[X] My Assistant

I was planning on introducing for April 1st last year, called Imagine

Imagine there's no tagging
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to waste your time on
And no grouping too
Imagine all the fappers
Living life in peace
Yoohooo oooo-ooooo~

They seem to be reviled by you, true, but I think you're about the only member with such strong and general opinion.

I actually don't have a problem with Shadow. I've seen Alpha abuse his power, so I'm justified in my dislike of him.

Because your 'gaping hole' can be patched at any time when there's a need, there's no need, you've been told so many times, and the concept just doesn't seem to be able to reach your brain.

Oh, you are going to undo 7 months of replace expunges because you employed piss-poor logic when writing the rule?

Remember that this is what you want other people to do for you.'

You want taggers to do more and more work for you but you won't do any of the work yourself.

Realize that taggers are your fellow members, they do this at their leisure. They are not paid, they do not have to do this, and frankly most of them suck. There are less than a dozen reliable taggers and I can count on one hand the number of taggers I trust. This is with me trying to correct and teach people how to tag for over three years. You two need to get it in your heads that there is nowhere near the manpower for the things that you are asking for especially considering that it's all voluntary work and you are not volunteering.

True, but

I think this is an idea worth considering - it might bring many people who currently tag on boorus here.

What we are saying is that 1) nobody would expect you to start devoting even more time to this but we hope that by implementing the functionality, we would draw people here who would do the work.

This is not that crazy, consider - you were not tagging galleries till the system made it an option. It is just potential, then, that when it becomes possible to tag individual images, we will see an influx of volunteers who will start doing this.

And if it takes years, so what? Are we on any time table here?

Lastly, even if it fails, it will simply be a poor feature that few will use. But if it succeed... think big! (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Who is saying that every new gallery has to be tagged on the spot, buy current crew? If the records are there, we have all the time to the ends of the world to gather enough momentum and thousands of taggers so they eventually tag them all. You seem to be unreasonably assumming two things: that if there is a way to tag individual images, the number of people tagging them stays the same, and that tags applied to those images will need as much fixing as current gallery system tags need.

That.

What you're talking about is curiously close to a system integrated with Galleries I was planning on introducing for April 1st last year, called Imagine, but then a lot of shit happened and it was shelved. The code and database structures for it are still in the system, and at some point I might continue working on it, if I can find the time.

That would be great (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I actually don't have a problem with Shadow. I've seen Alpha abuse his power, so I'm justified in my dislike of him.

That particular issue, for better or worse, is not a problem anymore... so maybe we can let bygones be bygones?

This post has been edited by Red_Piotrus: Jun 1 2011, 20:38

Lastly, even if it fails, it will simply be a poor feature that few will use. But if it succeed... think big! (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I don't think you have heard of this thing called "bad tagging" and how it can snowball out of control...

Tagging is not some purely good activity with no downside or possibility for doing more harm than good. More taggers only works when they fully understand the rules, standards, and practices already in place and even then mistakes and laziness will lead to good taggers inevitably doing some amount of bad tagging on occasion wherein mods will have to intervene.

Oh BTW, Danbooru taggers all have the equivalent tagging power of infinity. Their mods can also [danbooru.donmai.us] completely wipe out or massively change tags in the blink of an eye.

It's a very different system despite the similarities to this site.

We only have more tag moderator, for lack of a better term, here and that is Tenboro. He's the only one who can automatically kill a tag and the only one able to mass wipe a user's tags (something I've had to ask him to do twice in the last month or so).

Even if we got this huge influx of tagger, which I dare say is wishful thinking, how many do you think would read the rules? History says about 1% before I send them a pm. So who's going to monitor all these taggers and deal with the bad ones? Right now the entire force doing this is me. There's no automated system to deal with bad taggers like with like dupers. It's all done manually.

Bad taggers can be hard to track if they are tagging on old galleries, which they often are. This makes it even harder. New taggers will see bad tags and think they are good and then become bad taggers.

How do you propose dealing with all of this or do I get to police this exponential increase in tagging that you're proposing by myself?

You guys think that this is great but you're not looking at what it would take to make it work. Take a look at that long post I made in tagging abuse and note that those weren't all the problems, just the ones I listed and that was under 150 galleries. How do you propose dealing with the massive increase in bad tagging that comes with a massive increase in tagging?

