces with multiple characters of different genders.
Definitely this.
Using the dropdowns to add to the tag system is one thing, by the dropdowns themselves are still an entirely separate system that functions differently from the tags. If you're going to be integrating them together, make sure the dropdowns have priority and the tags are used to narrow down searches inside of those broader categories.
Like, if I just want to browse Transformation content, I use the dropdown, but if I'm looking specifically for works involving Twinning I would add that to a separate tag list to narrow down my results inside the larger Transformation category that I have selected from the dropdown. If there is a work that has the Twinning tag but isn't in the Transformation category, it won't show up in my search, but that is entirely on the poster for how they categorized their work.
And before you ask, fuck no I'm not going to Modern because of this. You had it on Classic before. It shouldn't be that hard to roll back the change since it was ALREADY THERE.
It was basically just them putting the cart before the horse in an attempt to keep things up to date. i have no strong feelings on the tag vs dropdown thing either way, im just glad that consistent filtering by gender presentation is making a return
Theyve acknowledged it was a mistake to do it without consulting the users of the site first, and have promised to restore the gutted functionality which is enough for me personally
The move towards a more robust/useful keywords/tags system has been long in the making. For multiple reasons, historical and/or technical, this is proving far more difficult and complex than originally anticipated.
To greatly oversimplify a VERY complex decision that took a long time to implement (so take everything here with a salt lick, not just a grain, please!), the Gender dropdown was seen as one that was both the "simplest" to migrate to keywords due to its relatively small size on the tech side (minimizing potential other breakages) and providing the most potential benefits for our users (removing the feeling that many have expressed over the years that they were "forced" into a gender from the dropdown, and not what fit them personally).
This is partly due to the fact that we couldn't realistically add every gender to the dropdown (GenderWiki is... "voluminous" to say the least, and keeps growing every day apparently) to ensure that people could properly self-identify with the list we were providing.
To say that this went badly is an understatement; process gaps and errors on our end missed a number of elements and created far greater friction with the Community than anticipated.
We've made a post mortem of the event, and have identified a number of gaps that we've been fixing, and looking at additional changes to prevent the lack of communication prior to a change, as well as not miss dependencies when making a change. Without going into details, we had a "perfect storm" that SHOULD have been preventable, but wasn't.
Our goal was never to "eliminate" or "erase" gender, but always to provide more versatility for our users to self-identify as they see fit and not within the confines of what we offer (or, at least, feel like they have to).
What happened with the Browse and Search pages were part of the "perfect storm" I mentioned, and this is why we're soft-rollbacking the change; we're still leveraging keywords, but offering a short list of the more "common" gender terms used on the site while replacing the "problematic" ones doing so.
This is done to ensure that since the dropdowns still leverage keywords, we have a normalized vocabulary in how those terms are written in the keywords field, rather than potentially having variance in wording (like plurals, typos, variance in term-specific writing like "genderfluid" vs "gender-fluid"). One of the issue that was uncovered by the change, and made clear by the Community in their replies, was this was an issue; we're already looking into improving/upgrading our search system to take these into account. I can't give an ETA for this implementation, but it is one of the team's priorities.
I genuinely hope that this explains the situation, and provides a better insight on our goals and the events that transpired. <3
I'm sure staff predicted AI, that's the only reasonable explanation for having tags
Like a virus designed to exploit a known flaw in a system's security.
Regardless I'm happy you guys are putting so much focus into tags, look forward to seeing what you do in the future as they are pretty bare bones atm. ^^
I hope there is not too much trouble repairing the damage to both the site's functions, and the trust and goodwill of us users towards you who work so hard to maintain this place. And I hope that you will be keeping a closer eye on your people going forward.
well, that works, but it doesn't explain how or why such a change that broke the browse page happened before it was ready to be merged like that. like, really, why implement this before you had the system ready?
That being said, I still strongly believe major changes like this should be discussed with the userbase first before suddenly imposing it on us. This would avoid 99% of the backlash and increase trust in FA's staff.
We've had a post mortem of the event, and have found gaps in our processes that led to what happened.
While we can't 100% guarantee it will never happen again, we've already taken steps and have additional changes set up to minimize the odds of a change going live without informing the Community again.
I hope this helps to reassure you about the future. :3
A number of fields would require constant changes, which is why the goal is to phase them out in favour of the keywords system.
In this case, if a gender/species is not listed, you can add it to the "Keywords" field when editing/uploading a submission, as what you are describing is the exact usage case for it, on top of additional information.
I hope this clarifies things a bit!
The issue with having dropdowns is that we have to make choices as to what goes and doesn't go in the dropdowns. This is problematic for attributes, such as Gender and Species, that are highly personal and in a constant state of change.
We cannot add and remove options all the time, nor do we want to see like we are the arbiters of what's a "proper" gender/species and what isn't. That is not for us to decide, but the uploader of the submission themselves.
As such, by allowing people to add their own genders/species in the form of keywords, we are letting you, the uploader, decide as to what identifies the characters in the submission.
Right now, we are removing some "problematic" terms in the Gender dropdown and replacing them with different, more commonly-used ones to address a temporary problem as we move from limited values that the Gender dropdown provided to a keywords-based system.
The new behaviour is that the dropdown will simply have a small, short list of commonly-used Genders to add to the keywords list. This is to ensure uniformity of the keywords used, but by no means forces the uploader into those identities; it's always possible to add new/different genders as keywords in the keywords field.
The Species dropdown suffers from the same problem where Community-made species, like Protogens, are created on a frequent basis. We cannot realistically add every single one of them, as well as every single species and breeds to the dropdown, as it would become unusable (I'm a long-time sufferer of being a "Dog (Other)", myself).
Which is why this is another dropdown slated to be replaced by Keywords instead (nobody likes a dropdown with 1,000+ values - and I'm sure the Tech team would need antidepressants for years to come if that were the case).
As far as the other dropdowns, like Type and Theme, these are not currently slated for replacement.
I can't guarantee the future, but right now, those are not going away.
At this time, those are the only changes to the site when it comes to uploads/search/browse.
The rest of your profile, your gallery, etc. is not going to change. If you feel that Fur Affinity is an "art site" today, rest assured that it will feel like an "art site" tomorrow!
I do sincerely hope this answers your worries and clarifies our plan for the future. <3
Honestly, if you're eventually going to get rid of species, leave a gender (or sex, or both) drop-down (on Classic as well for those of us who still prefer it or have issues with Modern not liking to display everything on mobile) for the convenience. Get the most common terms, a spot for putting other/custom terms that you type it in, and you'll still have less numerous options than species has. Make it forward-compatible, but also optional for those who want to add gender as a keyword. But for group images where we don't know every character, please don't expect us to tag genders for a dozen characters. That's why profiles exist, for people wanting to check out a user's character more in-depth.
