PTR - Tags guide
- Generic tags
- Clothing tags
- Clothing namespace when?
- Clothing terminology
- Clothing materials
- Clothing attributes
- Clothing guidelines
- Panty types
- On siblings and parents
- Gender tags and why Belverk is our PR person
- The species namespace must be destroyed
- Canonical Namespaces
- Non-canonical Namespaces
- General PTR Guidelines
- Quicksync
- Bad Tag Shaming
Generic tags
On the Elimination of Underscores
"eliminate the underscore menace from ptr"
- Beryl
"preferred way (for PTR and such) is no underscores"
- prkc
"kill all underscores!"
- Chad
"> Underscores"
- Judas hopps of Sotheby's
"Must I continue my holy crusade against the dark force of underscores?"
- Var
Because Hydrus, and by extension PTR, do not utilize spaces as separation characters like most boorus, we are free to utilize them in tags. This means that rather than needing our tags to be character:some_name
, we can instead write character:some name
. Due to this being much cleaner, please sibling tags with underscores to their equivalent with spaces when possible.
Why doesn't Hydrus automatically convert underscores to spaces?
In short, sometimes we do want to keep an underscore in the tag, such as when a series utilizes one in its canonical name. Due to this, we cannot have parsers automatically convert underscores to spaces, and must do so manually.
Clothing tags
Clothing namespace when?
The people deserver a clothing namespace!
-when Suika gets off his ass or we clone him
-first we purge it when we get the tools so it can be done properly
Clothing terminology
edited copy of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothing_terminology
Clothing terminology comprises the names of individual garments and classes of garments, as well as the specialized vocabularies of the trades that have designed, manufactured, marketed and sold clothing over hundreds of years.
Clothing terminology ranges from the arcane (watchet, a pale blue color name from the 16th century) (t-shirt), and changes over time in response to fashion which in turn reflects social, artistic, and political trends. For PTR purposes understanding clothing terminology is important to realize and actualize the value of the clothing:
namespace. Certain attributes are to be tagged without a namespace while in some instances you have to include it with the article of clothing to optimally convey the meaning e.g. clothing:frilled apron
.
Categories
At its broadest, clothing terminology may be said to include names for:
- Classes of basic garments: shirt, coat, skirt, dress, suit, underwear, swimsuit
- Length, for skirts and dresses: micro-mini, mini, tea length, ballerina length, full length, midi, maxi
- Contemporary and historical styles of garments: corset, frock coat, t-shirt, doublet
- Parts of garments: sleeve, collar, lapel
- Styles of these: juliette sleeve, Peter Pan collar
- Clothing details: pocket, french cuff, zipper
- Functional uses: base layer, insulation layer, outer shell
- Traditional garments: cheongsam, kilt, dirndl, fustanella
- Fashions and "anti-fashions": preppy, New Look, hip-hop, rational dress
- Fabrics: denim, wool, chiffon, velvet, satin, silk, cotton
- Fabric treatments: fabric painting, transfers, ikat, tie-dye, batik
- Fabric manipulation: pleat, tuck, gather, smocking
- Colors and dyes: madder red, indigo, isabella
- Sewing terms: cut, hem, armscye, lining
- Patternmaking terms: sloper, toile
- Methods of manufacture: haute couture, bespoke tailoring, ready-to-wear
- Retailers' terms:
- Size ranges: Small, Medium, Large, XL (Extra Large), XXL (Double Extra Large), Junior, Misses, Plus Size, Big-and-Tall
- Retail seasons: back-to-school, holiday, resort, seasonal
- Departments: special occasion, sportswear, bridge fashion
- Degrees of formality: formal wear, bridal, business casual
- Market: high end, high street, ethical consumer, cut price
Persistence

Despite the constant introduction of new terms by fashion designers, clothing manufacturers, and marketers, the names for several basic garment classes in English are very stable over time. Gown, shirt/skirt, frock, and coat are all attested back to the early medieval period.
Gown (from Medieval Latin gunna) was a basic clothing term for hundreds of years, referring to a garment that hangs from the shoulders. In Medieval and Renaissance England gown referred to a loose outer garment worn by both men and women, sometimes short, more often ankle length, with sleeves. By the 18th century gown had become a standard category term for a women's dress, a meaning it retained until the mid-20th century. Only in the last few decades has gown lost this general meaning in favor of dress. Today the term gown is rare except in specialized cases: academic dress or cap and gown, evening gown, nightgown, hospital gown, and so on (see Gown).
