Danbooru

Shortcut tag aliases discussion

Posted under General

What's the problem? Both of these characters have 9000+ posts. There are some less popular characters (e: not just characters, copytags and gentags too) with shorter names and/or less amount of posts that have shortcuts.

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-1 to both. I think such short shortcut names should be reserved for more important things, like copyrights. I don't really like this trend of using shortcuts for character names. At most I feel they should only be used if the name is overly complex to require it. Otherwise I think people should just use the copyright wiki to look up the name if they're having problems with the spelling, most of these popular series already have wiki lists of the character names to find the tag being used.

Also how would this work out if some new character appears and is more popular or a new popular series comes up that would use these very same shortcuts? Would you have made these same proposals if the shortcuts were already used with /im alised Ichigo Mashimaro and /ah alised to Arcana Heart?

NWF_Renim said:

Also how would this work out if some new character appears and is more popular or a new popular series comes up that would use these very same shortcuts?

You could say that about any currently existing shortcut.

Would you have made these same proposals if the shortcuts were already used with /im alised Ichigo Mashimaro and /ah alised to Arcana Heart?

No, I wouldn't have proposed them if /im and /ah already existed, but that's mainly to not confuse those who were already using those shortcuts, despite inubashiri momiji having a longer name/more posts than ichigo mashimaro, and akemi homura having more posts than arcana heart. But since they don't exist yet...

Log said:

Character shortcuts should only be used with unwieldy names.

Like the existing /yr -> yakumo ran, right?

Okay, I'll drop it. At least you two gave better answers than RaisingK did.

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souryuu9 said:
Like the existing /yr -> yakumo ran, right?

Well we really shouldn't have that shortcut, but if we are to continue going that route a better alternative would be changing the format of shortcuts to allow future room for new shortcuts. Instead of a simple "/yr" setup, have perhaps like "/touhou/yr" and if further needed have things like /hooe become "/gen/hooe".

Just some other examples:
/ar -> /shny/ar
/hm -> /vo/hm

NWF_Renim said:

Well we really shouldn't have that shortcut, but if we are to continue going that route a better alternative would be changing the format of shortcuts to allow future room for new shortcuts. Instead of a simple "/yr" setup, have perhaps like "/touhou/yr" and if further needed have things like /hooe become "/gen/hooe".

Just some other examples:
/ar -> /shny/ar
/hm -> /vo/hm

I like this system. While I never use shortcuts myself, If shortcuts are staying based on current popularity of the series I think this is a logical way to curb the coming shortcut apocalypse before it gets way too out of hand.

Actually, maybe I won't drop it yet. You three may have said no, but ultimately, jxh makes the decision. Unless he rejects the proposal, I feel that I can still make a point. I've been looking through the shortcut tags and noticed some things. On one hand, we have

  • /sk -> sketch (23560)
  • /to -> touhou (343994)

The number inside parentheses is the number of posts as of typing this message. These are the two shortest tags that have a shortcut. 3 character shortcuts for 6 character tags. Is this good or not? If it is, then at what point does it become useful for a tag to have a shortcut? A theroretical number of characters saved multiplied by the number of posts has to be over a certain bound? If it's not good, why does it exist?

/im -> inubashiri_momiji (9035) is a 3 character shortcut for a 17 character tag. Also, on a regular keyboard, typing the underscore requires the use of a shift modifier and a stretch for both pinkies, and the slash doesn't. Suppose everybody who ever tagged a post with inubashiri_momiji typed it out completely. They would've collectively saved ~126,000 characters of typing. Of course, not everybody types out the whole name when tagging, but you can add some back for those who type it when searching. Or more. I feel that for chartags, more people search them than tag them.

Yeah, we can search through wiki lists/use the related tags feature to find certain tags, but you can apply that to many tags. Not that I take this stance, but one can argue that we don't need any shortcut tags at all. Just use the wiki/related tags/type everything out.

short_hair (363139) has more posts and a longer name than touhou, yet doesn't have it's own shortcut. long_hair (499386) already has /lh, but /sh is taken by suzumiya_haruhi (6667). My opinion here is that /sh -> short_hair is preferable, but like what I said before, to change it will confuse those who use /sh for Haruhi.

On the other hand, we have stuff like

  • /mshvsf -> marvel_super_heroes_vs._street_fighter (1)
  • /mslnm2 -> mahou_shoujo_lyrical_nanoha_the_movie_2nd (0)

which are both certainly long enough, but one has only 1 post, and the other has none at all?

There are other tags with 1 or 0 posts that have their own shortcut. Did nobody try to oppose the creations of these? And jxh didn't have a problem implementing these? Here's one in particular that probably shouldn't be used.

Censorship implies something along the lines of hiding objectionable content or protecting people's privacy. There's nothing of that sort in this post. The background is just pixelated.

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Just to add, some other existing shortcuts that are aliased to the smaller of two tags that would fit with the abbreviation:

alias /ar -> asakura_ryouko (2209 posts) despite ayanami_rei (3979 posts)
alias /kh -> kingdom_hearts (825 posts) despite katsura_hinagiku (837 posts) and kagiyama_hina (5248 posts)
alias /ms -> moriya_suwako (9916 posts) despite miki_sayaka (10777 posts)
alias /sd -> symmetrical_docking (2177 posts) despite shanghai_doll (4925 posts)
alias /t -> thighhighs (208893 posts) despite touhou (336404 posts)
alias /us -> urushihara_satoshi (749 posts) despite uchiha_sasuke (1035 posts)

A couple of those may be because it's aliased to the longer one, but some are about the same in length.

souryuu9 said:

Censorship implies something along the lines of hiding objectionable content or protecting people's privacy. There's nothing of that sort in this post. The background is just pixelated.

That was probably aliased without thought as part of the mass-shortcut-aliasing of all background tags.

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Personally, I don't see most of these shortcut aliases as very useful with the autocomplete add-on working again, and autocomplete will be added to the site itself before long. Autocomplete allows you to consistently type most tags with 2-4 keystrokes. You only need to remember to first few letters of the tag, without having to remember "does this tag have a shortcut?" and "how was this tag's name abbreviated?".

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Most shortcuts are as old as time. Shortcuts with 0 posts were in response to something being announced as a sequel or part of a blanket and already had related shortcuts. This is not rocket science.

You can't move shortcuts, the handful of people who actually use them will just end up tagging shit wrong all over the place.

At least 50% of the shortcuts were put in place by albert to help him tag easier.

Just delete all the shortcuts if they're going to cause this much whining. It's a shortcut for a tag, not a law stating that one cannot fuck dogs on the corner of 8th and highland between the hours of 10 and 2 on a sunday.

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We don't do character shortcuts unless they're monstrosities like Louise's full name. Homura and Momiji are pretty average length names. Very old shortcuts may exist that go against current practice, but aren't to be considered precedents.

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