It's obvious a majority prefer that drop-down. It's also obvious a majority who use browse to find gender or sex-specific art for personal reasons want the drop down option. Evidently it worked better, perhaps because people more consistently used it, and there were less options than if people chose keywords, which have so many synonyms that negating tags like in search for everything you DON'T want showing becomes a chore, instead of a quick browse. It's an "only show this" option that's easier than "don't show this and this and this and this, oh and not this, and I forgot about this one..." I think that's the issue. A quick browse for recent fare, vs an in-depth search for something less recent.
Most people are hardwired to like particular genders (and sexes) for personal reasons. Some people are less focused on that. But looking for that should be easier, not harder, if that's what a large number use a function for. Taking away ease of use is bound to cause an uproar, even if mods announced "we plan to do this eventually," in the long-ago times (or a few months ago) on a Discord not everyone uses, or wants to give that site their number to leave an opinion. (It's Discord we don't trust with that.)
So maybe go with samples like Male (man, etc) Female (woman, etc) Non-Binary (Enby, etc), and a select (perhaps polled) short list of others. Then leave it alone, a relic that can be interacted with by those who want to, ignored by others who prefer the new, but whose removal would cause upheaval...again.
Windows used drop-downs because DOS was hard for people. Many of us like the ease of drop-downs. It's human nature for a great number of us to like picking from lists, instead of adding multiple descriptors. Users like speed, not work to browse. Uploaders...are lazy. A drop-down is quick and painless, somethingthat has at least a chance of being used. Tags, they use as few as necessary, despite better search results for their work. Don't ask me why. It's a Great Mystery we may never solve.
Sorry for the lengthy comment.
No worries about the lengthy comment! That's why I'm paid The Big Bucks™. ;3
(All kidding aside, this is a volunteer job, just to confirm. I still don't mind the lengthy comment, though!)
I just want to clarify:
There is currently no gender dropdown for profiles themselves, nor is there a plan to add one at this time (as far as I know). The gender option is exclusively used on submissions. So I'm not 100% sure what you mean when you say "That's why profiles exist, for people wanting to check out a user's character more in-depth.". I THINK I get what you mean, but I don't want to take it for granted, so if you feel like clarifying that paragraph for me, I can probably give you a better answer overall regarding this.
As for what you're describing for the Gender dropdown, this is basically what we're re-introducing. But instead of being a dedicated, limited entry in the database, it retains its addition to the Keywords field. The form in which it will come back is being debated by the Tech team right now, following a lot of feedback we've gotten regarding issues that users had in the past, and what the team identified. But the way it's looking so far, I think people will appreciate it.
We don't know if this is what will stay long-term, if it's an emergency "just get something out while we work out something better", or if it's just "in the meantime" yet, but right now that's the compromise solution the team is prioritizing following the feedback we've been receiving for the past 2 days.
We've been reassessing some of the design decisions and consideration for future updates following this event, so I can't speak for long-term changes in design or functionalities.
As far as synonyms are concerned, this is something that was pointed out, and we're already looking for potential solutions/updates/upgrades to the search/keyword system to address this.
I can't provide an ETA as to when this will be implemented since this is a freshly-in-the-oven "project" and barely started getting put together, but it is on the team's list of priorities to address.
Regarding the "Not everyone is on Discord" comment, I will mention that we have a way to provide feedback at any time through the ticketing system; select the "Feedback" option and write away!
I know a lot of folks feel that we don't listen, care, or even read those feedbacks but I can assure you (and everyone else reading at home) that we do. We certainly try to reply in due time, and always forward the feedback/comments to the right venue(s).
As for announcements, everything that is officially announced on Discord is also announced here. The comments are obviously individually answered to, so I can't speak for what's going on in the Discord, but we're pooling from the same source of information, so there should not be a big difference between what's there and here.
And regarding the lack of communication prior to removing the option: we've made a post mortem of the event, and have identified gaps in our processes that lead to this situation. We've already taken steps to drastically reduce the odds of this happening again, but we obviously cannot 100% guarantee it'll never happen in the future (no "trust me bro" guarantee here). But between the changes we've already brought, and the additional changes we're looking into, we strongly believe that this will not happen save for extremely specific circumstances (like an emergency update, for instance).
And finally, about the dropdown vs tags:
I understand your point about "uploaders are lazy".
Unfortunately, and I hate to say this because it feels like we're making excuses, but there is a good chunk of uploaders that already didn't bother with the type, theme, and gender dropdowns before the last update. And we don't want to force people to make selections, especially on the Gender dropdown, due to the fact that those are limited in scope and the uploaders can add additional/specific entries in the keywords field.
I hope this answers your questions in a satisfactory manner! And something tells me you're not against lengthy responses. ;3
What I meant was, if there's a bunch of characters in an upload, like a beach party, an individual uploading it because they're in it isn't going to know every other character or their gender. But if a viewer likes that character and wants to know more about them, they can visit that person's page to check. Some people do list their character's gender thrre, or had it selected in their own uploads. That's a lengthier description of what I meant.
Honestly, I used the drop down because it was easy, and told the gender in a specific spot at a glance, instead of going through the list of keywords. Some people use a few, but some use fifty tags. If you just want one piece of information, it's nice for it to be found in its own space. That's why I think the gender and species lists were nice. See an art I like. Click. What species is this? Oh, okay. What gender? I see. Then keywords...holy carp they wrote a biography in there! So as someone who rarely ever used browse, those things in their own little spots were handy for even a dullard like me.
As for the feedback tickets, I understand they're useful. But tickets aren't the best for a conversation or back-and-forth. Where a community journal or something feels a bit different. Like tickets are more...formal? Especially when the answers are usually boilerplate, at least for most reports. I understand why. It just feels like tickets aren't for discussing feedback, even though there's a section for it. That or it just feels like I'd be bothering a mod with something that isn't ticket-worthy, like say reporting spam. Maybe I'm just getting old, lol.
Those who skipped those drop-downs ruined it for those who did use and like them. They're the ones who don't understand that search and browse get them more views and more customers. But...FA shouldn't let them ruin a function many of us did use and like. Let them not fill them in but make the display be blank instead of "Any." Reserve that for people who have no preference, or who haven't figured out a character's gender. As for "Multiple Characters," I'd say that's still useful, like in the aforementioned Beach scene example.
I skipped a few things because they were covered well and didn't need a reply, partly for brevity.
Lol, no, I'm not. But I do try to not take up too much visual space. That is, unless you want me to opine on why I still prefer Classic to Modern. XD
... amma speak to my manager. >_>;
I now understand what you mean about the profile; this is indeed a choice by the user to post whatever they want in their profile (within the rules, of course).
