Finer control of Content Rating

+1 to that. I don't want to see outright porn. But i'm fine with 'anatomically correct' art, or things that aren't clean enough to be g-rated, but still pretty far from deserving to be rated as adult content.

+1, I've asked for this before we had UserEcho and they said they'd take a look at it if I remember correctly.

Yeah it'd be cool if there was also just a general block for fetish that might not necessarily fall under sexually explicit, nudity, or even mature. I don't want to see morbidly obese stuff, diapers, or inflation personally and that stuff shows up on every site with filters off. x.x I love the tag blocking but having one general tag you could block would be 1000000x better.

Also one for gore? I don't mind gore myself but some people do and I always feel weird if it's put under a general mature or "adult" filter.

hmmmm.... I do see the value of sorting out fetish artwork, but I don't think it would fit well as a rating. You could lump them all into a fetish rating, but then fetish artwork couldn't be sorted by a particular rating without needless complicating things. A separate field could work, but it seems to be a bit much for just one type of content.

I'd think gore would fit well enough under a mature rating if something like it were added, but if there were even more refined ratings/categories I could imagine a general list of check boxes like "gore, nudity, sexual, fetish". I'd be content with the initial request though. The rest can sort of be managed with tags, but not perfectly. Not everyone tags everything or uses the same tags.

tags could be a ton better if there was just one tag for a specific fetish and not many synonymes and mispelled versions that you all have to tag to get the subject blocked. For example, in order to block all the material about overly muscular characters I blocked: muscular, muscles, musclefur, muscle-fur, muscle_fur

An implimentation for official tags would be nice (they could be highlighted among others so users are drawn to pick them)

I assume community tagging is intended to deal with this, but it seems like something that's "too little too late" when you're just casually searching.

This already exists, here's my blacklist for example:

According to FN's rules, all fetish content needs to be tagged as adult in the first place, so seeing odd fetishes when only sfw content on shoudln't be a problem (and if it is, you report the people not obeying site rules).

How about a content rating system like that?:

"General" for content suitable for all ages, without sexual themes and violence.

"Mature" for violence, blood, drugs and artistic nudity (but not sexual content or arousal) etc.

"Adult" for explicit sexual material as in vanilla sex, but NOT including strong fetishes!

"Fetish material" for strong fetishes such as watersports, rape, exesive gore, and so on.

Then you could chose up to which specific rating you'd like to see content and tick it. This could also be color coded, similar to the current "yellow Adult Button" which I find extremely useful and far better than colored borders!

General could be a green G, Mature a yellow M, Adult an orange A and Fetish Material could be a red F or something similar to that. This makes it easy to see on the first glance what rating the material has that you are about to see. What do you think?

I don't think fetish material requires its own category since we have the blacklist system, and in future all fetishes are by default blacklisted for you until you remove them (atleast I remember reading about this a while ago), they go together fine with adult rating.

But FN could totally benefit from M-rating.

The fetish material was just an idea for those who don't wan to to see that sort of thing, but still want to see adult situations and an alternative to blacklist everything on your own. But if all fetishes are blacklisted by default that would solve the problem off course. I wonder how they're gonna do that, though. That list would be long!

Personally I find the current rating system a pretty big turnoff.

In websites like Weasyl I can use a 13+ rating instead of "Adult". In FA general works fine unless it's painfully suggestive, then I can use "mature".

In here if I don't use "General" my work is put side by side with straight up porn. There is a pretty big gap, and I don't like how people who wouldn't be offended at all might not see my work just because they filtered adult content out to avoid seeing sex/masturbation/gore/vore etc. But I don't want to get flagged either and there have been people who suggested my work is fetish related.

A good example of my problem with the current content rating is situations where you have refsheets that would show a sheath or be otherwise 'anatomically correct' without any arousal or anything to really make them 'adult' or outright qualify as porn. They still don't pass the "General" rating because there is visible genitalia, but they don't qualify as porn.

