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Tag Guidelines

Last updated

Why Are Tags Important?

One of the most attractive features of boorus such as this one is a robust and thorough tagging system. By properly tagging images, we allow users to more effectively search and filter our images. There are several categories of tags, and some are required on every image.

Important Tags

These are the most important tags, which you should start out with before considering others.

The rating tags

These special tags group content into broad categories. Images require at least one, and non-safe images can have one of each non-safe type (sexual, dark, and gross).

The safe rating (cannot be with any other ratings)

  • safe

    What it says on the tin: okay for kids, won't get you fired as work wallpaper. Unedited official MLP content is always safe, unless you do horrible, horrible things to make it unsafe. Then it's not safe. So don't do that and then try to tag it Safe.

Sexy Stuff

  • suggestive

    Risqué clothing, sexualized situations, interactions, descriptions, and/or touching, seductiveness, low-detail or outlined genitalia, innuendo and sexual jokes, sloppy smoochin', urination

  • questionable

    Detailed or disproportionately large sexual or sexualized anatomy, sexualized excrement, fetishy interactions, sexualized contact with sexualized areas of the body, sex toys, implied or pretend ejaculate, implicit or invisible insertion of any object, explicit description of specific sex acts

  • explicit

    Clearly shown or detailed description of sex, genitals and sexual bodily fluids.

Dark Stuff

  • semi-grimdark

    Creepy, violent, deathy stuff, but the more cartoony side thereof. Non-explicit physical or sexual abuse. Dubious consent.

  • grimdark

    Nightmare fuel. Explicit violence, gore, horror, abuse, rape, or torture.

Grody Stuff

  • grotesque

    Cronenberg would be proud. Body horror, explicit gore, filth, excrement, and other substances that come out of bodies.


Other important tags

  • artist:artist name here — specifies the work's artist
  • artist needed — when the artist is unknown
  • meta — stuff about stuff
  • seizure warning — animated content that could trigger seizures


Prefix Stuff

These tags help to distinguish types of tags from each other.

  • episode:episode title here — used before the title of any animated episode or short that appears in official media
  • character:character name here — used before the name of any character that appears in official media
  • oc: OC name here — used before any fanmade character name
  • parents:parent names here — used to establish that the tagged character is the offspring of the two specified parents
  • ship:shipped names here — used to specify a relationship between the named characters
  • species:species type here — used to indicate what species the tagged character is
  • comic:comic title here fanfic:fanfic title here series:series title here — used to indicate which fanmade comic, fanfic, or series the image is from


Spoiler Stuff

  • spoiler — general tag to indicate that the image contains spoilers
  • spoiler:sxx — general tag to indicate that the image contains spoilers for Season xx
  • spoiler:sxxeyy — general tag to indicate that the image contains spoilers for Season xx Episode yy

Other Common Stuff

  • anthro — non-humans with partial human body shapes not normal for their species
  • crossover — when elements from another media universe are combined with MLP elements
  • equestria girls pony life — for characters and locations from the Equestria Girls or Pony Life serieses
  • ponified — when a non-pony character has been turned into a pony
  • humanized — when a non-human character has been turned into a human
  • shipping — characters are in a romantic or sexual relationship
  • solo — when there is only one character in the image
  • oc — when any character in the image is an original character (not from the show, fan-made)

Importing from other boorus

All this can make moving your art between Boorus confusing or annoying. Keeping track of tags is not ideal, so for that purpose here we have a spreadsheet that other Boorus equivalent tags to the ones from Manebooru that most commonly differ. Please use it as reference, a quick check or even for your self-developed import tool. We'll try to keep it as complete and up to date as possible.

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