Then you have folks with a fairly-barren profile (like me). X3
I get what you're saying about finding the gender in a list of keywords being more difficult. It is, indeed, one of the downsides of the system compared to the old one.
I don't know if this is something that the team took into consideration, or if there are possible ways to remedy this. I can, on top of my head, think of a few ways that it could - but that's me not being on the Tech team, and knowing just enough programming to talk about it, but not nearly enough to do what those Technowizards do...
And because of your next paragraph, it PAINS ME to ask you to submit that in a feedback ticket, because it is a reasonable concern that we should track.
Which segues easily
<LTT voice>to our sponsor</LTT voice>into the ticket thing.I get what you mean by it feeling "formal". Unfortunately, they are also our best way to keep track of feedback and requests, and route them appropriately. And because there's a "paper trail" this way, there's accountability to action them, and explain why at least to those in charge if they cannot.
And we do often reply with a boilerplate/canned reply because you probably guessed that there's a lot... or it can take a LONG time before something is actioned (especially if it falls under Tech, not because they are slow but because the amount of work is... big. Like, really big.). But it does help drive team priorities far more than comments on a journal, to be honest.
I know it's... sub-optimal when it comes to engagement, but it really is the best way for us to get line-of-sight on issues, and see how widespread a problem is.
And as someone who had to give up the Classic UI when I joined the staff team ±2 months ago...
I feel your pain. I miss it a lot!
But frankly, Modern with the Retro skin is... surprisingly workable, especially on desktop. A few idiosyncrasies to deal with, but it is honestly growing on me. And, dare I say it... even on mobile. XD
(But I do miss how fast Classic loads, comparatively...)
Yep. See an interesting character in an artist's upload. Check the user...sometimes there's not even visible favorites. Always feel a little "Aww" when it happens.
I know nothing about coding or programming. I'd start chewing the floppy diskettes. FA still runs those, right? A little hamster switching them out as they code. X3
Awwwr...okay. I'll try to do so soon. I understand they're a good tool and can be tracked. (As I've made tickets for ages, I sometimes wish we could put them in a folder when closed.)
Classic is old but fast, and shows everything and doesn't feel like Web 3.0. My issues with Modern are things not being displayed, even in Retro, even when the browser is told to force full-site. The mini gallery is nowhere to be seen, even when I have it selected. (I'd prefer it under the main image. I think Modern is trying to force the main image full width, pushing the mini gallery into oblivion.) The same thing happens with journal lists that Classic has on the right. Nowhere in B...I mean Modern. Something is forcing it out of the viewable area, and pinch zooming out reveals nothing more.
...
I know...ticket of some kind. There I hesitate because I can't add a screenshot, and don't use a separate site for it like FA says to use. Archive today, or something, if I recall.
Juuusssttt gonna scooch on it and say, yes we do want to hear why you prefer Classic still! With Classic now being sunset, our Tech team and the lovely UI folks want to hear what it is about Classic that you like. They have received some really good feedback in terms of accessibility vs modern, and some readability differences, ect.
I'm all for tags becoming the new way of searching, but not with the tagging system FA has right now.
I genuinely wish the staff could revert to the gender dropdown menu as it used to work until we have a proper modern tagging system.
I use(d) the dropdown menu a lot to search for trans art and fellow trans artists. This has become a lot more troublesome now with the new system FA is trying to implant, because of the reasons I listed above.
This is no attack on the staff, nothing misogynic or transphobic. I'm trans myself and wanting to update the gender types is a great big step forward, but the new search method is actually standing in my way if getting involved with the trans community on FA (at least in the way I like(d) to do so).
I understand your concerns, and where you're coming from.
We're aware of gaps in the keywords system, and we're working at fixing some of them in the short term while the team continues work towards a tagging system proper.
Part of those changes is requiring a minimum of 3 keywords per submission in the future (subject to change).
Another is the synonym issue that we sometimes see on tags. This is a brand new "project", but it is a priority for team in order to address the issue that you and a lot of other users are experiencing.
We understand that the change that was made a few days ago was not up to what the Community wanted, and disrupted a lot of established patterns for everyone. We're hoping that the update the team will roll out soon will ease the situation and reduce the friction in using the site that we introduced.
We will continue to keep an eye out and our ears perked for additional issues and feedback.
I hope that it will make it possible for you to feel like you can involve with the community in a way that works for you, from one trans person to another. <3
As for people or someone categorizing the correct lists their are people who LIVE for that stuff especially adoptable (not me) People love them I knew people who pretty much knew every closed species I think it was pretty much their special interest. People love that stuff and are passionate about that stuff I bet you could get someone to organise species lists, or categories tidy them up and work on them simply because they enjoy it or would like to be an important part of the site.
Same with gender how many intersex people or trans people have actively spoken up in the comments and explained what is problematic and what is needed? Clearly passion is there I am sure someone who is passionate about Gender would be willing to help or have input. In all honestly it feels like FA is worried about upsetting parts of the community that are not thinking about everybody or people who don't care to be all inclusive and that is a little worrying.
As an ESL myself (I'm French-Canadian), having multiple ESL friends in the EU as well as locally, I can assure you that this is a problem that far predates the current year and most, if not all, people affected already have solutions in place regarding language barriers, as demonstrated by a sizable portion of our Community already.
As stated on numerous occasions in journals and on here, the idea of a curated list implies we are the arbiters of what is and what isn't acceptable/allowed as identities, gender, etc. Every time we deny an addition, remove a term, or otherwise make a change to please a group of users, another is unhappy and requests we revert it back, or make additions/removals, etc.
This has been a long-standing problem and the reason why we are moving towards a tagging system, which allows everyone to self-identify without us having to decide who can and cannot be listed. As we do not enforce gender identities in the Keywords list (as per our Upload Policy - section 1, paragraph 2), this allows everyone to express themselves without being forced into a list of identities that may or may not apply to them.
The same holds true for the Species list (as a longstanding member of the "Dog (Other)" club, I feel this).
We have identified a number of issues/gaps in the current keywords and/or search systems, and are working on addressing them which should take care of some of the concerns you mention.
However, this will take some time and thus, no ETA can be provided at this time.
I hope this answers some of your concerns!
That's part of the plan for the future, yes.
At this time (and is subject to change), we hope to introduce a mandatory minimum of 3 keywords in the future.
I cannot provide an ETA, but rest assured that we will announce the change prior to its implementation.
I hope this answers some of your concerns!