Oh, you are going to undo 7 months of replace expunges because you employed piss-poor logic when writing the rule?

As far as I know, there are no bad expunges to replace because of current rules.

I don't think you have heard of this thing called "bad tagging" and how it can snowball out of control...

I don't think I did.

Tagging is not some purely good activity with no downside or possibility for doing more harm than good. More taggers only works when they fully understand the rules, standards, and practices already in place and even then mistakes and laziness will lead to good taggers inevitably doing some amount of bad tagging on occasion wherein mods will have to intervene.

As long as there are enough taggers, the bad tags will be less important than the good ones, will be voted down more often and will have lower power. I don't think downvoting tags by any rule is a good idea - it smacks of a central planning system communist governments had as opposed to democracy where everyone puts up the tags important for them. What practices like having arcane rules and downvoting the tags you don't like to 'clear up the clutter' do is they turn people away from the site.

Oh BTW, Danbooru taggers all have the equivalent tagging power of infinity. Their mods can also [danbooru.donmai.us] completely wipe out or massively change tags in the blink of an eye.

Yes, and by analogy, high officials in North Korea can kill anyone they want, and starve whole communities to death. Does that prove it's a better system because it's more unified and tightly controlled?

We only have more tag moderator, for lack of a better term, here and that is Tenboro. He's the only one who can automatically kill a tag and the only one able to mass wipe a user's tags (something I've had to ask him to do twice in the last month or so).

I'm not sure it should be done at all...

Even if we got this huge influx of tagger, which I dare say is wishful thinking, how many do you think would read the rules? History says about 1% before I send them a pm. So who's going to monitor all these taggers and deal with the bad ones? Right now the entire force doing this is me. There's no automated system to deal with bad taggers like with like dupers. It's all done manually.

Why do you think there should be any rules? The problem I see is that there are too many galleries and not enough people tagging, but if there were enough, the voting system as it's done now would make the good tags float up.

To clarify, I think tag grouping should be there, as a way to make sure various tag texts mean the same thing. And that would be the thing to maintain, small enough to do it without making it user-generated. But deciding which tag should stay and which should go, based on the amount of effort to make this tag meaningful on the whole site? No.

Bad taggers can be hard to track if they are tagging on old galleries, which they often are. This makes it even harder. New taggers will see bad tags and think they are good and then become bad taggers.

I think tracking them is a waste of time. If enough people disagrees with them, their tags will vanish. If more people agree than disagree with their tags, then they are good taggers, no matter what any individual may think.

How do you propose dealing with all of this or do I get to police this exponential increase in tagging that you're proposing by myself?

I propose not to police everything. If you have to police something, vote up the good tags, focus on making the tag grouping work well, and don't touch the tags you don't like and consider stupid. They should take care of themselves - if some association is present in a segment of popular culture you are not at all acquainted with, why should you hamper people who have this association? That's putting your own cultural background above everyone else's.

You guys think that this is great but you're not looking at what it would take to make it work. Take a look at that long post I made in tagging abuse and note that those weren't all the problems, just the ones I listed and that was under 150 galleries. How do you propose dealing with the massive increase in bad tagging that comes with a massive increase in tagging

By noticing that an increase in good tagging is even bigger, and that existence of bad tags is an inherent property of the tagging system, much like the existence of grease is necessary for the engine to work. You seem to behave like a sculptor, eager to remove every last speck of dust from his statue, but galleries are more like an engine in motion, and they need to evolve effectively, not stay beautiful.

As long as there are enough taggers, the bad tags will be less important than the good ones, will be voted down more often and will have lower power.

Do you not remember how people get power? Hint: It's not because they are trustworthy with tagging.

I don't think downvoting tags by any rule is a good idea - it smacks of a central planning system communist governments had as opposed to democracy where everyone puts up the tags important for them.

Again, you're assuming that crowd-sourcing is some wonderful environment where everything moderates itself. There is not a single example of this ever working anywhere on the internet. Without moderation and rules taggers will actually lose incentive to do the right thing since they can be outnumbered by morons who think tagging "penispenispenis" everywhere is hilarious.

It's not "democracy" you're proposing, we already have that. Everyone has a voice and a vote albeit they are unequal and I agree we might want to do something about that. However, what you're asking for is straight up anarchy where everyone can do whatever they want and we'll have to simply pray that the assholes are outnumbered and out-powered by the non-assholes... I can practically hear war music (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) The site isn't run in any fascist manner, it's closer to a republic where a few trusted individuals keep an eye out for destructive behavior and make judgement calls as needed.

