The bulk update request #6450 has been rejected.

remove implication human (363469) -> mammal (3155219)

Reason: Retry of topic #33563

In our tagging system, human is considered a "form" rather than a "species" for most purposes, for example "anthro penetrating human" is considered a valid tag but "anthro penetrating sarcastic fringehead" not so much; we have "cat humanoid" but not "cat sarcastic fringeheadoid"; a post depicting only sarcastic fringeheads will not be deleted for irrelevancy, and so on.

In academic taxonomy, humans are primates just like bonobos, gorillas and orangutans. However, that implication would make it much harder to search for more "species-like" primate tags. Right now, human is in an awkward compromise between "scientifically correct" implications and not implying anything, like anthro/feral/humanoid/taur.

If a post containing an elf and a scalie is not tagged "mammal", then a post containing a human and a scalie should not be tagged "mammal" either IMHO.

EDIT: The bulk update request #6450 (forum #389860) has been rejected by @gattonero2001.

I think "mammal" is sufficiently broad that it isn't likely to interfere in searches, at least to the extent that implying primate would. Conversely, a person searching for mammals might well be expecting to include humans. I'd prefer to leave it as it is.

Who would this help? Are there people actually searching via "mammal"? That encompasses way too many things for me to imagine someone doing so regularly the same way someone would domestic_dog or dragon.

dsco said:
Who would this help? Are there people actually searching via "mammal"? That encompasses way too many things for me to imagine someone doing so regularly the same way someone would domestic_dog or dragon.

I imagine mammal is mostly used for blacklist negation. Like someone who isn't into scalies but doesn't mind seeing them might blacklist scalie -mammal.

You got a grand total of four people agreeing with you the last time you tried this. Do you really think doing it again will result differently?

votp said:
You got a grand total of four people agreeing with you the last time you tried this. Do you really think doing it again will result differently?

Methinks it's still worth exploring. If humans are treated as a form, maybe mammal wouldn't be a good tag to imply it to. Elves, harpies and mermaids are technically human, but not always mammalian, at least they aren't tagged human, most of the time. that's something I was a bit bothered by.

eta: more examples to make my point mermaid human solo, harpy human solo, minotaur human solo.

I understand what Gattoreno is trying to do, but I wouldn't say I fully agree with their bur.

wolfmanfur said:
Methinks it's still worth exploring. If humans are treated as a form, maybe mammal wouldn't be a good tag to imply it to. Elves, harpies and mermaids are technically human, but not always mammalian, at least they aren't tagged human, most of the time. that's something I was a bit bothered by.

eta: more examples to make my point mermaid human solo, harpy human solo, minotaur human solo.

I understand what Gattoreno is trying to do, but I wouldn't say I fully agree with their bur.

Those are humanoids.

dsco said:
Those are humanoids.

That doesn't discount anything I've said, though. Folks see a character that looks human, they tag human. I don't disagree that most of these are most probably mistagged, but in the same way as girly nobody reads the wiki and bases their definition on the name of the tag alone.

Add to that the fact the humanoid tags are liberal in their use. I don't expect the simpsons to not be tagged humanoid because of their yellow skin and cartoonish proportions, but I do expect characters that look nothing like a human to not be tagged humanoid. That's why making human a form tag would be beneficial if Gardevoirs are never supposed to be "anthro" and always supposed to be "humanoid" while looking inhuman.

I'd expect anime catgirls and dogboys to be cat_humanoid and dog_humanoid respectively. I don't expect this and this to be humanoid, but the former I'm afraid to change it, especially because Siral Exan touched the tags before, you can look at the tag history I forgot to pay attention months ago and added anthro to it because it looks like a rabbit robot thing, not a person, not a human. The latter was locked earlier, then apparently deleted. Look at the source, it looks nothing like a human.

So, the humanoid tags have 3 problems.
#1. Human gets used over them, as evidenced above.
#2. The characters in them often don't look human, human-ish maybe, but not human. Having a separate human form tag would help out finding human characters with small permutations like cat ears or a snake's body better and keep the humanized animal characters in the humanoid tags.
#3. The tags are near unusable for searching actual humanoids and such because of issue number 2 and is also undertagged because of issue number 1.

Alias human to humanoid if you want, that's at least something, but not doing anything about the underlying issue will never fix it.

