Lately, i've seen many discussions about how outdated Danbooru's rules are, what can be considered questionable and what safe, new users complaining about things not being written in the rules/finding loopholes in rules, the list goes on.

Is there a "need" to re-write the rules, FAQs, How-Tos? Why and why not?

I think a well thought-out set of new/rewritten rules could benefit danbooru, but at the same time "don't fix what's not broken" (altough the safe/questionable discussion still remains).

O boy...

Just for relevance, issue #4415. And yes some wikis need to be rewritten.

A big problem is the amount of how to/about/help etc suffixes and the fact that some articles are only linked in a single other article, making finding them pretty hard.

BTW I rewrote part of about:mod_queue yesterday due to very old cringy comments about "mod queue masters" that nobody ever bothered to clean up.

nonamethanks said:

BTW I rewrote part of about:mod_queue yesterday due to very old cringy comments about "mod queue masters" that nobody ever bothered to clean up.

Most of those "cringy comments" were thanks to the efforts of @lady_garegga who took the initiative to flesh out the documentation wikis at a time when most of those wikis were either barebones or nonexistent. Their writing style was a bit playful in tone for something as serious as a help page, but let's not be too hasty to dismiss those efforts as cringy when few other users have ever taken on the task of codifying this site's various unwritten rules.

Well, my main gripe is that that wiki made it seem like approvers are some kind of special being that needs to be put on a pedestal. At the end of the day it's just a bunch of weeaboos looking at anime porn. That kind of language has caused confusion multiple times in the past, the latest example being forum #164270, and as danbooru is based on group effort, any language that makes it seem that a class of users is inherently better than another is just gonna cause problems.

iridescent_slime said:

Most of those "cringy comments" were thanks to the efforts of @lady_garegga who took the initiative to flesh out the documentation wikis at a time when most of those wikis were either barebones or nonexistent. Their writing style was a bit playful in tone for something as serious as a help page, but let's not be too hasty to dismiss those efforts as cringy when few other users have ever taken on the task of codifying this site's various unwritten rules.

There's to be said that those were made 7 years ago. They may have been up to standards back then, but both irony in internet as a whole and feel we want to convey have changed during these years.
I applaud their efforts, but by now they're a bit outdated. I think a fresh coat of paint is needed after 7 years.

On that note, also topic #8673 as reference

In terms of what's considered "safe", Danbooru has generally maintained that it's "all art clearly lacking sexual content". However, in practise this guideline has largely been employed by defining "sexual content" as scenarios in which sexual acts must be being hinted at, progressed toward or actually occurring, as if the viewer is imagined to be some kind of robot lacking any subtlety in regard to what most humans would define as lewd. Posts featuring characters undressing for the viewer, exposing another's underwear to others and showing off a majority of their body without actually showing any of the "naughty bits" are all currently viable candidates for a Safe rating so long as nothing "truly" sexual is explicitly shoved in the viewer's face - however, a number of people see fit to rate even that sort of thing as Safe.

At times it almost feels like some sort of absurd competition between users to see who can get away with rating the most outlandish posts as Safe, with stuff like post #3743774, post #3556974 and post #3840229 all being rated Safe upon upload. Even howto:rate states that "tasteful panty shots" are Safe, despite the phrase likely being an oxymoron to 90% of the population. While there are at least semi-innocent pantyshots (especially when they are not a focal point of a post), at this point the definition has been bastardized to the point where things such as post #3697936, post #3417934, post #3656323 and the aforementioned post #3840229 are all somehow being considered "tasteful".

The main thing that needs to happen at the moment is a review of why it was decreed that we should (in opposition to almost the entire rest of the world) be rating such content as Safe in the first place, and whether we want to continue to do so going forward. Without answering these questions, it is going to be very difficult to find any middle ground in a discussion about ratings.

It was pointed out before that some builders+ try to tag almost everything as safe because those posts tend to have a higher score, since they end up showing up on safebooru and skip rating blacklists too, as stupid as that sounds.

Is it possible to put Western artists into higher scrutiny within the ruling when uploading? Or does that sound like too much/cynical?

