My suggestions:
-Keep the tag as Hentai
-Simplify the hentai rules to just content that published as porn
-Add hentai to content tags field
-Auto tag yaoi yuri as hentai
@Teasday Alright, I understand, my bad.
Well since it looks like changing it is not that simple and rather tasking for you guys, and since no viable solution as of now..
As the other user have mentioned before, let's just leave the tag as it is for now.
I mean the system not broke, why fix it yeah?
Something else to point out (and I'm not knocking those of you who hold to this position, just stating a case) is that the primary consistent objection here is people disagreeing over how specific the word "hentai" is/should be, which is NOT a contention that the marking system we use is somehow not serving its purpose.
De-facto, it definitely means "for straight men", in the manga community ("vanilla" notwithstanding).
Maybe there's a bunch of straight guys who don't realize this but—I have the hentai toggle on mangadex disabled and yet the daily updates are full of yaoi, just like on pretty much every other ostensibly "non-hentai" manga site. But 100% of everything you see marked as "yaoi" has explicit sex scenes, unless it's mistagged (which is rare). That's literally what that tag means (It's not something people argue back and forth over like the shoujo-ai/yuri tags).
So even if there might also be a more general understanding of "hentai" as "the Japanese way to say porn", in practice the stuff aimed at girls gets labelled separately. And everyone's used to that, really, whether they realize it or not. (I mean, even Batoto had a whole slew of explicitly sexual yaoi, even though ostensibly that was against site rules on explicitness.)
TL;DR: Stuff that (most) men don't want to read, just doesn't get policed under the same standards, or put in the same boxes.
@Pokari Yaoi doesn't guarantee"explicit sex scenes." There are 427 non-hentai yaoi entries with smut, and 611 non-hentai yaoi entries without smut. It's not as clear of a division as you say, although there are plenty of missing tags that can surely be identified. It also does get policed to the same standards as other content. Yaoi is just more likely to be marked as hentai than other genres of porn because yaoi groups are extremely likely to redraw dicks (qualifying it as hentai by our standards) or because it's just uncensored to a further degree (such as with the butthole scenes in Okane Ga Nai) also qualifying it as hentai by our set standards. If there are no genitals, it's not hentai. Most yaoi with smut do qualify as non-H when unedited.
Do you actually read yaoi...? I've been reading a decent bit, lately, for better or for worse, and your statements simply do not reflect the reality (again with, "I think possibly most guys just don't realize because they don't read it"?). I can't speak as to stuff that has been marked hentai, because it won't show up in my feeds, but:
A) The smut tags are not in any way representative of existence or non-existence of on-screen sexual content. In fact they seem to be applied semi-randomly where yaoi is concerned, but most commonly seem to be used to denote works with vapid, low-brow sexual content vs more sincere romances. Everything marked yaoi on the site has at least explicit dick-grabbing, 90-95% of it has at least a buttsex scene
(...I'm not exaggerating for effect here or anything, buttsex seems to be sort of "required" for any yaoi, not sure if by editors or by convention. Like, if nothing else, presumably real gay men don't always do it in the butt...? But I digress terribly.)
B) This is at risk of being a rant, but—I'm confused about why you're talking about redrawing? I'm seeing plenty of redrawn dicks in the non-H side of the site (I kind of wish that weren't a thing, personally, but XD). And how are you going to use individual scanlator-redrawing practices to classify whether a series is hentai or not? Isn't it a per-series flag...? Furthermore, classifying "explicit" as whether genitals are redrawn—as opposed to there there just being e.g. whited-out blobs spewing man-juice everywhere—would seem beyond absurd to me. Is that really the official standard? Regardless, that's certainly not what where I'm drawing the line for explicit-or-not (nor is it how the smut or hentai flags are used, in practice, on the yaoi on the site).
(P.S. Sorry if any of what I'm saying is a bit sordid, it kind of comes with the territory of the conversation here.)
@Pokari If you find unmarked smut series, report it or mark it as smut. If you find non-hentai series with redrawn dicks, mark it as hentai. We use an individual scanlator's redrawing practices to change it because they're the reason the series breaks the ruling. It's not like we have a method to mark specific chapters as hentai. Either it all is or it all isn't, unless you plan on disallowing groups from uploading their chapters. There have been a high number of yaoi groups or readers unmarking series as hentai or smut when we had marked it ourselves.