Personally, I'm in favor of replacing the "humanoid" tag with... anything else. "Humanoid" is probably the least clear name possible to express the idea it's trying to without being a non-sequitr.

Almost every time I see that tag in the wild is misuse as a synonym for "anthro", which, while being the normal definition of the word, is explicitly not what the tag is intended for.

Domain: Eukaryota
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia

Humans are mammals

cactus said:
Domain: Eukaryota
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia

rainbow_shoebill said:
Humans are mammals

ought we imply ape as well, then?

lendrimujina said:
Personally, I'm in favor of replacing the "humanoid" tag with... anything else. "Humanoid" is probably the least clear name possible to express the idea it's trying to without being a non-sequitr.

near-human?

sipothac said:
ought we imply ape as well, then?

ape is way more specific than mammal. Ultimately mammal isn't even really a useful tag to begin with, but removing this implication would mean needing to fix the tags on hundreds of thousands of posts because then they may no longer need mammal, and the gain that we'd get from doing so is non-existent and not worth anyone's time.

definitelynotafurry4 said:

but removing this implication would mean needing to fix the tags on hundreds of thousands of posts because then they may no longer need mammal,

Probably write a script to remove mammal from posts tagged human. If there's another mammal in the image the implication stops it from getting removed.

I've said this before and I'll say it again: us classifying humans as mammals is a "Mathematician's Answer".

That is to say, it may be true in a strict sense, but that being the case is completely useless to our purposes at best.

Edit: Didn't notice I got replied to.

cloudpie said:
near-human?

Yeah, "near-human" is MUCH better than "humanoid".

cloudpie said:
near-human?

That could be a problem for non-animal based creatures, like banette and gengar.

watsit said:
That could be a problem for non-animal based creatures, like banette and gengar.

The "humanoid" tag is not meant for them anyway. The only way they're even remotely "humanoid" is being referred to as such in game mechanics.

Lack of something else to tag them with is not a good enough reason to add a tag that doesn't apply to them.

lendrimujina said:
The "humanoid" tag is not meant for them anyway.

I'm pretty sure it is. They aren't anthro as they're not based on some animal, they're not feral as their posture is too human-like, they're not taur... what other form would they be tagged as if not humanoid/human-like?

definitelynotafurry4 said:
ape is way more specific than mammal. Ultimately mammal isn't even really a useful tag to begin with, but removing this implication would mean needing to fix the tags on hundreds of thousands of posts because then they may no longer need mammal, and the gain that we'd get from doing so is non-existent and not worth anyone's time.

I was mostly just pointing out that listing the taxons and saying "they are mammals, tho" were just kind of a non-usefull points because they could be extended to tagging them with more specific taxons as well which I don't think most users would support.

lendrimujina said:
The "humanoid" tag is not meant for them anyway. The only way they're even remotely "humanoid" is being referred to as such in game mechanics.

Lack of something else to tag them with is not a good enough reason to add a tag that doesn't apply to them.

they stand on 2 legs, have 2 arms, and they're not animalistic enough to be anthro, that's humanoid.

watsit said:
I'm pretty sure it is. They aren't anthro as they're not based on some animal, they're not feral as their posture is too human-like, they're not taur... what other form would they be tagged as?

I'd still tag them as anthro, personally.

You might disagree with me on that, but I just know treating them like elves or nekomimi (which is what the humanoid tag ACTUALLY MEANS, things that just barely skirt the "no human stuff" rule) is pure mistagging.

lendrimujina said:
I'd still tag them as anthro, personally.

You might disagree with me on that, but I just know treating them like elves or nekomimi (which is what the humanoid tag ACTUALLY MEANS, things that just barely skirt the "no human stuff" rule) is pure mistagging.

According to the wiki:

humanoid says:
Non-human creatures that resemble humans, with minimal or no animalistic features. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Fantasy races like dwarves, elves, fairies, goblins, and orcs.
• Humanlike aliens, angels, demons, gargoyles, monsters, robots, and undead.

They're human-like monsters or undead with little to no animalistic features, while anthro is "This tag is short for "anthropomorphic animals", which wouldn't apply.

lendrimujina said:
You might disagree with me on that, but I just know treating them like elves or nekomimi (which is what the humanoid tag ACTUALLY MEANS, things that just barely skirt the "no human stuff" rule) is pure mistagging.

that's not, and never has been what the humanoid tag means. for tagging purposes humanoid is just any humanoid character that's not "furry" and not human. that's plant_humanoids, aeromorphs, robots, living_dolls, demons, aliens, whatever.

sipothac said:
that's not, and never has been what the humanoid tag means. for tagging purposes humanoid is just any humanoid character that's not "furry" and not human. that's plant_humanoids, aeromorphs, robots, living_dolls, demons, aliens, whatever.