マローダー said:

Is it possible to put Western artists into higher scrutiny within the ruling when uploading? Or does that sound like too much/cynical?

No. It doesn’t really matter where the artist is from as long as the art is sufficiently anime-styled or the content is at least anime-related. (We have a good deal of western-style parodies. That Peanuts-style Touhou series comes to mind.) Western-styled art is already scrutinized more harshly and only a few approvers will even approve it.

マローダー said:

Is it possible to put Western artists into higher scrutiny within the ruling when uploading? Or does that sound like too much/cynical?

Good art is good art, regardless of who made it. Ideally, posts should be approved blindly in this regard, with no knowledge of who drew them. Applying more scrutiny on the basis of an artist's ancestry is not a good idea.

マローダー said:

Is it possible to put Western artists into higher scrutiny within the ruling when uploading? Or does that sound like too much/cynical?

Iirc, that was already a thing before, or people tried to make it a thing(I recall something about needing to meet two out three criteria; Japanese artist, Japanese style, and Japanese content), and in either case it didn't work out. It's already not uncommon for users to accuse Asian artists of being Western because of the style or content of their art, and any kind of rule like that is just giving people another excuse to flag perfectly acceptable art for no good reason.

AngryZapdos said:

Good art is good art, regardless of who made it. Ideally, posts should be approved blindly in this regard, with no knowledge of who drew them. Applying more scrutiny on the basis of an artist's ancestry is not a good idea.

blindVigil said:

Iirc, that was already a thing before, or people tried to make it a thing(I recall something about needing to meet two out three criteria; Japanese artist, Japanese style, and Japanese content), and in either case it didn't work out. It's already not uncommon for users to accuse Asian artists of being Western because of the style or content of their art, and any kind of rule like that is just giving people another excuse to flag perfectly acceptable art for no good reason.

I completely understand don't worry, but my personal worry is that (and I don't know if it's just a string of bad luck of what I've seen or just my personal taste) I've seen some amount of art pieces from Western artists being approved with quality that in my opinion wouldn't really be approved here, but again, that's opinion based.

Before we start talking about several rules, can we first make a list of the rules that strikes the creator ( @Mysterious_Uploader ) as "bad".
Would be much better and admins can also see what are the concerns of the community because I also think that our rules are either heavily outdated or just worded poorly.

The entire "western art" discussion in the end boils down "Is it sakimichan_(style) or not?". It's a lost cause, at this day and age there are a lot of different artstyles, some western influenced by eastern, some eastern influenced by western.

In my opinion, another thing to mention is the "elitism" of this site, mainly found in some of it's users and it's rules. One of the rules states that "names should be written in japanese order (surname first, name last)". I've been in the touhou fandom for years, and not once have i heard someone refer to a character by their full name with surname followed by name. This also applies outside of Touhou though.
To search with characters that have their full name as tag, you need to remember their surname first (or type *, but this was a recent addition and not many users, especially "casuals", know about it). This is detrimental both to taggers and "casuals", who apparently aren't worthy enough to have a say.

I also feel like people aren't "rewarded" enough (since some people need also rewards, not just passion, or maybe lack passion completely) to keep tagme or other similar tags "clean", but i feel like this is not a discussion for this thread (altough maybe an addendum about them might fit in the rules?).

I got a somewhat bad proposal that could be refined into something better: a non-linear rating system which is based on boolean statements, namely "Is it sexual in nature?" and "Does it contain nudity?"
That way "sexual" artworks without nudity get properly tagged, and "artistic nudity" is kept separate from sexual artworks.

Given that there have been cases in the past of people blanket nuking the tagme tag just to get the numbers down, without actually tagging up the posts in question, I'd be very sceptical of any attempt to "reward" the removal of these tags.

It's best to keep names of characters and people should be in the order as originally used in the copyright. Changing that is just opening up a can of worms filled with pointless warring over whether x character is better known one way or another, and making character names harder to search for due to inconsistency based on these arbitrary decisions.