I think tracking them is a waste of time. If enough people disagrees with them, their tags will vanish. If more people agree than disagree with their tags, then they are good taggers, no matter what any individual may think.

I pray Wikipedia never becomes like that or else vandals from 4chan and the like could ruin every article they wanted to with sheer numbers.

If a tag of something is misspelled but it gets voted up is it automatically good? People use tags to SEARCH FOR STUFF. The tagging system itself is NOT a public forum to be used for voting, THIS PLACE IS, and people are free to discuss what tags they want or do not want HERE.

Taggers are publicly accountable on the -boorus. You can check a user's ENTIRE history for every single change they have ever made, something which I think we need regardless of anything else. Right now if someone runs around like a moron and tags dozens of galleries with garbage like "dhfkjsdhfks" and "hurpadurpadoo" only Tenboro can undo all of the damage in a relatively timely manner. The tagging crowd can't do anything about it because they can't see what or where those bad tags are.

Also, taggers right now consistently vote things up blindly without checking if they are actually correct. Once a bad habit / trend in tagging starts it will be impossible to reverse without a mod. I'm not sure why you think everyone will be diligent and correct each other by sheer virtue of population, especially since those with a high voting power will inherently be trusted and the lesser powered will follow like lemmings.

and don't touch the tags you don't like and consider stupid.

"djvinci321 is an asshole" was used 13+ times as a tag. Should that not have been blacklisted? I wonder who that tag actually helps...

That's putting your own cultural background above everyone else's.

If I see a tag I'm not sure about then I don't fucking touch it. I can even attest that Weaver operates in the same fashion, not everything has to be voted up and down.

By noticing that an increase in good tagging is even bigger, and that existence of bad tags is an inherent property of the tagging system, much like the existence of grease is necessary for the engine to work.

True, except that enough grease will actually kill the engine in a fiery explosion.

I agree that too much moderation kills the whole point of tagging, but so does letting everyone run off like children with scissors in their hands and saying "yea, they'll be fine".

This post has been edited by Maximum_Joe: Jun 2 2011, 16:10

All good points, on the other extreme - I think the situation is rather in between. I was focused on the fact that all the work you do is just a drop in the sea of what others tag, on all the old galleries you can't have time to visit. You underlined the fact that with big numbers of people and tags it would be hard to search by anything because so many tags would have something in common with search phrases - for example if people tagged everything in all languages of the world. Some points below showed me that the site probably needs meta-management.

Do you not remember how people get power? Hint: It's not because they are trustworthy with tagging.

That is one thing that's not set in stone and can be fixed. Preferably so taggers who don't write garbage and don't touch tags they don't know about would get more voting power, and bad taggers get less.

The problem is that you, Shadow Weaver and some 10-15 more are too small a group to keep so big a site in working order, because you're losing too much of your time to stay motivated, working directly on tags, gallery by gallery.

I think you should be managing the taggers instead:

- be able to change someone's voting power,
- have a channel to communicate short messages to them next time they visit the gallery, even if they never visit forums (those could be shown instead of ads or in HV place)
- be able to review all votes cast by someone over some period of time (to decide whether they are a good of a bad tagger)
- have access to a page calculating a set of summaries from tags for a given tagger (how many tags cast, how many upvoted, downvoted, most voted tags, etc)
- have access to short note, visible only for you, but same for each tag/gallery moderator, where you can note the result of your inquiry, your opinion of the tagger (checks/doesn't check what he votes on etc). This way you won't have to go review the tags every time this particular tagger is brought to your attention

Wouldn't this be a time better spent, and effort better directed than the way it is today?

The other thing I can think about would be to have some search improvements: ability to search with only negatives (ie. -tag1 -tag2 ), clearly shown ability to search for parts of tag, or for tag exactly as it is, etc.

Of course, both depend solely on Tenboro. But, the more lively discussion we have, the more ideas we can give him to pick from (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I think Dlag makes an excellent point. We need tools to be able to tap into the big number of taggers/voters who may not even be aware of the forums.

