"Rating:Safe" and "Safe for Work"

+1/2 to adding a fourth rating. I propose making the new rating the one that's intended for the less-safe stuff. The great majority of posts in rating:s are already non-sexual. The new rating might be called "Risque", "R" for short, or "Naughty", "N" for short. (The name "Questionable" for the next higher rating is unfortunate, but probably too established to change.) New posts would be using the fourth rating, and those who care may populate the new rating with old posts incrementally.

-1 to repurposing the existing ratings. Trying to do that would make a huge mess out of something that is working reasonably well for many people, and would probably not work all that well for anyone.

+0 to creating a second ratings system that rates "objectionable content" in general instead of just sex. Setting it up so that posts that had no manually set rating under the new system received an automatic one (based on the old ratings system and certain tags) would be a start, I suppose. Or just stop making a deal out of things. It's just bodily fluids.

If we add another rating it should be a new one leaving the old ratings as is, like A for "All age" or something. Just using rating:s is a bad idea, there are still all sorts of tags to filter out, see safebooru. That said why not use safebooru in the first place?

About guro being rated safe, well, I think it's at least as unsafe as T&A and should get a questionable rating.

About doing something to make Safebooru more sfw, I guess we can go with enforced blacklists. Most suggestive stuff tends to be rated properly as questionable, anyway. We just need a to figure out a list of tags that would have to be included in the blacklist.

wareya said:

The list of stuff that qualifies something as questionable under "Wiki - howto:rate" is actually pretty good.

And that's a part of the problem. Danbooru's rating system in its current state caters to those who - pardon me my British - come here to touch themselves.

In any case, the burden of making even a reasonable amount of the database align with "safe = safe for work" is absurd. It's not actually going to happen, even if someone tries.

Quite a pessimist, aren't we? You will never know unless you try.

Saduharta said:

I know I never liked it myself, personally. To me, I'd like to approximately be able to use the different ratings as what I'd show others; If something's rated safe, to me that means it should be something I wouldn't hesitate to show to acquaintances, relatives, or share on social media. And certainly the amount of sexuality isn't the only factor there; I'm not going to post a [decapitation] pic on Facebook. To me, that makes a lot more sense than just some sexual gradient.

[...]

I also like the idea of 4 ratings; Safe would be suitable for all ages stuff... IE stuff you could share with relatives or on Facebook without worry. After that, the second rating up could be PG-13 kind of stuff: fan service, ecchi art, mild violence, etc. In this case stuff one might be able to show other anime/manga loving adults without things getting too awkward. The third rating could be rated R material: tasteful nudity, non-explicit sex, harder violence, etc. That would leave explicit for hardcore stuff: Vore, sexual fluids, rape, guro, etc.

Even though I don't share the appreciation toward Facebook et al., I wholeheartedly agree with the above.

Yeah, it would be a judgement call, but isn't it already? There's certainly never been 100% agreement on every image's rating, and I trust people enough to be able to tell the difference between a swimsuit picture and a suggestive swimsuit picture. And frankly I see little issue just being overly cautious and erring towards questionable when in doubt.

I concur. Alas, but right now it seems to be exactly the opposite - when in doubt, most taggers would rather rate a post "safe".

D'Eye said:

And that's a part of the problem. Danbooru's rating system in its current state caters to those who - pardon me my British - come here to touch themselves.

Also to those who wish to weed out stuff for people who came to touch themselves.

If you ask me, trying to have ratings account for anything else than sexual content is a terrible idea for reasons that have been mentioned several times: no two people will ever agree on what is ok to show in what contexts (if you doubt me, Saduharta's list has vore as explicit. Try to give a sound argument as to why all vore should be...). Attempting to make a standard would just be shit-flinging and trying to get that thing you personally hate to be rated explicit. If this is to be done, I think it should be with a safe_for_work tag separate from the rating system. At least that is something for which people can kinda come to an agreement. Maybe.

Borrator said:

Also to those who wish to weed out stuff for people who came to touch themselves.

If it were the case, I wouldn't have started this here forum topic.

I, for one, drop by to look for good and actually safe art. And instead I see something like this (the following, naturally, isn't exactly SFW): post #2121346, post #2084428, post #2088769, post #2114027, post #2096211, post #2123253, post #2104787, and so on and so forth... Oh, and each of the aforementioned posts has been both uploaded and tagged as "safe" by a Contributor+ user.

If you ask me, trying to have ratings account for anything else than sexual content is a terrible idea for reasons that have been mentioned several times: no two people will ever agree on what is ok to show in what contexts (if you doubt me, Saduharta's list has vore as explicit. Try to give a sound argument as to why all vore should be...). Attempting to make a standard would just be shit-flinging and trying to get that thing you personally hate to be rated explicit. If this is to be done, I think it should be with a safe_for_work tag separate from the rating system. At least that is something for which people can kinda come to an agreement. Maybe.