That’s excellent news, thanks a lot!!!
the existence of synonyms means that you have to spend a lot of time and effort trying to come up with every possible synonym that someone might use when searching for a particular tag. e621 solves this using a tag aliases, which have the benefit of presenting a uniform and universal terminology, but have the drawback of forcing users to accept a uniform and universal terminology. people have strong feelings about words, and there's often no single synonym that will satisfy everyone. someone will identify strongly with a term while someone else will find it highly offensive. i think that an alias system on fa would have to be strictly opt-in - when searching for a tag you specify if you want to include known aliases in the results, and if you don't then you find only the exact tag you asked for. for example a search for "transformation" would return results containing the tag "transformation", but if you specify that you want to include aliases then it would also include "tf" and "transfur".
another issue is that the current search system doesn't include results for terms that are shorter than 3 characters. this means that, for example, if you search for "tf" you won't get any results even though that is currently the standard tag for transformation.
does fa have a plan to implement fixes for these issues prior to removing the existing category/type/species system?
We're already looking at potential solutions to the synonyms issue.
While I can't provide an ETA, I can assure you this is one of the team's priorities in order to offer a smoother experience for our Community as we move forward with a more keywords-centric system.
This should also address the shortform for "tf" and similar other tags (like "ar" for "age regression").
I can't really provide details, especially since this is a fairly new "project" (not the right word, but I'm sure you understand the intention. :3 ), but we're definitely looking into things when it comes to these issues.
I hope this reassures you!
Thank you for attention.
For such suggestions its always the best to put in a ticket please!
So Tech can track them better and the suggestions don't get lost in the comments.
On Support you find all the way down "Report a Problem", that brings you to the ticket system. Then choose the category, write your suggestion in and send it.
Alternatively for now you can also click here
I just don't feel like it should be super important to mark it outside of tags. Marking fetishes on this site is absolutely vital because it is a thing that is gross to some people, but marking gender?.. i don't get it, it feels abundant and a little anxiety-provoking. Like, as a man who happens to be transgender, I don't want to mark my transmen characters as trans - they're men. but what if I mark them as a man and then I get banned because of a "wrong marking"? I had these little "what if" thoughts when marking gender to haunt me for a few days, even though I touch grass and have a life outside of internet lol
So yeah...just personally I'd rather prefer to just type it myself when i need to. That feature seems to me as a relic of some very old internet...
Perhaps, it would be nice to have a quick click menu to add common gender tags as an option for tagging, or some kind of "tag memory" for the account, like the one tumblr has where you see your last commonly used tags. This would help with making uploading posts seem less like a job/needing several tabs open (esp for reminders omg). This could probably solve a couple of minor browsing issues, including gender-specific browsing.
Roll back COMPLETELY, cancel all upgrade plans, hold a town hall in like a month to discuss this. That’s probably the “best” course of action, after this pile of crap yall waltzed into.
Don’t lie and say yall are rolling back. Yall served us a shitty steak, then tried to make it better by putting a bit of garnish on it. What you need to do is take the steak back. You need to do a full and complete roll back, no matter what it takes.
FA is proving it's still continuing that long, slow slide into the drain.
Staff absolutely messed up here, and I spotted the disrespectful comments some staff made and reported them.
HOWEVER, staff has:
1) realized they messed up and apologized,
2) implemented a fix that serves the best of both worlds,
3) punished unruly staff,
4) and are promising better communication (although i will keep reminding them of this one so they follow through.
People are forgiving, giving feedback, and moving on. And yet there are some here who are still harassing staff and other users, including you.
On the discord, you kept attacking staff and insulting them while telling them that they all need to be replaced, and you are doing it here too. This solves nothing and only agitates people, making the situation last longer when it should have been over yesterday.
The situation is over. Stop attacking staff and if you still don't like it here, either find some way to help or leave.
2. They didn't do anything. They're still proceeding with the changes. The drop down, last I checked, still doesn't exist.
3. They "talked to" the staff. If this was a more professional organization, those staff would be banned. You NEVER attack your userbase. The userbase made this site what it is. The staff who attacked users should no longer be staff, period.
4. I can promise you the moon will explode in an hour from now. I can promise that world peace will spontaneously break out today. I can promise a lot, but these are just words. Staff and management actions have shown that this is a promise they have yet to actually do. How many times has some person/org generally promised "better communication" and then didn't do shit?
Why should we move on from yet another debacle? Why should we let management off the hook time and time again? Staff has proven they don't care about the users. They keep staff who attack users, they lie about rolling back when they havent done shit, and they keep changing shit no one wants.
What we had WORKED! Don't fix want ain't broken, and all.
Why is it I cant express criticism, and I'm even attacked for doing so? Why is it always "oh why don't you do better then"? I'm not the one who decided to run an art site, management did. They need to run this like a professional organization, not some fun side experiment. People make their livelihoods on this site, and staff breaking shit and fucking shit up makes that worse for people.
No confidence in staff. There needs to be a complete house clean.
And you are continuing to use the site that they decided to run. You've registered your displeasure and made your criticism. You're mad because you're coming in here and demanding "mummy, daddy, fix it back the way it was, RIGHT THIS MINUTE" and then complaining that they're "unprofessional" when they don't just bow to your demands. "We are listening" does not mean "We are going to do exactly what you tell us."
This isn't a Westminster-style parliament. There isn't a "vote of no confidence" in the staff. There's Weasyl and SoFurry and plenty of other art sites for you to go to if you don't like how this one is being run.
"But some artists make their livelihood here..." Yeah, and you know what? That's on them for not diversifying. A lot of artists made their living on Twitter and had to leave and rebuild when the site became unusable. The internet is capricious - that's life. The artists who make their livelihood here do not pay to use this site. It is a very valuable service that they are getting FOR FREE. You're not being attacked for expressing criticism. You're getting pushback because you think you're entitled to dictate how this site is supposed to be run and who's supposed to run it - and continuing to do so, repeatedly, when a solution has been posted. You don't have to like the solution, but continuing to say "No, I want THIS!" over and over again doesn't make you passionate - it just makes you annoying.
The reason the change isn't live yet is because it is more than just a matter of hitting a single button to make things the way they were.
We're sorry that our update does not please you.
As you pointed out, we're rolling out a solution that, while imperfect for some users, still addresses a number of long-standing issues.
The way the Gender dropdown worked before the update was causing problems for members of the Community, for a very long time. It was also an impediment towards certain long-term updates the Community wants us to implement. This due to historical and/or technical reasons. This is why the behaviour is not completely rolled back.
As it was also pointed out, the roll-out of the previous update wasn't great. In fact, it was bad. We're aware of that, and we have apologized, as an organization, to our users for the way things were handled. We have made a post mortem and identified gaps in our processes, and have taken remedial actions to fix some of the issues that were identified. Other gaps need more time and additional work, but they have been identified and are in the process of resolution.
We understand that this change doesn't please all users, especially in the iteration we originally released it in.