Mysterious_Uploader said:

I've been in the touhou fandom for years, and not once have i heard someone refer to a character by their full name with surname followed by name. This also applies outside of Touhou though.

Some searches I did on the shrinemaiden.org archive (the most prominent English-language Touhou webforum from roughly 2004-2019) -

"hakurei reimu": 179 results ("reimu hakurei": 508 results)
"kirisame marisa": 30 results ("marisa kirisame": 30 results)
"izayoi sakuya": 60 results ("sakuya izayoi": 256 results)
"konpaku youmu": 51 results ("youmu konpaku": 200 results)
"kochiya sanae": 71 results ("sanae kochiya": 241 results)

It's certainly less popular (except in Marisa's case, who has very few results with either ordering for some reason) but the Japanese name order is factually used a lot more than zero times, seemingly a third to a fifth of the Western order on average.

Mysterious_Uploader said:

To search with characters that have their full name as tag, you need to remember their surname first (or type *, but this was a recent addition and not many users, especially "casuals", know about it). This is detrimental both to taggers and "casuals", who apparently aren't worthy enough to have a say.

This is untrue if the Western-ordered name is aliased to the Japanese-ordered name, as it should be unless the character is obscure and never shows up on missed searches or inspires anyone to submit a BUR of their own initiative. I'm pretty sure all Touhou characters have aliases in place already.

skylightcrystal said:

It's best to keep names of characters and people should be in the order as originally used in the copyright. Changing that is just opening up a can of worms filled with pointless warring over whether x character is better known one way or another, and making character names harder to search for due to inconsistency based on these arbitrary decisions.

Making this thread is opening a can of worms in itself, so might as well go all the way down and clean it up instead of delaying inevitable discussions.
Character names should be ordered on a copyright case-by-case basis. Most western people use western name convention. Danbooru is a western site, it doesn't have a japanese translation and it's not particularly used by people from japan.

There's also the "original names over english" thing which is closely correlated. That rule was made more than 10 years, ago, back when games came out two years after the japanese release (if they did come out), and the site was mainly focused on anime (which americans have the not unique experience of having them sound very different from the original ones, and to set a standard they decided to use japanese names over english (and in that i agree).
The reason why fire emblem tags are in english and not in japanese now is because there's no official romanization (forum #157684). Other than the verdict itself opening up an enormous can of worms, it's still not satisfying for me since it doesn't cover usage. Again, Danbooru is a western site. So i don't see why names of characters of games that came out the same day both in the west and in jp should use japanese names, when only a very small, very passionate fraction of said community would know both names.
Choosing between jp and en should be on a case-by-case basis, it is possible to (and we should) default to the original names, but if evidence is provided that shows that only a small fraction of western people know japanese names, we should change them to english.
This already happened with pokemon names (but still not character names?), i don't see why it shouldn't happen for other copyrights.

7HS said:

This is untrue if the Western-ordered name is aliased to the Japanese-ordered name, as it should be unless the character is obscure and never shows up on missed searches or inspires anyone to submit a BUR of their own initiative. I'm pretty sure all Touhou characters have aliases in place already.

I took a moment to check, and it is true that most, but not all, Touhou characters have some form of alias, but the only ones with Japanese names that have the English order aliased to them are Hakurei Reimu and Kirisame Marisa.

For everyone else, of the ones that actually have an alias, it's something like Kazami Yuka being aliased to Kazami Yuuka or /kk to Kamishirasawa Keine. In most cases, not things I would consider very useful.

blindVigil said:

I took a moment to check, and it is true that most, but not all, Touhou characters have some form of alias, but the only ones with Japanese names that have the English order aliased to them are Hakurei Reimu and Kirisame Marisa.

For everyone else, of the ones that actually have an alias, it's something like Kazami Yuka being aliased to Kazami Yuuka or /kk to Kamishirasawa Keine. In most cases, not things I would consider very useful.

My bad, I should have checked before making an assumption.

Regardless, if the Western ordered names aren't aliased yet aren't showing up on missed searches, this seems to me like a solution in search of a problem.