One of the many advantages of community forums is discoverability. It is why we go through so much trouble assuring our content is widely available, even without an account (of course, only appropriate content). This is in stark contrast to what has been popularized by places like Discord, private walled gardens filled with info, and is a great example of why we even built this forum in the first place.
But in order to achieve and maintain a well searchable bulletin board we all need to do our part. One of those things is tagging your posts. Tagging is far more important than you might imagine. Bad tagging results in content getting lost or drowned out by thousands of other posts when just searching keywords, and good tagging allows members to curate feeds of certain types of content they like to be notified about, or to mute topics they prefer not to see. It’s like the forum’s ethical content algorithm, performed by us humans.
So here’s a few guidelines and established practices in terms of content tagging. Please keep them in mind when creating posts, and feel free to create a Flag for content that you feel is wrongly tagged.
Not Safe For Work Content
This is arguably the most important one of them all. It’s less of a guideline and more of a hard rule. All NSFW or suggestive content must ALWAYS be tagged with the nsfw tag.
Additionally, NSFW or suggestive content relating to real-life (such as photography) should be tagged with the nsfw_irl tag.
Moderators might apply the nsfw tag retroactively if a thread turns NSFW over time, such as through replies by people. If you want to keep a thread strictly safe for work, we have the sfw_only tag. Using this tag communicates to people replying that they should keep it SFW.
Credits
For content you create we have the created_by_me tag, and for content made by others (like a commission you got, or a repost) we have the created_by_others tag.
Crediting the original creator of something is important, either mention them with an @ if they’re a member of the site, or reference a link in the post, but please do not create tags of people’s names.
Categories
It is not needed to create a tag that is the same as the category you’re posting it, like putting an introduction tag when posting an introduction in the Introductions category.
Creating New Tags
If you want to create a new tag for something that’s important to label in your post, be aware of the following.
Don’t Create Duplicate Tags.
- If your tag is similar enough to another tag, we may merge it into another tag to keep things clean.
For example, if you use the tag Paw, that tag will be changed into Paws so people looking for Paws don’t have to search up multiple similar tags to find all Paw related posts. This is also true of synonyms for other body parts, kinks, and more!
Keep in mind that our system will automatically adjust duplicates that we’ve accounted for, so don’t stress yourself out trying to remember what the “right” name for each body part, or kink is. Just try to avoid intentionally creating duplicate tags <3
Use Spaces For Tags With Multiple Words.
- If your tag consists of multiple words, for example, hyper_cock, please use an underscore to separate the words.
Tags that do not will be manually adjusted to fit this formatting convention. Only use hyphens in instances where it’s grammatically or culturally appropriate, like in the words double-sided, or pac-man.
Keep Tags Lower Case.
- Do your best to avoid using upper cases in your tags.
The standard formatting for tags is lower-case with underscores to separate words, like hyper_cock, size_difference, and created_by_others. Try your best to keep to this standard and help our mod team make tagging a more seamless process <3
Don’t Create Tags That Include Names.
- While we want all artists to be credited on the forum, the search bar already allows any credited artists, and their art, to be easily found as long as their name is included in any post with their art. So please do not create tags that include your name, or any artist’s name, as it clogs the system.
Tags like darkclaw_growth, or darkclaw_macro, are unnecessarily complicated and are not easy for users to find. Instead of creating those tags, just tag growth and macro, and make sure your name is written in the post! This will allow users to find it with the search bar just the same!
What’s Enough?
How many tags is enough? It depends. We have set absolute minimums on most categories. Most casual conversations need just 1 tag, but most content needs at least 3.
For conversations try to tag with the general topic of the conversation, like macro.
For art or other content, try to be more specific. Species, kinks and overall themes are all great things to include. Think for example excessive_cum or genie or gryphon. But there’s no need to overthink it, 3 to 5 tags is fine unless you have a wide range of content.
As this forum evolves, we will occasionally revisit this post and add new things that the community has settled on using in order to keep everyone on the same page. Thank you for taking the time to keep our forum tidy and well organized for everyone’s benefit.