But we strongly believe in the long-term plan that has been laid out during the town hall. And this is a step in that plan. We understand - and agree - that the rollout of that step was botched, and we have apologized for this and trying to fix the parts that were identified as unintended friction.
And while specifics cannot be provided, staff members have been globally reminded of their duty to the Community, and as stated, the moderators that have had a lapse in behaviour have been reprimanded.
I'm sorry that you feel you cannot trust us as staff members of Fur Affinity.
We hope that the future will change your mind and we will regain your trust in time. We understand this is a process, and we're hard at work to regain yours, and other users'.
srsly, why even remove the whole gender thing? And if people really still complain about it, LEAVE the field open/free or, for fucks sake, be an apache attack helicopter or what ever.
Male, Female, Herm, Any. What could go wrong with that?
You either have a d, a C, both or you dont care... And D O N T be that person now, alright???
I feel like this whole thing gets W A Y to much out of hand with not only the pride month but things around it. I WISH people would go back to the actual ROOTS of pride month and for what it was SUPPOST TO BE - NOT using it for literally thier abusive behaivor and force stuff on something we dont need nor want. Srsly, WHO gave a dang about this whole gender-tag? It was OK working! it was fine!
However, we want to be very clear about something: We are not apologizing for trying to be more inclusive to those with different gender identities. Fur Affinity values inclusiveness of all different kinds of people. Using this comment section as a platform to disparage diversity of gender expression goes against our site values and will not be tolerated in this discussion. Please refrain from making further such remarks, or you will not be allowed to continue participating in the discussion.
> We apologize for that, and we are working to make it right.
You say that, and yet the only staff member I can find that's replied to concerns about how even with the "rollback" (which is *not* actually a rollback, and shame on you for trying to call it that) a significant feature of the dropdown filters is being broken gave an answer that basically amounted to a very polite way of saying "Tough shit, that feature's never coming back. Here's a workaround that only mostly solves that use case, if you add multiple extra steps." That's... not actually fixing the problem you've created with this change.
If it's not already one of the potential suggestions you're looking into, a relatively simple method that would probably get most of the way there would be just using the dropdown list of curated 'common' terms itself; when one is selected, automatically also sets exclusions on (most of) the other options from that list.
I thought that kind of toxic shit had died out in the furry fandom, but I was BREATHTAKINGLY mistaken. Jesus Christ dude, get over yourself. You are NOT that important. Some men have vaginas, and some women have penises. Get over it.
It's 2025 now. Get with the program or get left behind.
the fucking comments " Pepe frog screeching meme "
Tech is working on it; some feedback and requests that we've constantly received in the last few days have slowed down the update a bit, as we're trying to make things right by offering a system that hopefully bridges some shortcomings that were present before. This means a bit more UI and code design time was required, which slowed things down.
But we're hoping to get it live soon. I can't provide an ETA, but I also don't want to make a Star Trek Generations "Tuesday" joke either. But right now, I think it's relatively safe to say "in the coming days".
This is by no means a promise or set in stone, however, and remains dependent on testing and other factors for the rollout.
I hope this answers your question!
The update just made it sound like they were turning it back on and them "fixing" it later.
Thought it was strange how nothing had happened yet.
Also, fuck transphobes. Seriously. Fuck bigots and haters in this community. You're the worst kind of people.
I have honestly never seen such an easily avoidable self-kneecapping as what this change has done to the site, if they don't find a way to fully roll it back.
To make a long and tumultuous story pretty short, we've migrated the Gender dropdown to keywords.
We didn't take into account certain realities of the Community when it comes to using the site, so things weren't great. We also had internal issues that made the change live without being announced first.
The community let us know that we had made a booboo.
Now, we're partly reverting some changes by reintroducing the Gender dropdown on Upload, Search, and (I believe) Browse pages, but instead of being an independent value, it will be included in the keywords instead.
We're also taking the opportunity to clean up and update the values displayed in the dropdown with some of the more commonly requested ones.
So yes, this means you'll now be able to add "herm" (and its derivatives) to your keywords block list. :)
We're also looking at updates/upgrades to the search system that should solve the issues of term variance (like plurals, common typos, differences in writing the same term, etc.) and synonyms.
I hope this satisfies your quest for knowledge!!
"Herm" was in the old dropdown, and was one of the terms being considered for removal for a long time.
As we were migrating the gender to the keywords section, we removed the dropdown altogether, which "solved" the issue.
But after seeing the feedback and understanding better the added friction in using the site to a sizable portion of the Community, we're adding back the dropdowns, without the "problematic" term - including "herm". However, the dropdowns still will leverage keywords, and not have a database field dedicated to them (unlike before the last update).
This will ensure that there is no variance in how the more common gender keywords are written, making them easier to find/search.
I hope that this clears things up a bit!
While we understand the feeling, some terminology does get deprecated in time as things change.
There are a number of words that would never fly today that did 50 years ago, and if we were to include them in any context, it would be seen as a tacit endorsement of the usage of that term, which isn't the case.
As such, we are removing the term "herm" from the dropdown due to its changed nature and meaning over the course of many years since it was added.
Here are some resources for you to peruse to better understand the history of the word and our decision to remove it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLGBT/co.....tersex_people/
https://lgbtqia.wiki/wiki/Hermaphrodite
https://isna.org/node/16/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex (third paragraph)
We are not keeping anyone who identifies with this term to add it themselves to a submission's keyword list, and will not be removing the term from any submission's keywords where the uploader self-identifies as such. We simply will not be providing a shortcut to it.
So to reiterate, we are not banning its use, but simply removing the shortcuts that the dropdowns are becoming.
I hope this clarifies our decision!
It's history as a word that could be used as a slur is also, even according to your sources, largely not a concern since its misuse originates from improper understanding of how it cannot apply to humans or is said with outright malicious intent (in which anything can be used as a slur). However in the context of furry, herm is a term that doesn't have the issue of not being applicable. People can have characters or identities that contain the specific anatomy the term is meant to refer to while being distinct from intersex, giving both times where one is more accurate than the other. It also comes with the benefits of being important for tagging/blacklisting and I hardly need to delve into why removing the ease of tagging something accurately will just lead to more problems for users and the community.
I'm also voicing my concerns with the context of how FA HAS in the past tried to suppress people from using "problematic" terms to identify with, even going so far as to delete group pages causing people to have to remake new ones. So I am very skeptical about the slippery slope potential here even if the intent is to still allow people to use the term manually in keywords instead of the future dropdown options.
I understand you feel strongly about keeping a word in the list that will populate the keywords to make it easier for yourself.
I regret to inform you that the decision to remove the problematic term from our list is unappealable and not up for debate.