Shirt and skirt are originally the same word, the former being the southern and the latter the northern pronunciation in early Middle English.
Coat remains a term for an overgarment, its essential meaning for the last thousand years (see Coat).
To bring this back to the purposes of the PTR, janitors have a certain agreed upon persistent style for types of clothing that may not always be consistent with the contemporary use. Articles of clothing are to remain closest to their country of origin. clothing:kosode
& clothing:geta
are relevant only in their cultural context despite for all intents and purposes being identical to a loose jacket and platform sandals. In a European context we have the clothing:gambeson
as the persistent term despite it being synonymous with a padded defensive jacket, an aketon, a padded jack or an arming doublet. In the PTR this is generally resolved with siblings, but we also want to avoid adding more of these due to ignorant tagging where we can.
Clothing materials
Its important to distinguish a piece of clothing from it's material. In cases where you have a certain recognizable type of clothing it may be preferable to tag it as clothing:denim jacket
or clothing:denim miniskirt
while you might as well as just use the namespaceless tag denim
for the image. Its up to the tagger to recognize where its better to tag only the material and where he needs to include the material together with the piece of clothing. (More discussion in the page Clothing attributes) Typically clothing materials are called fabrics, while some modern artificial materials may not fully fill the latter definition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fabrics
https://www.thespruce.com/fabric-glossary-clothes-you-wear-2145791
External sources are not all-exhausting. The wikipedia article for example doesn't list a fabric that's gaining popularity called rayon
. Rayon is synthetic silk.
Exceptions to common material and attribute schema
This may even deserve an article of it's own depending on how many exceptions we describe. All of them boil down to inappropriate yet common colloquial speech. When the colloquialism is blatantly factually incorrect, use tags that better represent reality. Take the primary clothing example of khakis. Khaki is only a color. This is an undisputable fact and the original meaning of the word. The etymology is as follows: Khaki is a loanword from Urdu خاکی 'soil-colored', which in turn comes from Persian خاک [χɒːk] khâk 'soil' + ی- (adjectival ending); it came into English via the British Indian Army.[6][7]
Khaki was the typical color of military uniforms made from coarse home-spun cotton. As awareness of the style spread into civilian consciousness it became standard that in western fashion that smart casual dress trousers for civilians or other cotton fabric with a khaki color would be called khakis, sometimes even inappropriately when the cotton hosen was of a different color. In PTR we aim to represent the media with the most truthful and accurate tags. khaki
is the tag for the color. The only correct way to use clothing:khakis
is for a khaki colored cotton military uniform or civilian clothes with an identical visage. Even this is not preferred because usually better synonyms exist.
Clothing attributes
Often the attribute of a clothing is called the type of clothing in contemporary speech. This is a common gotcha when it comes to tagging pictures.
The issue we are trying to solve here is how do we tag images with clothes in a searchable manner without having to place a million tags by hand, and without having basically unreadable compound tags?
Common scenario and terms
To keep these ideas readable one common scenario and common terms are used for every suggestion that displays the main issue for clothing tags. Suggestions use the same (debatable) tag rules where for example a tag like clothing:silk
is not parented to the unnamspaced silk
. Please note that these are simply a way to explain and not a specific element of the solution suggestion.
The terms are element and attribute, where element means a piece of clothing, so a dress, or a sock, and an attribute means something that that element is, so a red dress, or a frilled sock.
The scenario is a specific case of a multiple-attribute clothing element. An image that has a frilled, red, silken dress in it.
Solution suggestion 1. Single attribute clothing tags
This idea suggests that we add only single attributes to clothing tags. A user tagging this image would then type this (inner bullets are from parents, repeated children are not shown):
clothing:red dress
clothing:dress
dress
clothing:frilled dress
clothing:frills
frills
clothing:silk dress
clothing:silk
One of the major advantages to this idea is quickly visible. With proper use of tag parents a lot of typing can be taken out of the users hand. Three typed tags included in eight searchable tags. This is coincidentally also one of the big disadvantages of this solution, the amount of tag parents this requires. (By far not as many as suggestion 2 though.)