Like, in my reneming corner which I recently am enjoying, so many SOCOMs would be wasted if not for me and Kistune looking at SOCOM renames and listing them on the forums. This means that there are many renamers, some with pretty decent skills, who don't realize that by not posting on the forums they are could be wasting their time. I would like to be able to identify them, and send them PM with "come to the rename forum thread" messages, for example. And some of them could use power boosts (every now and then I'll run into a very good renames, submitted by a 1% strong voter... those would not even shows as tags).

I think tracking them is a waste of time. If enough people disagrees with them, their tags will vanish. If more people agree than disagree with their tags, then they are good taggers, no matter what any individual may think.

Here's a pair of tags I had to recruit people to help get rid of on a single gallery:
too much fucking sasuke: 24 up votes (including the original tagger)
still too much fucking sasuke: 15 up votes

According to you if I hadn't recruited help killing these tags all these taggers should be considered good taggers. Should I mention that the first person who voted these (and the other similar bad tags in the gallery) after I posted the gallery link was you.

These also means that if I recruited enough people to tag "Dlaglacz is a moron" on every gallery, or if what Red wants went through, every image, then we would be able to directly insult you or anyone we wanted for that matter with every gallery and be considered good taggers.

You say tracking them is a waste of time but say they needs to be a way to "be able to review all votes cast by someone over some period of time (to decide whether they are a good of a bad tagger)" aka a tool to track them. I think a tracking tool would be great, but because I don't have one I have to try and track bad taggers.

As Joe said there are a lot of taggers who blindly vote up every tag. The last guy who was banned from tagging did this. I remember in one of the PM's I sent him, a gallery I had pointed out he voted up footjob. There were zero footjob images in the gallery. When he finally sent me back a PM he admitted that he was just going through all the doujin and manga galleries and voting up all the tags without looking. Remember how mad because he had scored around 10000 tagging point like this, Tenboro later told me his actual vote total was more like 20000. This means that every tag good or bad had his power added to it.

You can't manage the taggers if you don't manage the tags. You have to identify the bad tags to identify the bad taggers.

Again, I love the idea of more tracking and accountability. Those have to come first waaaaaaaaaaay before we try to encourage more taggers / renamers / other contributors.

e.g. The only reason we can stop crappy uploaders from dumping dupes, prohibited content, or other garbage galleries repeatedly is because we can easily identify them and see everything that they have uploaded. We have no shortage of good uploaders contributing positively to the site but there's always those few buggers that refuse to read the rules and just blindly upload. Remember that even in that system we need moderators to ban those who refuse to alter their behavior.

The discussion between the sides don't seem to be going much anywhere. Arguments against it keep comparing extremes. What I'm talking about is just about being more lenient. In the essence, you can tag exactly as you do today with a more lenient system, but you also allow for more useful tags if people want to use them. It doesn't give you more tagging work whatsoever.

I am curious to see this Imagine system in action in the future. Sounds like a good idea.

On the issue of not enough taggers

This is partly because many users of the site don't have any power. People who play a lot in the HentaiVerse get a lot of power through that, or you could spend time on forums and get karma from wacky posts, both things that have generally little to do with tagging. On a site that revolves around rewarding its users for helping out, there's not much of an incentive to tag galleries.

It would be better to see a system that gave you tagging power based on past tagging. To prevent people from gaining power just from upvoting everything, perhaps just reward the ones doing new tags on a gallery, and only after that tag reaches 10. Sounds like a pain to implement, but I don't have any better idea around the issue.

Here's a pair of tags I had to recruit people to help get rid of on a single gallery:
too much fucking sasuke: 24 up votes (including the original tagger)
still too much fucking sasuke: 15 up votes

A tag moderation system would get rid of shit like this. A first-time approval/rejection of new tags, which a moderator could change upon request in case of a mistake. The first-time approval could either be done by appointed moderators through a simple list interface ("New tag" - Whitelist/Blacklist), or it could be done by users through an interface where they can upvote/downvote tags, say +100 it's whitelisted, -100 it's blacklisted.

Abuse, like spotting people recruiting others to tag certain things should be cracked down on, and there should be systems in place to ban those users and reset their actions. There's not much in the way of making an interface for moderators to view recent actions of a person. I.e. View the recent activity of someone suddenly emerging on top of the tagging list. I don't really see it as much of a realistic issue right now, but if people find out that they are "allowed" to abuse the system like that, someone will eventually. It's hard to deal with random low-level abuse, but such a system would at least prevent high-level abuse, and legit higher level users would likely moderate most low-level abuse with relative ease.