And yes, we define hentai as series that have a focus on sex (yaoi generally does) and has visible genitals. Otherwise it's just smut and not hentai.
That's... How is "redrawn genitals or not" a useful definition of hentai to anyone? I'm flabbergasted. If you don't want hentai, you don't want the pasties-equivalent either.
Edit:
We're talking about these rules, right?
1.9 Tag porn (and only porn) as hentai. Ecchi and smut do not count. The primary focus must be on the sex, and genitals must be visible (typical censorship aside). 1.9.1 Oversimplified rule of thumb: if it's mostly porn with some plot, it's probably hentai; if it's mostly plot with some porn, it's probably not.
"Typical censorship aside" to me pretty clearly means, "censorship notwithstanding [e.g. of the genitals as required by Japanese law]", the exact opposite of what you're saying (and also a much more standard and sensible conclusion). If it means something else, it's a mis-statement.
Under this more sensible interpretation, yaoi by these rules would be variably hentai or not depending on how much emphasis was on the sex, but all yaoi would qualify for the portion of the clause that pertains to level-of-explicitness.
@Pokari When did I ever say we don't want hentai...? Are you confused with any detail that I need to explain? Smut that has redrawn genitals by the scanlators is hentai, by our definition of focus on sex + visible genitals. Smut that doesn't have redrawn genitals, and is appropriately censored naturally, isn't hentai by our definition of because the genitals are non-visible. Which part are you confused about?
You misunderstand. I'm not saying you don't want hentai, I'm saying that anyone using the site who doesn't want hentai, doesn't want "lightly-censored" hentai either.
The hentai-toggle wasn't introduced just to circumvent countries with censorship laws; cordoning off hentai is also for those users who just don't want to see porn in general. A product of early discussions on whether the site should have hentai at all (e.g. https://vatoto.com/forums/index.php?app=forums&module=forums§ion=findpost&pid=1858647 ), no?
Are you confused with any detail that I need to explain? Smut that has redrawn genitals by the scanlators is hentai, by our definition of focus on sex + visible genitals. Smut that doesn't have redrawn genitals, and is appropriately censored naturally, isn't hentai by our definition of because the genitals are non-visible. Which part are you confused about?
For some of us the lack of visible genitals are important. I don't read hentai here, but if a manga is mostly plot with some not visible genitalia sex then it's fine. If you don't want to see it at all then perhaps you should blacklist the smut tag.
@Pokari It was lightly mentioned in that Batoto thread, that's not at all the reasoning why we finally went through with it. Most of the discussion occurred on Discord. Indonesia banned mangadex.com before we had the hentai toggle implemented, a month after the website's creation. We had pornographic content on full display. Indonesia is our second largest source of traffic. Heeding the warning, we created the hentai toggle shortly after and we intentionally switched from mangadex.com to mangadex.org JUST so that Indonesian users and others in similar countries could use the website without requiring a VPN. If that wasn't the majority reasoning behind why we did it, there would have been no reason for us to change domains. It was and still is, mainly for the sake of such countries. We've been doing fine for well over a year since the incident.
Smut isn't "lightly-censored hentai." If it was, it would be age-rated as R18 and teenagers wouldn't be able to buy it. If you have an issue with smut, you're free to block it using genre filters.
Myself, I've spent most of my life avoiding anything with any explicit sex scenes whatsoever. Now I'll read some stuff if I think the plot can stand on it's own and the sex scenes aren't the main focus (though I still tend to kind of speed past them).
Having the hard line in the sand be whether the genitals are fuzzed out or not, regardless of what else is going on in the scene, seems incorrect to me. That is, I would have said the difference between explicit and non-explicit sex scenes goes down to more than just whether the genitals themselves are censored. Like, stuff with whited-out genitals, yet with various body fluids on display, and where it's clear what is where and who's doing what with what organ—by commonly understood conventions (at least in English-speaking culture) I'd still call that "explicit", and I wouldn't have wanted to see it when I was avoiding explicit things.