We feel this solution solves the ease of tagging problem, and also the unreadable compound tags problem.
Solution suggestion 2. All attribute clothing tags
This idea suggests that we add all attributes to one clothing tag. All attributes are added in some "canon" order, most likely alphabetically. Let's see how a user would use this(inner bullets are from parents, repeated children are not shown):
clothing:frilled red silk dress
clothing:frills
frills
clothing:silk
silk
clothing:dress
dress
Note how the user only has to add one tag. This is the biggest advantage, and also the biggest disadvantage. The user has to know the order of the attributes before typing, and editing a tag like that is a massive pain as well. This solution requires loads of parents. Even more than solution suggestion 1. Since every combination of attributes needs to be parented for every clothing element. This would be a massive undertaking.
This sounds like a good idea when you just read it, but in reality this makes it hard to add tags to images, which is a massive problem, and it also requires innumerable parents.
Ideas and messages from discord
Let's examine the tag frills
which is common on the boorus. The tag frills
could be used when any form of frills appears inside the picture. This could be on a frill curtain, the neck frills of an animal or a frilled apron. Only one of these is clothing. Hence when we want to be explicit we assign clothing:frilled apron
.
This is one of the benefits of the clothing:
namespace for clothing enthusiasts. It lets them search and tag pictures with clothing specifically. If they did a general search on a big database only running frills
they may end up with results of neck-frilled lizards and lord knows what kind of abominations instead of lovely clothes. It also lets them do a wildcard search on clothes insides the namespace containing the desired attribute e.g. clothing:frill*
.
"Would it not be easier to search (and faster too) to parent all of those to clothing:frills
which is then also parented to un-namespaced frills
? I feel like the clothing:frilled apron
tag is just a nested namespace in disguise. This could then be done for every attribute. Think clothing:seethrough
, clothing:silk
, clothing:red
(though tagging clothes colours may be a bit out there I feel it diplays the point well)
It becomes especially problematic when you have say a frilled
silk
dress
. Would you then tag clothing:frilled silk dress
or clothing:silk frilled dress
? (don't even get me started on a colour as well.) There are multiple options, either you limit to one sub-namespace: (there would be a lot of parents but with a somewhat managed list of attributes that could be automated) clothing:silk dress
(parent of: clothing:silk
, clothing:dress
) clothing:frilled dress
(parent of clothing:frills
, clothing:dress
)
Or you decide on an order (like how we did with X on Y tags for actions) I don't like this due to being harder to search (as seen above) and being harder to remember which is right. What could be neat with this is to have the large tower of attributes sorted by alphabet which you parent out into smaller towers, though that would be hell to maintain(even if it would please my autism brain) (and it would make for weird tag lists like):
clothing:frilled red dress
clothing:red dress
clothing:frilled dress
clothing:dress
clothing:frills
clothing:red (maybe too much to also do this lmao)
There may be more options for this as well, but I prefer the 'one sub-namespace' option the most."
-from matjojo
Clothing guidelines
Guidelines
Consult this page first before reading the others. Right now the PTR is lacking janitor tools to efficiently handle implementing a large namespace like clothing:
. Until these tools are added follow the advice of the clothing articles, but if any example uses the clothing:
namespace simply drop the namespace and tag as usual.
Panty types
There are many names for different styles of underwear or panties. This article is on the many names of panties typically worn by female presenting characters. It's very important to properly tag the type and attributes of undergarments for people with clothing fetishes.
List of panty types
https://www.trendypins.com/types-of-panties/
For a start consult the above article, it mentions most types you will encounter and need with a few exceptions. boyshorts
is the Americanized English word for knickers
but seems to be somewhat different especially in the context of Asian art. Most taggers prefer the use of knickers
. With very few exceptions, always use knickers
when a Touhou character is wearing that type of panty.
The article doesn't mention every single type of panty out there. Gelbooru uses highleg panties
and lowleg panties
respectively depending on where a stringy undergarment is tapered. whale tail
can be used for the Y-shaped waistband of a thong or g-string when visible above the waistline of low-rise jeans, shorts, or a skirt, but is functionally identical to highleg panties
.