On the issue of "Who should Tenboro trust to moderate?"

It's Tenboro's decision of course. If he doesn't want a lot of moderators, that's up to him, but I've seen communities function well with several users appointed without them really being too well known in the community to start with. There are issues of abuse everywhere, but with a hands-on policy, it usually gets detected and handled quickly. Only the behind-the-scenes abuse occurring at the top levels is hard to detect and do something about. Appointing a couple of trustees in the top of things, with lesser moderators with powers over different sections could work out.

@ ShadowWeaver

Ichizon, stop requesting more and more things for taggers to do because you want it. You are not a tagger. You want taggers to do more and more work for you but you won't do any of the work yourself.

You misunderstand. I just want the tag system to be better and more free. My suggestions don't involve giving the taggers more work. Tag moderation would get rid of stupid tags (like the ones in quote above) altogether, giving moderators less work in handling them. A better tag system would likely attract more taggers if done well. And I don't want you, if such a system is at all implemented, to think you have to tag a gallery 100%. Just continue tagging as you've always done (language, "translated", author, circle, "big breasts", "lolicon"?), and allow people to tag the other stuff. It doesn't matter whether they do it or not, but that they can.

I personally tag what I feel is missing when I see it. I don't treat the site as my job, and I don't go into every gallery just to tag, no. I view a gallery and tag stuff I feel is missing, and don't bother voting up stuff that is already above 10 in power. It's rare to see a currently allowed tag that is less than 10 apart from a couple of tags I've tried using. They have been downvoted as bad tags ("bike shorts" or "crotchless clothing" for instance; "exhibitionism" and "humiliation" are among the few successful tags I've tried using, which are quite often missing). If someone hadn't tagged "translated" and "english" already, I'd tag that if I came across it, don't worry.

Whitelisting is more work than blacklisting, since a mod has to approve every new tag. Whitelisting would demand that a mod (or the crowd in the case of that 100 power idea) makes a decision without discussion or consensus.

Whitelisting means we need to enter every single character name, series name, author name, circle name, and many other things into a database. With correct spelling. Otherwise we have tags waiting to be approved sitting in an ever-growing backlog and galleries now go without tagging until they get approved.

The existing system may be reactionary to bad tags but so would a whitelist to good tags.

If there's an indicator as to whether or not the tag is about an artist, circle or fetish (i.e. colour), then that helps a lot towards moderating them. I agree that initially, if implemented, there will be a backlog of things to moderate. However, when that initial batch is done, I don't really think there will be a lot of new tags every day. Sure, some things would perhaps need to be discussed, but that's no different than today. The main difference is that it goes through an automated system instead of having to be discovered manually.

The system doesn't prevent tagging of unlisted tags. You could for example tag ten galleries with a new tag without it being whitelisted. The point is that a new tag is picked up for easy moderation, and if it's whitelisted it stays, while if it's blacklisted it disappears. The point of whitelisting is merely to not have to deal with it again, unless someone specifically has issues with it over the forum.

still too much fucking sasuke

I can't very well argue with that, you know (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif)

According to you if I hadn't recruited help killing these tags all these taggers should be considered good taggers. Should I mention that the first person who voted these (and the other similar bad tags in the gallery) after I posted the gallery link was you.

This tag wouldn't serve the purpose of making the galleries more searchable by tags well, but it definitely adds to the enjoyment of browsing galleries. Since the tagging system isn't something hidden that no one but machines will ever see, but something visible to users, part of the gallery page, I'm not surprised they want to adorn the gallery page with such grefitti. It's culture (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) And if we're not focused only on efficiency of tag search, but also on enjoyability of gallery pages, then yes, I say that if that tag wasn't enjoyable for people there, they would vote it down, and that by voting it down you probably decreased enjoyability of galleries by a small bit.

These also means that if I recruited enough people to tag "Dlaglacz is a moron" on every gallery, or if what Red wants went through, every image, then we would be able to directly insult you or anyone we wanted for that matter with every gallery and be considered good taggers.

It would only be an insult to me, if it got to me, ie. if I believed to some degree that it's a real opinion of people who voted it up and that it has something to do with objective reality. They might have many reasons to vote it up. If they sincerely want it to be there, I'd be fine with it.

You say tracking them is a waste of time but say they needs to be a way to "be able to review all votes cast by someone over some period of time (to decide whether they are a good of a bad tagger)" aka a tool to track them. I think a tracking tool would be great, but because I don't have one I have to try and track bad taggers.

