It was suggested in forum #154001 that there should be more consistency between the tags for fourth-wall interactions. I felt that it would be good to have a separate forum thread for the discussing the current state of these tags and deciding where to go from here.

As of right now, most tags describing interactions with the viewer follow the pov_*, *_pov, *_viewer or incoming_* templates. Exceptions to these include fourth_wall, reaching_out, 2d_dating (sort of), and pov itself — feel free to let me know there are any others I missed. Most of these tags are pretty clear in their intended meaning, and I don't think it would be very productive to tinker much with the existing tag templates in order to make them all fit the same format, but we might be able to improve this system by finding tags that overlap and merging them for consistency.

There are a couple pairs of tags that stand out to me as possibly redundant to one another. One is attacking_viewer and incoming_attack. Is there a circumstance in which an attack directed at the viewer should have one of these tags but not both? If not, we should consider aliasing one of them to the other.

The other two tags are incoming_food and pov_feeding. Incoming_food is consistent with tags like incoming_gift and incoming_kiss, but pov_feeding is the older and more populated of the two. Is pov_feeding just incoming_food + feeding, and if so, is it really necessary?

If you can think of any other tags in the same vein as these that could benefit from being better consolidated or renamed for consistency, please respond with suggestions.

I noticed that the difference between the incoming_food and pov_feeding tags is that pov_feeding states that it is "When a character in the image is shown feeding the viewer, or vice versa" (emphasis mine). I believe that a pov shot of the viewer feeding a character in view should be separated from the viewer being fed and that the two tags concerning the viewer being fed should be combined.

I browsed through the pov_feeding tag to find instances in which it was used to denote the viewer feeding someone. I didn't disable my blacklist for this, so it might not be 100% comprehensive but it's pretty close.
post #3200786
post #2925128
post #2875782
post #2830995
post #2679028
post #2274861
post #2109097
post #2110628
post #1767658 (which is mis-tagged)
post #1560452
post #1556242
post #1509073
post #1535487
post #1505900 and children
post #1504601
post #1502855
post #1495707
post #1484850
post #1409097
post #414503
post #372240
post #9744
In these posts, both occur simultaneously:
post #3525912
post #2486749

@Zurreak Thanks, I hadn't even realized that pov_feeding's wording explicitly allowed it to be used for two entirely different things. Ugh, I had been thinking about simply having that tag implicate feeding and incoming_food, but now I'm wondering if we'd be better off scrapping it altogether and replacing it with specific, unambiguous tags. It makes no sense at all to have one tag with two meanings.

I found topic #6639 and one of the suggestions there was to create fed_by_viewer for posts where the viewer is feeding a character. Would that tag, and feeding incoming_food be sufficient to replace the current function of pov_feeding?

iridescent_slime said:

I found topic #6639 and one of the suggestions there was to create fed_by_viewer for posts where the viewer is feeding a character. Would that tag, and feeding incoming_food be sufficient to replace the current function of pov_feeding?

Yes, it certainly would. And as Hillside Moose mentioned, pov_feeding doesn't necessitate a reference point so it isn't always suitable for the pov tag. Getting it off of a name which includes "pov" in it should make things clearer for taggers.

For the sake of completion I decided to go back and check the posts in pov_feeding which my blacklist blocked before and also the status:deleted posts. I found 2 more:
post #1321358
post #3267119

With that, the lists I've provided should be comprehensive.

iridescent_slime said:

There are a couple pairs of tags that stand out to me as possibly redundant to one another. One is attacking_viewer and incoming_attack. Is there a circumstance in which an attack directed at the viewer should have one of these tags but not both? If not, we should consider aliasing one of them to the other.

Looking through them, I couldn't see any functional difference between the two tags, though it looks like they somehow managed to maintain little to no overlap. Incoming_attack is much older, so it could be that attacking_viewer was created under the assumption that no such tag already existed. Unless someone has an explanation for how these two tags differ, my vote would be for aliasing incoming_attack to attacking_viewer since the latter is more immediately obvious in its purpose.

blindVigil said:

Looking through them, I couldn't see any functional difference between the two tags, though it looks like they somehow managed to maintain little to no overlap. Incoming_attack is much older, so it could be that attacking_viewer was created under the assumption that no such tag already existed. Unless someone has an explanation for how these two tags differ, my vote would be for aliasing incoming_attack to attacking_viewer since the latter is more immediately obvious in its purpose.

I'm actually a bit conflicted about which tag has the more useful wording. Incoming_attack has the obvious disadvantage of not specifying who is being attacked, which can lead to mistagging. There are already a number of cases like post #743378 where it was apparently used as a synonym of attack.

On the other hand, that slightly broader wording could be beneficial for finding images like post #854787 where the viewer is being attacked but no attacker is in sight. Yes, I know the current wiki definition doesn't allow this, but wikis can be changed when doing so helps improve search. The transitive verb in attacking_viewer seems to imply that a character in the image is doing the attacking, so this tag might be construed to exclude posts where the viewer is under attack by no one in particular. I might just be reading into it too deeply, though. Semantics are hard.

iridescent_slime said:

Incoming_attack has the obvious disadvantage of not specifying who is being attacked, which can lead to mistagging. There are already a number of cases like post #743378 where it was apparently used as a synonym of attack.

I don't think it's as unclear as it first seems. Danbooru's current tagging convention for actions directed towards the viewer is "incoming_*". There are several tags in this format; see the wiki page for pov for examples.

For this reason and the reason you pointed out, I personally believe that incoming_attack is the better way to phrase the unified tag.

After a couple weeks with no further discussion, fed_by_viewer has been created and pov_feeding has been split up between this and incoming_food, with a handful of other mistagged posts being corrected to incoming_drink or incoming_pocky_kiss. Given the ambiguous nature of pov_feeding, requesting an alias to incoming_food seemed like asking for trouble as fed_by_viewer posts made up a higher percentage of it than anticipated.

The bulk update request #2341 is active.

create alias attacking_viewer -> incoming_attack

Reason: Same thing. I cleaned up a handful of incoming_attack posts that were really just attack. Perhaps the similarly named incoming_punch tag is causing confusion?

EDIT: The bulk update request #2341 (forum #163851) has been approved by @evazion.

The bulk update request #2341 (forum #163851) has been approved by @evazion.