Scanties aren't mentioned in the article. Someone needs to write about them.
maebari
is for when a vagina is covered by an adhesive. bandaid on vagina
is self-explanatory.
On siblings and parents
Gender tags and why Belverk is our PR person
Workplace Security
In a world where an unlimited amount of genders and protected groups exist, transgender transsexual lesbians will reign supreme with their masculine clitorises. They have every advantage of being biologically male while also being considered of the protected and highly valued female group for all intents and purposes. As a matter of fact being trans makes them better and more valuable than any filthy cis-person could ever hope to be. When everyone is female, no one is.
-this is both a serious and joke article, delete it if we're trying to be a proper wiki t. "PR Guy"
Gender tags
I'm sure that individual characters will have spergs telling us otherwise, but that's for them to correct individually after a sweeping fix
then you have cases like Astolfo/Felix where part of the community thinks they're nonbinary, part thinks they identify female, and most think they're a normal trap
In which case fuck em go with the majority
-Peeves
Nah, you always go with the explicit definition from the author, unless the author is a pussy ass faggot who refuses to confirm the trap's gender then fuck the author
-Bel
Don't ask for a gender:
or sex:
namespace. You will be mocked and laughed at relentlessly. Discussing gendered tags and how to properly use them is worthwhile though. It's the age old question: How do we describe a chick with a dick? What about a guy pretending to be a girl? What about a guy who looks girly but isn't pretending?
Most people who participate in the game are retards. Ignore them. Janitors sadly have the unsavory job of wrangling with these tards and rejecting their PTR submissions. There is only one thing that matters about how you tag the gender or gender presentation of a character with one subcategory. What does the author says? The word of the author is final. Problems only arise because some idiot authors want to 'hide' the true gender of the character. In these cases there is definitely only one true answer male
or female
potentially with androgynous
and whatever descriptive tag you want to add. The exception and subcategory is when the fandom has an ironclad rule about the gender expression of the character. Consult their wiki and the fandom then tag accordingly.
Quick rundown on the trans issue for newbies: cis- and trans- are configurations (isomerism) or expressions of a concept. Cis means on this side, trans means on the opposite side. So a cis-woman and a cis-man are expressing their natural sex as their gender. A transwoman is expressing woman as a gender but since this is opposite configuration biologically she was assigned male. So transman was female at birth.
Now let's give serious discussion to the gender expression tags that are somewhere in between and how to properly use them. Some people think the following common categories aren't related to testicles. They are retards. Let's start with the easy one.
hermaphrodite:
This is a biomedical term. An organism that has complete or partial reproductive organs and produces gametes of both biological sexes. Especially since boorus have more specific and specialized tags for the topic, there is no debate about hermaphrodites. As a tag it means complete hermaphrodite. Both reproductive systems, completely. A hermaphrodite may still lack balls but for it to be properly tagged it must also include neutered
or eunuch
or similar variant.
futanari:
A term from Japanese media. It means to be of both kinds, to have both. This term has evolved culturally and has come to mean a chick with a dick in popular use. This popular use is the only thing we care about. If it's obviously a female with a real living dick it's a futanari
. Testicles may or may not be included. Hentai series use both types of futanari and make them cum. Only female body traits with dick matter. Tag the presence of balls separately. full-package futanari
is a misnomer due to this cultural quirk. The thing to remember here is to use full-package futanari
only when dick balls and pussy are present on a biological female. Don't use futanari together with the below tags.
Shemale / Newhalf / Dickgirl:
Why the fuck does anyone care enough about this shit to make these distinctions? These all essentially mean the same thing. I don't care about whining, whatever word you prefer is entirely based on nitpicking and lore. Newhalf is the Japanese term the others are western. These are biological men that have transitioned into transwomen and have male genitalia combined with a feminized body, typically distinguishable tits. If a newhalf is lacking balls that's because they were neutered
or you're watching a fantasy hentai that redefines gender expression. Your series may have a different lore for why these transwomen, but this is literally what these tags describe. Most people don't care, if you're going to tag this, use the same term as the author. e621 makes dickgirl the winner of these siblings, but this is NOT the generally agreed upon PTR standard.
