Danbooru

specific tags on deleted posts

Posted under General

this has been bothering me for some time now. there are a considerable obscure specific tags of very little population. it seems some of them are specific terms for that post alone; or the artist's name (not yet properly typed and no artist/wiki pages entries); or even character names of less popular personage; or a little-known copyright.

but the posts are no longer viewable because they are deleted. should i complete the post's tags and properly type it? but isn't we tag posts for searches? so what's the point if it doesn't appear in a search? or should i leave just the most common general tags? or simply ignore it?

and there are even newer tags for long deleted posts. what course of action is most acceptable? thanks.

Updated by jxh2154

Privileged users and above can see deleted posts in search by adding status:deleted to any query. However, I am of the opinion that while it is technically good practice to properly type tags on deleted posts, it is most likely a waste of time that could be spent properly tagging posts that actually require proper tagging, for example all the gentags:<2, copytags:0, arttags:0 -artist_request, and chartags:0 -character_request -original images.

i realized today that tags of deleted posts are still necessary as they can be resurrected by appeals even if they were deleted several years ago.

however, what bothers me now is the existence of posts like post #249031. a post like this can be found by status:any filesize:0kb. there are 251 pages.

i would like to request to completely remove all their tags. i find no use of them as they're completely gone now and what is left is just remnants of the past.

  • as a gardener and tagger, i find it a nuisance that such kind of posts appear in my searches. i still have to click it just to verify that the thumbnail is telling the truth.
  • they also occupy a considerable space (on thumbnail view) when mass editing. instead of relevant posts displayed on a page and speed up the process, they're just there to slow us down.
  • they also pollute search results because they still have an increment value of one.
  • another thing i believe, is that when aliases and implications are committed, these posts are also affected (depending on how they were tagged). i would consider this a considerable waste of system resources and time.
  • if we managed to purge them all, posts of deleted status will be just posts that can be appealed or those from banned artists. cleaner i guess.

any thoughts? thanks.

Big -1 for this one, these empty posts are from before deleted posts were retained for potential resolution (hence no picture or thumbnail), but they do have taglists linked to the MD5 hash of a given image.

If for whatever reason one of these posts were to be re-enstated, that information would still be valid. Moreover if someone wanted to use Danbooru's data elsewhere and came across one of these deleted images, they could still use it.

I'm almost always against the destruction of information, and this is just the wholesale version of that. These deleted posts don't hinder typical use of the site in any way. Giving them a special tag, like deleted, and excluding that when needed is a much better solution.

ok, thanks for the input. i never encountered that there exists a deleted tag before. so i guess it's a good place to store these empty posts.

and i discovered lately that there's no way to remove all tags completely as tagme is automatically added.

however, what about the other tags? should we still keep them? even if danbooru says that page doesn't exist? i've checked sonohara and hijiribe and they all tell the same. if these are just landing pages i would understand.

i understand too that there's a need to preserve information. but up to what extent? if we are waiting for a resolution of some sort for these and possibly reinstated in the future, wouldn't it better to isolate them for now for reasons i've mentioned above - so that they don't interfere searches, pad posts count, and consume precious resources/time during job tasks of aliases and implications?

by isolation i mean they carry only one tag - deleted. they will be sequestered away from the active part of danbooru. carrying one deleted tag will be the rough equivalent of posts carrying only tagme tag in the active part of danbooru. it shouldn't pose a problem since they're deleted anyways.

in cases they did become reinstated, one can just revert back to the tag history before the deleted tag was affixed. aliases or implication that happened after the deleted tag was added will only take effect place during the reversion. unlike now where these posts get affected too every single time a job task is committed.

and yes i agree, at least, deleted should be used for these.

Updated

ghostrigger said:
Even if danbooru says that page doesn't exist? i've checked sonohara and hijiribe and they all tell the same.

Danbooru will always say the same thing as Sonohara and Hijiribe, because Sonohara and Hijiribe are the two mirrored servers that comprise Danbooru. Checking Danbooru means you are indirectly looking at either one or the other.

ghostrigger said:
Wouldn't it better to isolate them for now for reasons i've mentioned above - so that they don't interfere searches, pad posts count, and consume precious resources/time during job tasks of aliases and implications?

There is no reasonable reason to treat deleted posts without images any differently that deleted posts with images. Despite what you say, they don't affect post counts (wait a day for the cache to refresh). As for taking resources when running aliases and implications, this is actually more desirable than the alternative, as it ensures everything is consistent. If we didn't do this for deleted images, something could potentially be appealed and re-instated in an inconsistent state which would cause bigger headaches for everyone.

As for interfering with searches, they will only show up when someone is probing status:deleted or status:any. This is not a normal case for the vast majority of users. If you need to be searching this set and don't want posts without their images to show up, institute a new tag and exclude it.

If deleted is to be used with all deleted images (I'm not sure why, since that it would then simply replicate the status), then perhaps missing_image or something like that.

Shinjidude said:
this is actually more desirable than the alternative, as it ensures everything is consistent.

ok, thanks, i never considered this before. so i guess there's some wisdom behind it.

institute a new tag and exclude it.

there's no documented use of deleted i could find. but i would guess (and taking a hint from you) this was used in the past to hide images from public view similar to banned_artist today. missing_image could be a better alternative, though including them in my searches has disadvantages already especially in gardening as my other search parameter is a mandatory status:any. however, i think i will just do that in one of my future projects.

though now i'm convinced that what i suggested didn't concern a lot of normal users (and didn't seem to put a lot of strain to the whole system), i would just like to verify if we are tolerating a certain degree of information loss or destruction of outdated information?

i bumped into post #9493 not long ago. it's over 6 years old and uploaded on 2005-09-03. it was undertagged. i added more gentags, verified the list, and checked the post history . i was surprised to see my entry as the first. clicked prev and next and didn't find anything new. i encountered similar posts much later.

would this mean that after i updated the tags of post #9493, all previous updates between 2005-09-03 and 2011-11-28 were destroyed? or they're just 'hidden' to most normal users? and if indeed we are destroying information of 'alive' and 'active' posts, would the same be applicable to the deleted ones too?

just curious. thanks.

Tag history on old posts isn't in the database, it was lost after an update. You can verify this by finding an old post that hasn't been updated since that update to see it has no history at all.

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