Wait. Seriously? I'd still call an anthrofied inanimate object "anthro", but...

...
...we probably should have a "near-human" tag, though, even if not as a replacement.

And in any case, "humanoid" as it is is too misused and vague to stay. It's one of the most misused tag families on the site, and the many, many subtags don't help that misuse.

lendrimujina said:
Wait. Seriously? I'd still call an anthrofied inanimate object "anthro", but...

...
...we probably should have a "near-human" tag, though, even if not as a replacement.

And in any case, "humanoid" as it is is too misused and vague to stay. It's one of the most misused tag families on the site, and the many, many subtags don't help that misuse.

maybe humanoid is a bit stretched thin, but honestly, I feel like it's probably a bigger problem that we literally just don't have form tags for the non-humanoid version of these types of characters.

lendrimujina said:
And in any case, "humanoid" as it is is too misused and vague to stay. It's one of the most misused tag families on the site, and the many, many subtags don't help that misuse.

I don't disagree that it's probably the most misused tag on the site, but I don't think there anything else it can be called (without losing applicability to what it's meant to cover) that wouldn't equally be misused.

Why would anthro-planes and gengar not count as anthros? They're still more animal featured than human.

oopsitripped said:
Why would anthro-planes and gengar not count as anthros? They're still more animal featured than human.

Yeah I'm not so sure about those especially the planes. aeromorph doesn't imply humanoid. I thought the point of humanoid was that they have a humanlike face

cloudpie said:
Yeah I'm not so sure about those especially the planes. aeromorph doesn't imply humanoid. I thought the point of humanoid was that they have a humanlike face

Pretty sure the point is that they are more like humans than animals/monsters, kind of like most japanese "monster"-girls.

cloudpie said:
Yeah I'm not so sure about those especially the planes. aeromorph doesn't imply humanoid. I thought the point of humanoid was that they have a humanlike face

aeromorph dosn't imply anything because it's aliased to just living_aircraft, which includes both aircraft_humanoids and dire_aircrafts.
presumably it's not aliased to aircraft_humanoid, because the alias was created before dire_aircraft (and dire_machine in general) really took off. _heh

sipothac said:
aeromorph dosn't imply anything because it's aliased to just living_aircraft, which includes both aircraft_humanoids and dire_aircrafts.
presumably it's not aliased to aircraft_humanoid, because the alias was created before dire_aircraft (and dire_machine in general) really took off. _heh

My b, I meant to write living_aircraft, but I didn't realize aircraft_humanoid was for the "anthro" ones and dire was for the "feral" ones. TIL

chrysalia93 said:
Pretty sure the point is that they are more like humans than animals/monsters, kind of like most japanese "monster"-girls.

Well, quiet a few "Monster girls" are more animal/monster like than what gets tagged as anthro. Creatures like harpies and centaurs have inhuman body plans for example but they retain a human facial shape. From the wiki the biggest divide between "anthro" and "animal humanoid" is the face but even that's not always the case. Last time I brought up Ankha as an example, she often gets depicted as a yellow "cat girl" with a lack of a nose but she gets tagged as anthro most of the time. Likewise even if the wiki mentions noses, and I assume they mean a facial structure like the Mithra from Final Fantasy which is a human face with the bottom of the nose in a different color, for animal humanoids sometimes it's hard to tell if they're meant to have a different facial structure due to stylization and simplification which in anime inspired art styles is pretty common to stylized the muzzle to a button nose when it's not drawn from the side.

watsit said:
According to the wiki:
They're human-like monsters or undead with little to no animalistic features, while anthro is "This tag is short for "anthropomorphic animals", which wouldn't apply.

This has always baffled me becourse I love all anthros, as in any character that has humanlike qualities while not a human. There are a many posts in the not_furry tag that I've looked at and liked.

Not tagging anthro on human characters makes sense, but forbidding tagging it on aeromorphs and pokemons is where the line should be drawn since none of them are humanoid.