transsexual:
"""Parent""" of transwoman
and transman
. Don't actually use this as a tag unless it's for your private meme collection. This is only relevant when a character is actively expressing their participation in trans-culture like an okama
that is the butt of many jokes in Japanese media.
trap:
Term from Japanese media that has become misunderstood as the concept has become popularized in western media. Comes from the figure of speech 'to get trapped', to accidentally mistake the gender of a character based on their looks. The intent of the trap character is secondary. Based on cultural portrayal trap
always means a male character that could be mistaken as a female (until his underwear gets taken off). The intent of portraying the male as looking female is the deciding factor for using this tag. A trap
has a full set of male genitalia with no exceptions (unless he is neutered
etc.). reverse trap
is used for females who almost passes as a man usually through skeletal structure and wardrobe use. Gelbooru has aliased otokonoko
to trap althought hey are slightly distinct in use. Otokonoko refers more to the perceived femininity or bottom-ness of a guy. Astolfo is the quintessential otokonoko although it is debatable how much he is trapping.
Citation from EHwiki (tomgirl):
- Description: A male whose appearance causes a casual observer to easily mistake them for a female (e.g. longer hair, thinner/more delicate features, rounder eyes/lips). Likely to have a shy, submissive, or passive disposition (e.g. blushing). Often involves m:crossdressing.
- Notes: Should not be confused with futanari or shemale.
- Japanese: トムガール
- Slave Tags: Male - with notable synonyms femboy, otokonoko, and trap.
cuntboy:
Physical biological male with a vagina. Don't use this in tag for any other scenario.
https://hackmd.io/FEs6PwPQR2yvyALVwifLNQ?view
-someone who actually cares about gender expression tags, please edit this to be factually correct, Bel only did this on what he took as a dare, honestly, just copy citations from EHwiki lmao
The species namespace must be destroyed
Watch yourselves species taggers, the day of reckoning is near
Canonical Namespaces
Namespaces that are often seen on PTR and accepted by Jannies
Creator
creator
is an essential namespace on PTR. This namespace is used to notate who created a work. In the case of artwork, it's the artist. There can be multiple creators on a single file, but there shouldn't be extraneous creator
tags. When first tagging an untagged file, adding the creator is often one of the first steps to take.
Character
character
is another essential namespace on PTR, and one of the first tags added to most images. You already know what this means, but if a character doesn't have a tag already, how should you write it, and when should you avoid making one? Additionally, how should you format the more confusing and granular character tags? That's what this article is here to discuss.
Character tags by origin
Mainstream Characters
Suppose a popular series just introduced a new character, and you want to tag something that includes said character. If the character already has a tag on danbooru, default to that. Danbooru usually has sane tags.
Supposing the character isn't on danbooru, the question then comes down to how unique the character's name is. See below for information on formatting new character tags.
Original Characters (OCs)
Original characters sometimes receive a unique tag, and other times they do not. A general litmus test for whether or not an OC deserves a unique tag on PTR is to see if the character in question has received gift art (art created by someone other than the character's author, who created the piece for free). If the OC has received gift art, and has at least a small collection of works they're included in, it is generally safe to create a tag for them. Otherwise, it's advised to keep the tag local and off of PTR.
Tag Uniqueness
Every character
tag should refer to exactly one character and no more. For characters with longer names, this usually isn't an issue. However, for those with shorter names, those without a canonical last name, or those with common names, care should be taken to ensure their tag is both unique and intuitive.
The old solution to this was to utilize titles to distinguish between characters, such as character:zeus, god of lightning
, however this fell out of favor due to not being intuitive for searching. The currently favorable solution is to instead append a character's name with the series they are from, such as character:excalibur (warframe)
.
In the case of original characters, don't append the series, but always append the OC's creator. For example, if I were to make a Sonic OC, and he met the above recommendations for OC tagging, I might write the tag as character:edgy mcbloodstain (var)
. Again, even if there is no other "Edgy McBloodstain", I should append my creator tag.
Character Variations
Say that a character has different variations, it can be included in the character tag. For example, if a character has both a male and a female variation, such as Byleth from Fire Emblem: Three Houses. In this case, the variation can be included in parentheses after the name, and before the series or creator information, if it's included (see Tag Uniqueness). In this example, male Byleth might be tagged as character:byleth (male) (fire emblem)
.