(As an entirely alternative argument, I'd have said it's still sexually explicit (and nearly as "icky") if the characters e.g. just describe in detail what they're doing as they do it, even if it's not explicit in the images themselves.)
I think if I say anything more for today we'll just end up talking past each other in circles—too many points are up in the air at once now, I feel, and we're probably already misunderstanding each other on too many little things—so I'm going to let the matter rest for now, unless you feel otherwise.
Going to point out, while it's commonly thought of as mostly sex. R-18 covers more than just sexual content. There is a scale for it as well. judging everything to decide if it's R-18 or not would put a responsibility on the staff and not everyone would agree with every rating.
Having the hard line is a much more practical way of doing it. Especially since in the regions they are sold many of the things being proposed to go under "R-18" are sold to minors just fine. and At what point is the line drawn. For example Monster Musume has many sexual implications and fully nude with strategic censoring. To some this would be R-18 to others and publishing companies it's not. Where I am it's just Older Teen (16+).
The other sticking point appears to be that some people believe that Hentai doesn't include Yaoi or Yuri, while others believe it does.
Like, stuff with whited-out genitals, yet with various body fluids on display, and where it's clear what is where and who's doing what with what organ—by commonly understood conventions (at least in English-speaking culture) I'd still call that "explicit", and I wouldn't have wanted to see it when I was avoiding explicit things.
That depends on the specifics and the publication. Especially in the recent years some magazines that are most definitely pornographic have gone for the lightsaber censoring, but by virtue of being obviously pornographic in the first place, these get categorized as H. Meanwhile, there are plot-driven series in seinen magazines with a significant focus on sex, except the censorship in these cases relies more often than not on strategic cropping and not even drawing the proper shapes, relying mostly on implication, and these kinds of series are currently considered smut because it's hard to argue they're strictly pornographic in nature. The explicitness of the sexual act itself ("where it's clear what is where and who's doing what with what organ") regardless of what you actually see is not really the dividing line.
If you don't want see what you say you consider explicit things, then simply exclude Smut from your tag settings.
That depends on the specifics and the publication. Especially in the recent years some magazines that are most definitely pornographic have gone for the lightsaber censoring, but by virtue of being obviously pornographic in the first place, these get categorized as H. Meanwhile, there are plot-driven series in seinen magazines with a significant focus on sex, except the censorship in these cases relies more often than not on strategic cropping and not even drawing the proper shapes, relying mostly on implication, and these kinds of series are currently considered smut because it's hard to argue they're strictly pornographic in nature.
I do agree with all of that. I mean, it's a really arbitrary set of standards and conventions, but we're all used to them by now (at least in English-speaking cultures?) between the age-ratings on hollywood films and English literature education and whatnot.
If you don't want see what you say you consider explicit things, then simply exclude Smut from your tag settings.
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I know how to avoid things I don't like, rest assured (though thank you).
Relevantly—although purely of academic interest—I was originally pointing out that, de-facto, the things people are saying in this thread about how things are tagged (smut and hentai flags) don't reflect the reality of how yaoi on this—or other sites—gets categorized. That is, "yaoi" is understood to contain at least the possibility of a smut and a hentai tag, in practice (in a manner similar to how a romance tag is usually implied by any of the gay-romance tags)—which works out relatively okay (notwithstanding whether it follows the rules) because those uploading/tagging/reading them understand this convention—but was relevant vis-à-vis a question that had popped up of whether, in general, "hentai" generally implies male-demographic works (at least to a western-audience).
1) People have a tendency to get preposterously pretentious when their fetishes are called into question. Lust resides exclusively in the lizard brain and the lizard brain doesn't like it when other brainy bits infringe on its territory. (see: people arguing that man-on-male-trap isn't gay, or that lolis/shotas are perfectly acceptable fuck-focuses because 2D isn't 3D)
2) All these classifications and stuff represent (truthfully or not) a potential barrier to people accessing their fap-bait, which kicks the lizard brain into overdrive.
3) A lot of people have a huge focus on their sexual "identity" as one of the foundations of their character, so they naturally assume that any dispute over the topic or related issues is a personal attack on them.
Doesn't really matter regardless of whether that's true or not, it's not how we use the word. If we renamed it to "porn", practically nothing would change except we'd be even more vulnerable to ending up on blocklists.