I heard somewhere the tag 'furry' was its precursor, but was invalidated due to misuse ad that's how the tag anthro replaces it

At least lets have this compromise, I would like to use a 'creature' form tag for characters that are not animalike enough, but very much not human also. Characters like Sullivan and Mike from Monsters inc would fit nicely in there.

wolfmanfur said:
This has always baffled me becourse I love all anthros, as in any character that has humanlike qualities while not a human. There are a many posts in the not_furry tag that I've looked at and liked.

The problem with having the tag mean "a character with humanlike qualities while not human" is that can also refer to the_lion_king characters. Basically any non-human thing capable of speech, human-like actions, thoughts, or expressions. Essentially every post here would be tagged anthro.

wolfmanfur said:
Not tagging anthro on human characters makes sense, but forbidding tagging it on aeromorphs and pokemons is where the line should be drawn since none of them are humanoid.

anthro can apply perfectly well to (certain) pokemon, like lucario, lopunny, midnight_lycanroc, etc. It doesn't apply to aeromorphs because they're based on machines, not animals.

I'm just not seeing any purpose in this deimplication

1. humanoid is so broad that a humanoid may not be mammalian despite being "near-human" in appearance, so that tag can't imply mammal. Some humanoids are mammalian (e.g. a cat humanoid), some humanoids are definitely not mammals (e.g. a lot of characters under fish humanoid)

2. human doesn't imply ape because that would cause the tag to almost entirely consist of posts depicting humans. While scientifically correct, nobody is searching "ape" on this site to see humans. Mammal is so broad that there's no risk of this happening.

3. If someone is searching for something exclusively including mammals, or trying to only see posts with scalies or avians, I don't think deimplicating human from mammal would be useful.

watsit said:
The problem with having the tag mean "a character with humanlike qualities while not human" is that can also refer to the_lion_king characters. Basically any non-human thing capable of speech, human-like actions, thoughts, or expressions. Essentially every post here would be tagged anthro.

If that's your concern, I can assure you there are probably posts mistagged anthro under this tag. My idea wouldn't make the problem any worse, but it needs to be specified those characters have to stand on 2 legs to qualify for anthro. If not, at best they are semi-anthros. Standing upright like a human is a humanlike quality too.

wolfmanfur said:
If that's your concern, I can assure you there are probably posts mistagged anthro under this tag. My idea wouldn't make the problem any worse, but it needs to be specified those characters have to stand on 2 legs to qualify for anthro. If not, at best they are semi-anthros. Standing upright like a human is a humanlike quality too.

I wouldn't doubt there are posts mistagged with anthro. Mistags are a fact of life, but the goal is to make useful tags while minimizing mistags. It's not an exact science, and there can be discussions on altering tags to reduce mistags without sacrificing utility. But broadening anthro too much to avoid mistags will make it not useful to tag at all, effectively removing a tag without something to fill the gap.

It's not just about standing on two legs, as there are plenty of bipedal ferals (even IRL, there are plenty of non-human species that are biped, e.g. birds, kangaroos), but about having human-like proportions and stature while being (non-human) animal-based.

The more I think about this, the more I start to believe that this would be for the best. Hear me out.

This is primarily a furry art site, yes? If someone actually searches mammal, I expect that they're looking for anthropomorphic mammals primarily. Not humans. Maybe ferals, maybe animal_humanoids, maybe taurs as well, but not humans.

Maybe it's not super useful for searching because mammal is such a vast category that covers so many different species, but it would be far more useful for negation if humans weren't included. Unfortunately, a basic search like human_on_feral -mammal returns no results because it itself implies mammal. Otherwise, this would be a useful search for people looking to find human on reptile, or human on avian, or human on dragon etc. without having to use a ton of ~'s.

I feel pretty certain that anyone actually using the mammal tag is not using it with humans in mind. If you want humans, you just search for humans. If you want mammalian furries, you use mammal, presumably. I don't think keeping this implication actually serves any functional purpose whatsoever, but getting rid of it would make certain searches like the aforementioned human_on_anthro -mammal possible. Keeping this implication in place only closes down search possibilities without any benefit.

If this is going to be kept in spite of that, I think we really need to have the virtually human humanoid species such as elves and orcs imply mammal as well, for the sake of consistency. So you have a human, which is a mammal, but then the human's ears get kinda long and pointy and all of a sudden it isn't a mammal anymore? That makes absolutely no goddamn sense, lol. Either both humans and elves are tagged as mammal, or neither of them are.