I don't believe that this rule applies to alternate costumes or character skins, but I'll edit this page once I get a consensus from the Jannies.
Nicknames, codenames, and titles
If a character is called by a codename in their series in place of their name, it will often be included in the tag, such as character:lena "tracer" oxton
.
This rule is used for characters who are often referred to by the audience by their title. For example, the Fate franchise is not subject to this rule, as fans of the series often refer to characters by their names, such as character:astolfo (fate)
, and not character:astolfo "rider of black" (fate)
.
Non-canonical Namespaces
Namespaces that are either out of use, or contain no information relevant to PTR. In general, don't push these namespaces to PTR.
Uploader
uploader
is a namespace primary used by the Reddit parser to denote which user uploaded a work to Reddit. This information is not wanted on PTR, as who would ever need to know who uploaded someone else's dick-pic to reddit. If it is an original work by the reddit user, add a creator
tag instead.
Copyright
The copyright:
namespace, while used on danbooru and e621, is not recognized on PTR. Use series:
instead. Yes, even if it's a franchise like Pokémon or Fate.
If you see a copyright:
tag in the wild, it is your legal and God-given duty to sibling it to series:
, copyright:
must be eliminated, and you are to aid in the cause. Destroy them all. Rip and tear, until it is done.
Pool
Say you have a group of images that you want to represent as being "together" in some way. Either they're part of a set of variations, or they're pages in a comic. How do you keep them together? Many boorus resort to creating a "pool", a group of images that its users have decided should be grouped together.
Unfortunately for PTR, many of these boorus use arbitrary numbers for their pool ids, and such they can overlap with each other. Thus, they cannot be considered reliable unless disambiguated.
If you want to make your own pools, please do so locally. If you want to designate pools that found on boorus, the current suggested solution is to append the booru which issued the pool id after it, such as pool: 23685 (e621)
.
General PTR Guidelines
General/Generic stances go here
Pixiv IDs
The convention of creator:pixiv id 1234
stays despite being suboptimal. This is due to pixiv artists having terrible naming sense and changing their names far too often. The id is recognizable and always true. If the artist happens to have one name accepted and recognized by the public at large then maybe that should be the winning sibling. Ask Suika or prkc for more information why some pixiv artists are cancer.
Rating
Ratings for a few popular boorus and links to the page that outlines their definitions. These ratings are primarily for the level of sexual content with some of the boorus having additional ratings for other types of content of the precise type of sexual content.
Danbooru: Safe, questionable, explicit. https://danbooru.donmai.us/wiki_pages/howto%3Arate
Gelbooru: Safe, questionable, explicit. https://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=wiki&s=view&id=2535
Sankaku: Safe, questionable, explicit. https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/wiki/show?title=help%3A_ratings
E621: Safe, questionable, explicit. https://e621.net/help/ratings
Derpibooru: Safe, suggestive, questionable, explicit. https://derpibooru.org/pages/tags
Furbooru: Safe, suggestive, questionable, explicit. https://furbooru.org/pages/tags
Quicksync
The Quicksync files allows you to skip the slow and heavy processing of the PTR
To do this on the other hand requires you to replace the entire database (containing all tags, settings and mappings).
Cause of this, being a new users without any actual important content is wanted!
Users can export tags and some metadata from their old database though!
Full Install Link: https://koto.reisen/quicksync.7z
Date Updated: February 05 2021
Uncompressed Size: 49G
Download Size: 15GB
Simply Download the archive linked above, Download the latest Hydrus Release and merge the two.
Depending on when the database file was made, it can take time to process the updates.
If you already have an database or client, put this to the side so you don't overwrite it or loose anything.
Having the old database in an other client folder allows you to return too it and export any info you might need from it before deleting it.
Bad Tag Shaming
This document exists entirely to shame some of the dumb tags that we have seen pushed to PTR. The creators might have thought these tags were clever, but they were not. They were fucking stupid.
Hall of Shame
The all time worst tags we've seen pushed to PTR, ever.
time:9:14
Why in dev's name did you think that was a good tag to push to PTR?
Bad Namespaces
These are basically entire categories of tags that are awful. Avoid using these namespaces please.
bodypart:
Listen. I don't need to know that a picture of a human has legs in it.