Alright, here you have a point. Things that can be objectively described with a tag (e.g., vore) - and, as such, blacklisted easily - probably should be excluded from this discussion.

And that's a part of the problem. Danbooru's rating system in its current state caters to those who - pardon me my British - come here to touch themselves.

I think it's much less like that and more like pandering to western society treating sexual things as some kind of special different explicit thing from murder and gore. So the ratings guidelines are, in fair turn, highly centralized on sexual concepts, even though they make mention to some other stuff.

And if you're saying that Safe is a little too lenient, well... Almost anything I would masturbate to that's marked as safe, I would probably change to Questionable, or would be weird for masturbating to.

People have different standards as to what they like to jerk their dick off to so changing certain posts from questionable to safe should be an action taken with regards to what the community in general would think. I do agree though that the Safe rating is more biased towards sex and doesn't really include violence, blood, and goes into the equation. Something like impalement or decapitation would be rated as questionable in places like Europe. Then again, this site is created off American ground.

Also, should we go ahead and come up with a special blacklist for Safebooru?

It's very simple. The ratings system is "biased" toward sex because it is a ratings system designed to indicate levels of sexual content, for the purpose of easily finding/avoiding said content. It is not, and has to my knowledge never been, intended to tell you how suitable for kids, work, your mom, etc. a picture is. This has nothing to do with European vs. American anything.

Keep in mind that with another rating you'll do a great disservice to regular members who'll no longer be able to do something like touhou rating:s and will have to also type out something like touhou rating:risque in a second search. Also, how would you distinguish questionable from risque? You're thinking of adding another gray area to where we have one already.

Also, in general, if you're fine with viewing anime art gallery at work, you'll also be fine with girls in bikini. Nopan like post #2114027 is another story, I'd personally mark it as questionable. As for guro, it should be in your blacklist if you are going to view danbooru from work or someplace similar.

Perhaps, though, guro might be added to mandatory custom blacklist over safebooru, but I don't think something like overlaying system-wide blacklist exists currently.

Type-kun said:

Keep in mind that with another rating you'll do a great disservice to regular members who'll no longer be able to do something like touhou rating:s and will have to also type out something like touhou rating:risque in a second search.

A great disservice to regular members, huh? If regular members actually need to see both at the same time, you can always create an umbrella metatag which would include both "safe" and "risque" posts, and call it something like "rating:oldsafe".

Also, how would you distinguish questionable from risque?

I'm hesitant to draw the line here, since it's not my area of expertise. I'd like to hear the opinions of other Danbooru members first.

You're thinking of adding another gray area to where we have one already.

Quite the opposite. The current howto:rate is indeed one huge gray area. And that's exactly why creating an additional rating would make the color transitions more pronounced, so to speak.

Also, in general, if you're fine with viewing anime art gallery at work, you'll also be fine with girls in bikini.

It's not just about work... Did you even read the thread? Also, there is a difference between just "girls in bikini" and "girls with exaggerated proportions wearing skimpy bikinis in suggestive poses".

Nopan like post #2114027 is another story, I'd personally mark it as questionable.

Does that mean you consider the rest of the posts I linked to be "safe"?

D'Eye said:

Does that mean you consider the rest of the posts I linked to be "safe"?

For what it's worth, back when I used to tag safe as meaning "safe for work" (in the earlier days of Danbooru), I would have tagged all of the posts you listed as questionable, except for post #2084428. That one's debatable, but I'm willing to be lenient with most tasteful one-piece swimsuits.

Personally, I don't think there's any meaningful way that Danbooru can tag or otherwise indicate "safe for work". "Safe" is obviously a vague term, which is why we have the guidelines we do, to try and make it objective - but "safe for work" carries an implied meaning of "safe for your workplace", and that's a standard that varies immensely from one workplace to the next.

To go back to fossilnix's earlier example of "passionate homosexual kisses":

• in some places, it'll have no consequences (except maybe a flirty wink from the guy who saw it)
• in other places, it'll have no obvious consequences, but then you always seem to get passed over for raises or promotion
• in some places with "promoting immoral behaviour" laws, you may be fired if your boss decides to make an issue of it
• in other places with "promoting immoral behaviour" laws, you might get publicly flogged (and likely also fired)

Now admittedly, people in places like the last are not likely to risk browsing Danbooru at work, but the point is this isn't the kind of call Danbooru (in its vague collective identity) can or should be making; it's too dependent on factors completely out of our control.

Regarding the later direction the discussion took, I'm not opposed in principle to expanding the current ratings, but I think it could be tricky to do so usefully. I'm inclined to agree with Type-kun that it's more likely to just make things fuzzier: it'll be hard to avoid the impression that "safe" and "explicit" stay the same, but now there are two types of "questionable". (Also, as proven in a number of studies, humans get a lot worse at choosing when there are more than three choices.) Still, if anyone comes up with some solid proposed guidelines, it's worth at least considering.