As stated, the usage of the word for self-identification was, is, and will remain allowed, as per Section 1, Paragraph 2 (Submission Detail) of our Upload Policy (emphasis my own):
[quote]
Keywords, Ratings, Categories, Themes, and Species are used to define images as they appear in Fur Affinity's search engine. Abuse of these (misleading, inaccurate, or false) is not allowed. This does not apply to the Gender section. Submission file type should correspond to submission type. Intentionally listing inaccurate keywords in the description is not allowed.
[quote]
The only change you, and other users in a situation where they show preference for that term, will be that they will have to manually enter the term in the keywords field instead of having a shortcut doing so. This is true for any other gender-specific wording that is not included in the limited list of terms added to our list.
The same will hold true for the search feature when the update goes live.
I understand this does not please you, but as stated, this decision cannot be appealed.
I’m happy announcement comments are open again but these have to be extremely stress-inducing. Just do what you can, I’m grateful enough that the site is still alive to this extent.
While I understand where you're coming from, we're trying to actively move away from lists that keep increasing in length (and feel restrictive to a portion of our users), and having to modify them on a regular basis.
We're adding more common ones to make sure that the variance in vocabulary (plural versions, multiple ways to write the same word, etc.) for those popular terms is as minimal as possible, and we are looking at solutions/updates/upgrades to the search system to reduce the impact of synonyms and variance in how keywords are entered.
As such, we are hoping that everyone will start leveraging the Keywords field to provide their own identification keywords, gender or species, if they are unlisted.
I hope this explains our goal and situation a bit better!
It's on the list of things!
Which has... gotten slightly longer in the last 2 days.
But it's on the list!!
Its a bit of a catch 22 and we understand that. We are aware of our history, and this is why we don't want to give solid dates. This only leads to disappointment if we happen to miss it. Buuutt if we give vague "it's on the list" users are like "OK sure buddy!". Which hey! Fair enough.
We know that only actual delivery will help user confidence, and we hope the fact we have crossed off multiple items off of our road map will put weight behind when we say "it's on the list".
Improved blocking is on our 2025 road map, and we talked about it during our Town Hall a few months ago.
The link to the video is here:
https://youtu.be/zfynMkqDJGw?si=VMAe1UdOQebC3SxB
Sorry I'd like to have grabbed you a timestamp, but I'm struggling on mobile. 😅
Remember not to feed the trolls, everybody
And then people scratch their heads and wonder why FA usually takes so long to fix things.
People don't want this fixed. They just want to be angry.
I'm not defending everything that everyone said, but it was an inevitable outcome. If the staff really are working on improvements, they need to be finished before any steps are taken towards them or any preceding systems are removed. You don't start crossing a bridge before it's completely supported and just expect things to be fine.
Their partial rollback is a compromise - there's nothing they can do (including rolling everything back to exactly what it was before) that will make everyone happy, and that's clearly not the direction the site owners want to go. When the staff says "we are listening," that doesn't mean "we are going to give you everything you want because you complained enough."
You made your point the first time you said it - if they didn't heed it the first time, they're not going to heed it the tenth time. They're just going to tune you out, and you will deserve it. You can like the compromise or not like it - you can make a suggestion for what they can do to improve it. But stomping your angry little feet in the middle of every conversation like a spoiled little child and demanding that mummy and daddy fix it back the way it was doesn't make you passionate - it makes you annoying.
They're welcome to disagree with me. But acknowledge that you're breaking site functionality on purpose, and that it's not just a fixable oversight.
Also, I've hijacked exactly once thank you very much, and admitted to doing so at the time. Yes, I've brought it up multiple places - in relevant conversations.
It's not going to happen. Grow up.
Grow up, touch grass, maybe talk to a therapist, yall are terminally online if your main grievance is 'the dropdown is back as a shortcut tool to instantly add gender keywords so they can still be searched and blacklisted PLUS you get to add your own! :D' I do NOT see the issue here ffs.
Good lord.
Then I read the comments and now I am once again disappointed in the community. Not staff, the community.
The situation is over and yet people are still attacking staff, being absolutely horrible to each other and posting awful things regarding the LGBT+ community (especially trans and intersex folk), and just being terrible overall.
Thank you to those being polite and kind with your words and feedback, I appreciate ya. And again, thank you staff for listening and improving the site.
As for the rest, see you when you get the ban hammer or no one wants to talk to you.
Cant freaking wait...
I figured most people would say thanks, move on, and wait for the changes to happen. But I feel like some people are just here to stir the pot.
Yeah I commented and complained a ton on the other post, but I’d like to think that my posts (even if they were a bit hard handed) were at least a little constructive.
Here to find out there might be a lotta pushback because of actual bigotry. Yeesh. I just wanted the search system to work better, not erase people.
I already apologized to Sciggles but I will extend my sympathies to any staff that are having to deal with bad faith actors.
I just want the most popular furry website to be the best it can be, and I figured that can be done with tag standardization to start- for gender, and most other topics.
I still don’t think it makes you a bigot if you were upset that it would’ve been no longer easy to sort by gender, but it’s another thing if you are doing it out of genuine distaste and hatred of another gender.
Sometimes I wanna see fluffy dudes
Sometimes I wanna see fluffy girls
Sometimes I wanna see fluffy… things in general!
For me, it’s as simple as that, and I much appreciate the system in the future where people could add something like ‘male’ and ‘trans_male’ and ‘cis_male’ on their posts for as specific as they’d like to be. I mean obviously visibility would be best on the male tag, but the latter can help for people looking for specific types of work- such as when I would need to study anatomy.
Word vomit is to say: This situation sucked, and it’s really complicated, so I hope the future can work more smoothly. I don’t feel or see that much transphobia but… maybe I’m just misreading. There certainly is some.
Just try to have a nice day and don't get down on yourself about this.
Sometimes I don’t wanna see men’s/women’s genitalia and gender search helped with that.
If the issue is that genitalia shouldn’t be the identifier for gender- sure. But then maybe there should be the standard agreed on separation of gender/sex? For the clarity of browsing?
I mean it really doesn’t affect me since I’m not a particularly nsfw person, I just sometimes wanna see one rather than the other presentation of gender.
+ Tags/keywords are predetermined and outliers especially for cases like gender can be submitted to staff for review monthly or so on a field request,
+ Takes care of the dated searching style FA has when searching for multiple items, and
+ Contributes to merging the Browse and Search options on here.
Also, helps for those who want to put things in categories that aren't as extreme as the labels here make them to be. If I want to browse some content for slightly overweight or muscular characters and it's Fat Furs or Muscle with the more extreme results, why aren't there easier categories for the 'in between' margins as well?
Loooove how staff improved the situation and then the shitty people came out and tore everything down again.