Another example is a lot of vore-related work. It's just an open maw, there's nothing that you wouldn't see in Saturday morning cartoons, but because it's labelled as a fetish, it ends up flagged as "Adult". I don't mind seeing that, or other mostly tame but still 'fetish' stuff, but i don't want to see outright porn.

In both cases, it's easy to filter those elements out if you have adult content enabled, but there's no current way to allow them if you have adult content disabled. And if you do enable adult content, there's no way to keyword-block porn effectively.

I'd want either a rating when above general but lower than porn, or maybe as another option, a way to white list tags that would allow them to bypass the content rating.

Contributing to this because, while it was fine at first, it has become a bit of an awkward procedure when uploading trying to determine what to rate my art. There's a massive grey area about fetish artwork being adult or not because, honestly, a lot of "general" art could be fetish art in disguise. How do we define fetish art? Does it depend on intent? The amount of eroticism? The popularity of the fetish itself?

Some of my art is created without me thinking anything of it, but then I remember that it could be considered fetish art... so off it goes into the 18+ category. If there was a mature rating we could force all fetish artwork there without blocking it off into 18+. Same with things like gore, innuendo, etc. At the very least, fudge with the site's definitions of what does and does not constitute as adult artwork.

I understand the whole bases of a "fetish" is to be drawn to it in perhaps a sexual way more often than not, and in order to display that artists depict that in their artwork. However the actual definition of Fetish is just taboo, it's to be drawn to something. Anyways, I'm one of those people who enjoys fetish art but nothing sexually explicit, I'd actually rather stray away from it if I can. I find artistic aestheticism and beauty in some fetishwork, because it's something I'm not used to seeing and I find beauty in the taboo. Fetishes like coiling, hypnosis (those are rather tame fetishes however), and goo I often enjoy, but I end up finding more sexuality placed on them than I'd prefer.

Indeed, it would be nice if there was a "tame adult" filter or option, at least for those who enjoy that grey area.

Hey everyone! Thanks for your great feedback so far, this has been really useful for us to figure out a better solution (and the cases when it'd apply).

This is something we are investigating, and getting an idea of the complexity involved in implementing a "third content rating" from our development team, as well as what the political concequences would be.

We are considering three content ratings right now. The names and the scope of these aren't set in stone - so we welcome feedback on how we can improve them!

"General" - Content suitable for all ages, without sexual themes, violence or fetish themes.

"Mature" - Content which features violence, blood, fetish themes, drugs and/or artistic nudity (but no arousal / sexual content). [Note the addition of 'fetish themes' here - this would cover vore etc]

"Adult" - Content which features explicit adult material, and/or extreme fetish content.

Basically, the big change this would create would be putting "fetish" content which isn't implicitly adult into a "Mature" category, along with stuff like anatomically correct but non-sexual refsheets, etc. We think this should solve the majority of the issues / use cases raised, and still keep the site "safe for work" when browsing in our upcoming "SFW" mode.

Thoughts? Feedback?

I think that's a fair breakdown for the ratings. I'm glad this is being looked into.^^

I think this is just the solution we need! :3

Going with that "General/Mature/Adult" separation would be fine with me, it's what other sites have been using, and it's working well enough so far.

Perhaps General/Mature with the option of 'upgrading' (for lack of a better word coming to mind) Mature content to containing sexual, fetishistic, and/or violent themes separately?

It bothers me that we treat sex and violence as the same thing.

At worst it would create

mature/violence

mature/sexual

mature/fetish

and the mixes thereof.

This is a feature we're working on right now - keep an eye out for a future blog post discussing how we used user feedback to figure out a solution to this!

I'm all for getting more specific with this! Perhaps any this can be done whenever someone adds a new tag?

The other user who suggested being able to blacklist multiple tags (all that match per image) was imo a better idea.

I further added to that that the blacklist should be a text box. One tag per line filters out the entire tag completely. Two or more tags per line filter out only images with ALL of those tags.

What you wrote there would be blacklisted as:

STRAIGHT MATURE

STRAIGHT EXPLICIT

CUB MATURE

CUB EXPLICIT

SCAT

WATERSPORTS MATURE

WATERSPORTS EXPLICIT

Making a grid with tags is probably cumbersome to implement in terms of design.