On a side note (but still somewhat related): I didn't realise safebooru (the local one, not safebooru.org) was back, though it apparently has been for some time; I've been away longer than I thought, I guess. I seem to recall that in its original incarnation, it also avoided NSFW ads - I think by the method of not showing any at all. Ads have been gone on Danbooru for quite a while now, but issue #1703 (two years old, admittedly) suggests that they might come back eventually; is there any sort of promise that if they do, safebooru will still be limited to "safe" ads? I had a quick look through the forum, but couldn't find anything talking about it.

Drive-by necrobump:

As the instigator of the change linked, I can tell you why it was proposed and implemented: it's because "worksafe" is a thoroughly meaningless label. It has no useful content and no actionable definition. The variation is so broad that nobody could ever agree on what constitutes worksafe. By doing away with the suggestion that our ratings have anything to do with anyone's workplace, at least we could avoid starting with a misleading expectation and try to define somewhat less vague and more applicable standard that'd be useful to the people who actually put in the work of maintaining it.

Now, for the wiki page. The author has a very firm grasp of syntax, thank you very much, and intended to say exactly what has been said, which should be obvious from the surrounding context. It's explicitly not a goal, because it's a stupid goal and anything done under the pretence of trying to qualify how "offensive" or "family friendly" something is going to be at the expense of other, actually useful information. Note also that the line that offended you so much (which, btw, said "if you're offended by sex", not as you implied have a problem with the ratings) explained rather thoroughly the underlying motivation. Not doing great on the reading comprehension there. It's a simple statement of fact -- no rating system is ever going to be bulletproof, so if you really, really don't want to encounter any sex ever, danbooru is a bad use of your time and it'd be a lie to say otherwise. Danbooru has always been about categorising and curating a specific database of content, content that is very likely to include porn, and not anything else.

Now, about the 4th rating -- it was already mentioned in the original thread that people do really badly when confronted with more than 3 choices, but if you truly want to implement something like that, I'd strongly suggest doing it essentially separately from the 3 ratings and as a "supersafe" whitelist on top of current rating:s. Hell, you could implement it with a tag and call it safebooru_ready or something. Don't introduce further subdivisions between q and s, the line is fuzzy enough as it is. And it's an absolutely monumental task. Back when I proposed the original definitions, the primary objection was that it was too big a change ever to be implemented, not that it wouldn't be a good one. That was when the post count was probably not even 5% of what it is now. Roughly 75%, or 1.5M images currently in the DB are rating:s, so trying to recategorise that would be futile. Your best shot is to whitelist a "certified supersafe" subset of that, and have a small, but robust fraction of it by vetting content in.

Does Safebooru have any blacklists on certain tags or is it just posts with a Safe rating?

tapnek said:

Does Safebooru have any blacklists on certain tags or is it just posts with a Safe rating?

Was just safe rating at first, but as of Nov 6, 2014 the following tags are also filtered out:

toddlercon|toddler|diaper|tentacle|rape|bestiality|beastiality|lolita|loli|nude|shota|pussy|penis

Toks said:

Was just safe rating at first, but as of Nov 6, 2014 the following tags are also filtered out:

toddlercon|toddler|diaper|tentacle|rape|bestiality|beastiality|lolita|loli|nude|shota|pussy|penis

Might want to filter guro as well since some posts with that tag are rated Safe. By the way, some posts with tentacles aren't necessarily sex-related such as some innocent monster girls. And maybe filtering tags such as toddler and diaper may not be such a good idea. Don't forget that lolita is aliased to lolita fashion, which has perfectly safe posts.

tapnek said:

Might want to filter guro as well since some posts with that tag are rated Safe. By the way, some posts with tentacles aren't necessarily sex-related such as some innocent monster girls. And maybe filtering tags such as toddler and diaper may not be such a good idea. Don't forget that lolita is aliased to lolita fashion, which has perfectly safe posts.

The filter doesn't account for aliases, so it doesn't filter out lolita_fashion or tentacles currently.
http://safebooru.donmai.us/posts?tags=tentacles
http://safebooru.donmai.us/posts?tags=lolita_fashion

This filter was added after something or another to do with credit card companies/stripe/whatever, so I assume the reason things like diaper are filtered out is because they specifically requested it.

Toks said:

This filter was added after something or another to do with credit card companies/stripe/whatever, so I assume the reason things like diaper are filtered out is because they specifically requested it.

Probably, since filtering art like post #1672782 is weird. I guess they think danbooru is a porn site where diapers are fetish stuff.

There's no convincing them anyway but there's not much to lose in the process. Should I make a bigger list of tags to filter or will that put too much load on the server?