Quick edit, not an attack on you, and some of the users were far more polite and friendly, voicing legitimate concerns and not being terrible people. Im just extremely disappointed how the users reacted to this announcement.
Yes, I expected better from our community, and I'm legitimately disappointed because it feels like we've gone back in time ten years with what's been going on in the comments (and not in a good way).
@lower amadenchart
So for example, if someone were to search for content but did not want to see my uploads at all, they could search for "wolf lower amadenchart"? I'm sorry, I have a hard time understanding commands like these.
Forgot the @ but yes!
Example search of the above.
That shows *only* my artwork however, but I could *remove* my artwork completely from the search by adding "-" before the command! This is an absolute game changer!! I'm happy to know such a command exists!
You can find it right there on the Help Page, accessible from the "Support" menu. :3
I hope this helps!
But you might be surprised how often that's the case. X3
I'm just glad it helped. :3
Thank you so much for your kindness and patience!
Pickra is the tech guy, so he's already answered. I personally already add artist_(my username) to all of my submissions. It would be cool of us artists kind of adopted our own standard until better curation tools can be implanted. :3 Kind of like a community push to help each other out.
Yessss I've been doing that since my old account too! It's just convenient and a simple courtesy! Always tag "amadenchart" to all of my submissions!
My fursona is a hermaphrodite; he is not intersex, she has both a functioning penis, testicles, vulva, uterus, and ovaries. I'm a bigender person and despite feeling both male and female, true hermaphroditism does not exist in humans so there is no way for someone like me to physically alter my self. So, I use my fursona as a representation of myself, because in art and fantasy I am able to explore that part of myself. Removing the ability to tag things as herm/hermaphrodite would take that away from me.
Re: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal...../#cid:61146016
I hope it's replaced with a new one and not outright removed altogether. I'm worried more people will incorrectly mark their characters as intersex as a replacement when they are not the same thing and make that issue [both tagging and conflating them as the same] worse than before.
I'll forward your suggestion to the team, as you raise a very valid concern; the original plan was to simply remove the term outright with no direct replacement, as it seemed to have a few variations that were individual-specific. As such, we had planned to leave it up to people to self-ID directly in the keywords field as they saw fit.
Right now, I'm not making promises as we've been getting a lot of feedback as to what users wanted over the course of the last few days, and the plan has changed a lot since even this morning in how it will be implemented.
We went from a dropdown to potentially a series of checkboxes to allow for multiple selections, and as such we don't want to overload the list either. It's... a fine balance to strike between offering choice/diversity of more popular tags, and UI real estate.
Still, thank you for your comment! It is very much appreciated. :3
I'm sorry to report that I'm pretty darn sure that this decision is not appealable.
However, as I stated, we are simply removing the term from the "shortcut" options, which will feed into the Keywords field. In other words, the dropdown/checkboxes do not feed a separate database entry anymore, but simply provide an easy way to write the common terms into the keywords.
While we will no longer offer that option in the shortcut, it is by no means a banned term for people who self-identify as such. Therefore, it is still absolutely possible to manually add the term to the Keywords section of a submission by entering it manually. The same goes for the search options.
I understand this is your not your preferred direction, but we believe it is a positive change for the site and its Community as a whole.
I hope this sheds a light and explains our decision and goal.
C'est la vie.
The "species" drop-down has a lot of categories. Some, like, wolves and cats, are a lot more popular than others (eg. giraffes and moles), but for the people who are really into seeing anthropomorphic moles, I'm glad that the site allows them to do so easily. That's just being user-friendly. I don't see why sex and gender can't be addressed with the same philosophy.
I do think it would work better as a checkbox rather than a dropdown, though. That way, rather than selecting only one gender that interests the user, the user can select multiple gender categories that they may wish to see and deselect categories that they're not interested in.
You can set the search to display by date, most recent first or oldest first, by changing the first dropdown under "Sort Criteria" to "Date".
With the "Date" criteria, "Descending" order will show the newest ones first, whereas "Ascending" will show the oldest submissions first.
Also, if you don't wish to enter these settings every time you use the search, you can set default search behaviour at the bottom of the Site Settings page.
I hope this helps!!
Glad you're finding this useful, Rielle! Happy searching!! <3
I really am trying not to bash the dev team because i know yall work really hard amidst you're actual jobs and lives. And yall have made some really good decisions in the past. But this one i just don't understand. You could have fixed the options for the gender drop down to make it more updated and better inclusive. But its just gone now making the browse function null and void.
The change should've been announced before it was rolled out, sure. But people should've given it some time before exploding about it.
I'm sorry the FA staff had to go through that.
What, exactly, do you actually expect to accomplish here? They hid your original comment and gave you a 24-hour suspension. I'm genuinely curious about what thought process led you to think "if I go back and post the same exact thing again, they'll have to listen to me this time!" You're saying "I would have explained this" as if you are owed that consideration, and now you're coming in and acting as if you are still owed a platform for it. You do realize that they're just going to suspend you again (likely for longer this time) and hide your comment again, right?
Regardless of whether your cause is righteous or not (like I said, not even getting into that), it seems to me that your energy would be better spent NOT getting into fights you can't win (and making yourself look rather foolish in the process).
Because if the answer is "I want to make them remove the BLM links," A) they're not going to, certainly not for someone just coming in and making demands about it, and B) even if they were willing to entertain the possibility (which they are clearly not), why do you think that commenting about it here, on an announcement that is completely unrelated in any way is the correct way to go about it?
Or maybe a better question: what do you realistically expect to accomplish?
If you realistically expect to accomplish nothing, then what are you doing here? Posturing? Virtue signaling? Like I said, there are much healthier ways to spend your energy. Maybe go and donate money to an anti-racist organization that you approve of. Write to your congresspeople to demand that they vote in favor of things like diversity, equity, and inclusion. Do... literally anything other than whine about one buried link in an unrelated journal on a furry art site.
Please submit a Trouble Ticket under the "User Interface (UI/UX)" category.
We'll be able to forward to Tech and see what they can do.
Make sure to provide a description of the issue, the browser and its version that you are using, if you're on desktop or mobile, and if you can provide a screenshot that shows where the problem is (you might need to upload to a third-party site like Google Drive, IMGUR, etc.) that would be fantastic in helping them out.
I hope this helps, and sorry for the trouble you're experiencing with the site!
The removal of the term was simply a byproduct of the change that was being made to begin with. While it wasn't the main driving force behind that change, it was a "happy coincidence" that helped move it forward.
The gender field had been identified a long time ago as a first step to the keywords/tag system migration as it was a low-footprint item that has had a good portion of the Community unhappy with it for various reasons. As such, if the change broke something else (it did, just not what we expected), it would be easier to fix than a big/critical system. It would also address a number of Community concerns regarding it, not just that single term, at the same time.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
I hope this explains the logic behind this choice so it makes more sense!