Ah great. Surely this would not head into another "tag-pocalypse" situation, right?

OP's reason made me frustrated. I'm sure the majority of the users don't mind seeing humans on some posts. Besides, they don't immediately think "ape!" when they see a human behind an anthropomorphic cat.

Not jumping into complex specifics, but if I remember correctly, elves are mythical creatures and had lots of interpretations about them, while humans are too common and thoroughly defined (for now).

I don't think this is a tagging problem. It's that one specific type of group of users' problem. And I mean those that wanted to exclude humans on their searches. No need to overcomplicate this. Just help them figure out how while not affecting every other mammals on their search.

scaliespe said:
The more I think about this, the more I start to believe that this would be for the best. Hear me out.

This is primarily a furry art site, yes? If someone actually searches mammal, I expect that they're looking for anthropomorphic mammals primarily. Not humans. Maybe ferals, maybe animal_humanoids, maybe taurs as well, but not humans.

Maybe it's not super useful for searching because mammal is such a vast category that covers so many different species, but it would be far more useful for negation if humans weren't included. Unfortunately, a basic search like human_on_feral -mammal returns no results because it itself implies mammal. Otherwise, this would be a useful search for people looking to find human on reptile, or human on avian, or human on dragon etc. without having to use a ton of ~'s.

I feel pretty certain that anyone actually using the mammal tag is not using it with humans in mind. If you want humans, you just search for humans. If you want mammalian furries, you use mammal, presumably. I don't think keeping this implication actually serves any functional purpose whatsoever, but getting rid of it would make certain searches like the aforementioned human_on_anthro -mammal possible. Keeping this implication in place only closes down search possibilities without any benefit.

If this is going to be kept in spite of that, I think we really need to have the virtually human humanoid species such as elves and orcs imply mammal as well, for the sake of consistency. So you have a human, which is a mammal, but then the human's ears get kinda long and pointy and all of a sudden it isn't a mammal anymore? That makes absolutely no goddamn sense, lol. Either both humans and elves are tagged as mammal, or neither of them are.

The problem with adding non-extant lifeforms to real-world hierarchies is that not only will the applicability differ from setting to setting, but in many cases is simply not verifiable. This would be similar to, say, the issue of kobolds as canines, goblinoids, or reptiles/dragon. I've always found "elf" itself a fairly... dubious tag, given realistically it only means "humanoid with pointy ears", with orcs being likewise vast in what their tag applies to (LotR short goblin orcs? Early D&D and Japanese pigmen? Warhammer/Warcraft Greenskins?).

Arguments that breasts make a mammal are non-applicable, as any character drawn with breasts would be a mammal to the same logic. Warmbloodedness, similarly making dinosaurs and avians "mammals", albeit difficult to define visually.

I don't get why humans are not part of the standard tagging hierarchy, as logically if human implied ape, people who were searching "-human" or had human blacklisted would not care. People who wished to search for nonhuman apes would simply "ape -human". Species-level tags are the simplest thing to exclude from a search or alter on a blacklist. Is there a tangible, functional difference between humans divided from every other species hierarchy tag versus being treated like every other organism in terms of how you would search? What is this difference? What situation would this create for searching that is not arguable for any other species with the same desired outcome? How would it affect tagging through implications?

Honestly, it seems more logical, to me, to just implicate human > ape and be done with it. How do we handle cavemen and proto-humans? Would transitory states of homo prior to recognisably anatomically-modern humans get an ape tag, or a human tag? This seems like a mess that doesn't really need to be a mess.

The bulk update request #6450 (forum #389860) has been rejected by @gattonero2001.

wandering_spaniel said:
Yeah I'm not so sure about those especially the planes. aeromorph doesn't imply humanoid. I thought the point of humanoid was that they have a humanlike face

No, the point of anthro and humanoid was to split them into furry and not-furry, for easy blacklisting/searchability.
Our anthro tag is short for 'anthropomorphic animal' (='furries'), not just 'anthropomorphic'. The latter would cover nearly everything on the site except for humans.

The face isn't all that relevant. Things like object_head and headless ghosts go under humanoid too. Even legs aren't a strict requirement, since not all 'humanoid' elementals, genies etc. have those.

On a good day, not_furry anthro should return zero matches.