I don't mean that there should be a pre-made table, I mean that when you create a filter it creates a table [or whatever] with the ability to click which of the ratings it filters.

So you would just add the tag straight, click add, then click the options next to it [or those could be there at the typing stage.]

The table I included was just to illustrate what I was trying to say as I know I often fail to convey my ideas properly.

I think that's much better than having to add each tag like your example and should be relatively easy to code [I think.]

My system is not limited to ratings, it allows all manner of combinations of what you specifically don't want to see

For example:

UNDERTALE INFLATION EXPLICIT

UNDERTALE VORE EXPLICIT

If you implement both, you can't have a table, you'll probably have something like a single line text box and a bunch of option buttons next to it. Add 30 of those and you just added a couple hundred elements to the page.

My method requires ONE text box and ONE save button.

And I have been very polite to you, the downvote was uncalled for. But I'll return it in kind and you're welcome.

Also minor clarification to those examples, I don't mind vore or inflation in general, it just annoys me when people make Undertale vore. Assuming I'd actually use tag blacklisting (I'm not a baby, therefore I don't) I don't want to filter out all vore or all inflation, just what is related to that particular type of fanart.

Downvoting you wasn't an insult, I didn't like the alternative idea so I downvoted it. [Likewise the following downvote for the comment I'm replying to isn't out of spite but due to the passive agressive insult you included calling anyone who uses the filtering system a baby.]

Leaving out the option for multiple tags for the moment [something that could work in addition to this idea, it doesn't have to be separate from it.]

The method you are promoting is cumbersome and would be a lot more work for the user.

With my idea you would enter the tag [or multiple if that also got implemented] then you would be able to select 1, 2 or all 3 ratings to be filtered out.

With your idea you'd save time filtering all three as you wouldn't have to select anything [the exact system we have now,] but you'd double the number of filter tags you'd have to manually add to filter two of the ratings, which simply doesn't make sense when tickboxes and such would do it so much easier and faster and doesn't risk user error in spelling explicit, mature or clean.

Also, my idea futureproofs itself.

If they add more ratings beyond just general, mature and explicit that just requires them to rename the tickboxes and add extras for the users to select.

Your idea would require them to modify all filters that use the current terms and for users to edit each one to add any new terms to them.

It also wouldn't differentiate between the rating mature, and the tag mature [for character age.]

Well, I disagreed with your proposal, but instead of downvoting it, I just abstained from voting, which I usually do when I don't fully agree but don't completely disagree either.

Until you went ahead to be a clown about it, that is.

Yes, my idea requires about 5 seconds more from the user, as it would take to copy and paste part of his tags into a new line and type or copy in the other age rating. If you bother to block, you can spare 15 sec per item to format your blocklist.

Also, all blocklists can be saved server-side as text files. If the age rating tags ever change (I HIGHLY DOUBT) they it probably takes a minute or two from the terminal to write up the commands that replace all those tags in all those files.

Don't you worry, there will be tags that reference the rating. Since not all people use blacklists, but some users may want to look only for clean art or explicit art at some point in time.

This idea is lazy, hard to implement and would require a lot of clicking around to edit. If you can back up and copy paste your blacklist, you can also do quick editing in Notepad++ on it, like replacing certain tags or removing certain tags without removing everything else.

Just ban all furry pedophilia. Problem solved.

My idea actually isn't just about the cub issue though.

I actually mean it as displayed [though that would simplify the cub filter example XD.]

I really do think it would be good to be able to filter things based on rating. I'm gay and while I don't hate straight porn I'm not interested in it but blocking it outright when clean work might be really nice would be a waste.

Also, as silly as the watersports example is, I'm sure there are some terms that mean one thing in porn but another outside of porn that people would want to block without blocking from general.

Thank you! The quick switching option also makes it a lot nicer than i'd have expected. No digging deep through settings and entering a password to change it! It's more of a "What do i want to see now." than "What is this account for." thing now, which is great!