At least maybe trim it down to just some basic, common animal species.
It is, indeed, going to go the way of the Gender dropdown.
But we do plan on retiring it and, depending on what happens with the Gender changes, offer something similar if that's what the Community wants.
Plans got derailed a bit lately, but we're hoping to get back on track soon with a number of updates to put in the work. Just that our priorities have changed following this last event, and such we are revisiting some plans and considering how to approach things in order to reduce the risks of a repeat of the last few days.
As such, I really cannot provide an ETA as to when this will happen, but... it's on the list.
I hope this information is useful to you! :3
I understand your concern, however I think there's a misunderstanding here.
When I say that the species dropdown will go the way of the gender one, I do mean that it will be transferred to keywords, just like the gender dropdown was phased out in a similar manner.
How this will translate on the interface is still not decided, and the coming time where we adapt and see how the way gender is handled will definitely have an impact on how we do the change with the species dropdown as well. We do take the feedback and comments seriously, and since the gender change was the first step, we got a LOT of both feedback and comments.
As such, we're adopting a more careful, albeit slower, approach over the coming weeks to make sure everything works properly, and address any additional issues that might arise after some usage.
We've already identified, with the help of the Community, some gaps that we hope will be fully addressed soon - but as we are literally just coming out of the storm, we need to assess those gaps properly first to have an idea of where we're going. So we cannot provide any resemblance of timeframe.
All of this experience will absolutely be transferrable to switching over the Species list, which should make everyone experience's much smoother.
As for the transition of the species dropdown, it is not unlike what it was for the gender list:
There is no way for us to list every single species and breed of animal, on top of existing community-made species (protogens, for instance), and any other additional species that might be created in the future.
By switching to a keywords system, we're removing limitations of the dropdown since users can add whatever species they want without feeling like we're gatekeeping or ignoring their request (as a long time member of the "Dog (Other)" club, I would welcome normalizing keywords, honestly).
I hope this helps explain what our goals are, and what the changes we're looking for imply to a more satisfactory level.
That's the end goal, but we have to go through a LOT of code changes to get there.
Changing the way that genders were handled was step one, and a lot of things didn't go as planned; we've remedied a lot of the process gaps that were identified during a post mortem, but we still got more work to do to ensure it doesn't happen the same way in the future.
Also, we are taking into consideration the Community's feedback over the last few days to improve on our plan to align better with Community requests.
After this, we're planning on additional back-end updates/upgrade to address issues that cropped up during this update event as well.
And then, we'll revisit our plans for updating the site with the next step, using the experience of this update event to provide a better change and experience to you all.
It might have pushed back some of our plans, but I genuinely believe that it will help make FA better for everyone in the long run.
I hope this answers your concerns!
Yup, those are already a thing!
You can find all available operators and options on the Help Page's section on Search.
I hope this helps! :3
I appreciate the work and effort you all put in! I've been here a decade and it's great to feel like this site and community will keep evolving and growing~
First it was the pokemon fanbase, actining folks for pokemon nsfw pics. They said they'd take feedback and tell us what they're going to action folks base on feedback, even had a feedback box on it. Never heard a thing after it.
The other is the babyfur folks, which they action two well babyfur known artists, stating they broke rules that wasn't updated or posted about beforehand. It was about a month to a month and a half before they reinstated their accounts, saying they'd do better next time, they'd seek feedback in this and others before putting such actions into effect.
Now we have this event, just tossing it out there beforehand then trying to fix it after the fact. So you have to forgive me on this if this seem harsh, but there is reason to take what the staff say with a gain of salt here.
Since then, the FA staff has generally been much more consistently good about communicating things and engaging with users instead of just handing things down from on high. Have they always done it right? Of course not. This latest change was a huge misstep, and I'm not seeing many people deny that. But the way so many people just instantly assumed some kind of malicious intent on the part of the people trying to make improvements to the site has turned this into a much bigger mess than it ever needed to be.
A grain of salt is one thing, but people are going from zero to a hundred when they don't get everything exactly the way they want it right away, and then saying the staff is out to get them. What does that accomplish?
Best thing to do is to close comments if you want to.
I followed this but didn't comment much as it was disheartening to see the arguing get out of hand.
I just went elsewhere to discuss details of this since I didn't comfortable doing it here.
I appreciate staff handling this fairly well. Must be hard to try to control the comments here. Would be best to just use the Discord server for easier control with discussions like this. It was more civil there.
But this sort of topic will generate dislike or distrust in forms. I'm sure it could be done better in a neutral talk.
Update Journals rarely had comments open and maybe that shielded me from the more negative elements here.
Now I feel I should to be more careful on this site. I don't want trouble or to upset people. I have been there before on other sites. Getting roped into debates that turn sour is a real downer and takes me out of my art.
- Completely valid complaints in response to a poorly implemented change
- Otherwise-valid points ruined by spoiled, entitled demands on the staff
- Transphobes and bigots turning the comments into a platform for transphobia and bigotry (though staff has been pretty good, IMO, about shutting this one down when they see it)
I agree, it's been super disappointing, but I don't think the situation is as dire or widespread as this comment section makes it appear (at least, I hope not).
Yet, the "rational" comments without insults and only with opinions are getting hidden.
"We will be adding a limited subset of genders onto the dropdown menu to recreate previous functionality"
Unfortunately that's only half of what people, including several of the people you were hoping to be inclusive of (not just the "waaah I hate ladypeen" bigots), wanted. From a search filtering perspective this doesn't restore the "show this and only this" functionality that the dropdown used to have on the Browse and Search end and that the tag system cannot hope to replicate at all in its current state (let alone as conveniently). So it ideally needs to revert to functioning as a category (but ideally one that accepts custom entries) until the tag system is capable of replicating that functionality.
Second, it doesn't restore the "other", "any", "multiple characters", etc. labels that were carelessly stripped away from millions of uploads. That massive screwup is why you need to COMPLETELY AND ACTUALLY roll the change back. That is why nothing less than an actual rollback to the previous system is acceptable. You grossly underestimated the importance and meaningfulness of those labels, imperfect though they may have been, and left millions of submissions behind as a result. Forcing users to restore that much missing information when it's YOUR fault that it's missing is not an acceptable course of action. You need to roll the change back to fix that colossal mistake, and then you can worry about tinkering with dropdown behavior.
Since you can't use tags in the "Browse" section the whole thing has basically ruined the site for my purposes.
Call it "outdated" all you want, that dropdown served a clear purpose and worked fine. You could always just add additional options to it if you wanted to to cover more uses but it seemed to me to have all bases covered already.
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.