I feel tracking them is a waste of time in present circumstances when I see that it probably could be done *much* more effectively with some website tools. I wish my expertise was more in the web programming than in assembly/C/C++ language and technologies used in high-performance games.

As Joe said there are a lot of taggers who blindly vote up every tag. The last guy who was banned from tagging did this. I remember in one of the PM's I sent him, a gallery I had pointed out he voted up footjob. There were zero footjob images in the gallery. When he finally sent me back a PM he admitted that he was just going through all the doujin and manga galleries and voting up all the tags without looking. Remember how mad because he had scored around 10000 tagging point like this, Tenboro later told me his actual vote total was more like 20000. This means that every tag good or bad had his power added to it.

You can't manage the taggers if you don't manage the tags. You have to identify the bad tags to identify the bad taggers.

If you were able to see exactly what was tagged lately by particular tagger, say in a form of a list, then by clicking a tag you would see a list of all galleries where this tagger voted this tag up or down, and then by clicking on gallery link you could visit each of those galleries, that would make the job of determining if it's a bad tagger more convenient though - wouldn't it?

Your whitelisting system would do very little to stop bad tagging. It might stop some of the stupid stuff but those are few are far between and are stopped by blacklisting. The majority of bad tagging are things that would be whitelisted but are bad for the gallery. I just killed 8 common tags on a gallery because they did not apply under tagging rules.

Think about the size of the initial batch. All the fetishes would be the quick part. There are a lot of artists and series. Then you have characters. Most small series have at least 3 or 4. Evangelion (a very common series) has 7 or 8 girls, Naruto a dozen or more, Sailor Moon has ten scouts plus their real names, Bleach 15+, Negima started with 31 girls. Those are just some popular series and then you have to do the guys for yaoi as well.

Dlag, there might be better ways to track down bad taggers but I don't have them available. I can only work with what I have and if I don't track the bad taggers down I can't exactly stop them from making bad tags now can I?

This post has been edited by Shadow Weaver: Jun 3 2011, 11:28

To clarify, a whitelist even in the best case scenario would only stop bad tags not bad tagging.
People using good tags inappropriately is the biggest problem, by like a factor of 10,000. That is what we need more tools to mitigate against and discourage.

This tag wouldn't serve the purpose of making the galleries more searchable by tags well, but it definitely adds to the enjoyment of browsing galleries. Since the tagging system isn't something hidden that no one but machines will ever see, but something visible to users, part of the gallery page, I'm not surprised they want to adorn the gallery page with such grefitti. It's culture (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) And if we're not focused only on efficiency of tag search, but also on enjoyability of gallery pages, then yes, I say that if that tag wasn't enjoyable for people there, they would vote it down, and that by voting it down you probably decreased enjoyability of galleries by a small bit.

This is exactly what the comment section is for. Tags are to inform people of the galleries' contents, not what people THINK of said contents. You can converse, post links, and express yourself freely in the comments section with impunity. If you feel that the comment section needs some kind of improvement or redesign that's something I would be much more sympathetic towards.

As far as I know, there are no bad expunges to replace because of current rules.

Every single replace made under the new rule is bad.

This is exactly what the comment section is for. Tags are to inform people of the galleries' contents, not what people THINK of said contents. You can converse, post links, and express yourself freely in the comments section with impunity. If you feel that the comment section needs some kind of improvement or redesign that's something I would be much more sympathetic towards.

Well, perhaps the comments section is not visible enough? If someone wants their opinion to be seen, they're not going to place it in the section hardly anybody ever scrolls down to. I'm probably not a typical gallery viewer, having large thumbnails and 40 rows visible set, but even with 2 rows it's not staring at you out of the page. Maybe if comments section was placed where tags are now, and tags were placed below the gallery, the opinions of those who dont see the difference would land in comments and not tags? But then possibly fewer people would know that tags even exist, and fewer would tag. It's worth trying imho.

a whitelist even in the best case scenario would only stop bad tags not bad tagging.
People using good tags inappropriately is the biggest problem, by like a factor of 10,000. That is what we need more tools to mitigate against and discourage.

absolutely.

one thing that may help (and i apologize if it's been discussed before) is maybe a big public list of all the tags used? (not including stuff like author/character/circle names i guess...)