Topic: Something I am Kind Of Curious About

I kind of curious, if Mods and Janitors would be willing to weigh in:
Are there any rules we have NOW that were not rules when e6 started?
Like, someone did something that was not against the rules at the time, and the then-mods basically thought 'In hindsight, we should have thought of that' when making it a new rule?

This kind of popped into my head when re-browsing the forum thread 'who was the worst offender in e621 history' and a user said 'this guy is the reason we can only do 50 note edits an hour'.
So my brain went 'I wonder if there any other changes/rules due to bad actors?'

Very early on, we were allowed to post scans of doujinshi that had not been sold for years, but eventually they acknowledged that was just piracy.

(That's one part of why my upload limit is now 0. I realize I can appeal that, but I probably won't be uploading anything soon. ^{Reducing my upload limit 1 -> 0 to participate in that April Fool's Day event was worth it though.})

EDIT: To whatever Mod increased my upload limit, thanks!

Not a mod but I can think of a few in rough order of implementation:

- e621 used to allow scans of doujinshi that were over a certain age to be uploaded. A while back that changed, and no paid works are allowed to be uploaded since the site is meant to be more artist-friendly than under its original owners.
- Lore tags did not exist, and by extension no rules regarding tagging the wrong lore tag intentionally existed either. A certain popular artist had a meltdown and other people followed suit, which resulted in the implementation of lore tags to say what gender or sex a character is when you can't tell through TWYS, and then expanded upon later to include other useful things too rather than just gender. Lore tags are basically the only categorical exception to TWYS.
- e621 used to allow human(oid) loli/shota works to be uploaded, but something happened in 2024 that nobody who knows the actual reason why is allowed to say anything about it. Don't bother asking for an answer as to why, you won't get one. Cub/non-human(oid) works remain unaffected.

Those are the big rules changes I remember. It'd be neat if the uploading guidelines had let you view changes like a wiki page does, it'd be neat to see the changes over the years. I got here like 2020 but I browsed the site long before that. I don't remember everything since the dawn of the site, though it did change hands- Bad Dragon wasn't the original owner IIRC. From what I know, it was a very different place when it started.

There are plenty of rule changes since the site started, though I wouldn't attribute every change due to bad actors finding loopholes.
Most of major rules are still the same, some are refined and reclassified, while others are due to changing policies (e.g., prohibitions on underaged artist works, AI generations, etc.).

If you meant Uploading Guideline changes, you can see the link below.

mklxiv said:
It'd be neat if the uploading guidelines had let you view changes like a wiki page does, it'd be neat to see the changes over the years.

Any page you see here should be searchable through the Wiki tab, including their version histories.
https://e621.net/wiki_page_versions?search%5Bwiki_page_id%5D=11143

The very early starting days/years of e6 were a very different place. But here's a few highlights that not every user might already know/remember has changed over the decades:

- Originally there were no tagging minimum rules. [1] There could be (and were) images posted with only one junk tag. People complained. It pretty much took years to have that rule changed and then to be actually enforced.

- Originally there were no public uploading guidelines. [2] , [3] , [4] And it was that way on purpose. At most, there was a loose furry-mostly focus that was more likely than not to be approved. But pretty much anything went, and it often came down to 'if a mod likes it, it stays'. Also, if a mod didn't like an upload, they might delete the upload, OR they might delete the user, or they might delete both. The only things you could count on were that broken images and some really extreme anti-furry troll posts tended to get deleted. And illegal RL photos. Everything else was an unpredictable gamble.

---

A few of the much later on changes:

- We actually added Sets because it was such a problem with people using Pools for personal collections, and it was mutually frustrating for both staff and users for us to have to delete and punish people for it. So we finally made a user personal alternative called Sets. It did work to reduce how many people misused Pools, and it also gives us somewhere to point them towards when we have to tell someone off for it and delete any personal pool collections.

- For the longest time, there was a fairly limited # of how many tags you could search at a time. I do know that at one point it was as low as only 2 tags search at a time and later reports of 2 tags search limit for member accounts and 4-ish for priv+. Then raised to 6 for reg and 8 for priv+ Those limits meant power users got VERY creative using their blacklist to filter results as a workaround for any search they wanted to do, so that way they could get more specific than just the search bar alone could get them. It actually took a very long time for the search limit to expand to give us the search capacity as it is now. So that was a big deal.

- It used to be that if you deleted all of the tags on an image, it became almost unfindable. You would have to check for it specifically, to find and fix them. Which delayed how fast that type of vandalism was found, and because of that level of disruption it was often treated as a more serious degree of infraction with less tolerance for those who did it. Make no mistake, it is still 100% against the rules! But several site changes over the years make it easier to find and fix, so those who get smacked for it usually get more of chance to turn their behavior around before being shoved permanently out of the airlock.

- Before Replacements Beta was invented, you had to separately upload the improved version, then flag the old one and link them, so that way we could at least easily see and compare both versions before deciding which one to keep. Later improvements added ways to optionally keep/merge the favorites and votes and tags, if it made sense to do so for that image. Before that? Everything would just get lost with the old copy when it was deleted in favor of the better one.

I'm sure there are plenty more.

Probably a little off-topic, but I think there are a few notable restrictions/changes made that weren't directly related to rule changes/uploading guidelines:

• Anonymous commenting used to be a thing.^[1][2][3] The commenter would be labelled as "The Dog In Your Guitar" and were all removed at one point (e.g., post #7814), mandating people to create a proper account to comment. Deleted or lost accounts also went under the same name.
• Flash games used to be a very big thing, with interactive elements that allow users to play games directly on e621. However, it got discontinued on the site with the death of Adobe Flash, though people still cling onto the hope it makes a return.
• We used to have an IRC chat which allowed you to chat with people online in real-time, see e621:irc. It got removed at some point and we switched over to Discord.
• We also used to have a Contributor rank that was one level above Privileged, but it was rarely given out and eventually removed.
• People used to be able to see the who the uploader is for each post, but it got removed because of people began competing over who reposts something first and gets the "poster credit".
• People used to be able to see the full list of users who favourited a post, but it was once removed due to it hogging up too much site resources every time it loaded a post. It eventually got re-added again. In addition, there used to be no limit on how many posts one could favourite, but it got capped for the same reason mentioned.

thegreatwolfgang said:

• People able used to be able to see the full list of users who favourited a post, but it got removed due to it hogging up too much site resources every time it loaded a post.

Then they added a "show" link next to the fave count to see a list of people who favorited the post on a separate page. I doubt many people are going to a separate page to satisfy their curiosity about "I bet THAT guy favorited this!" though, so kinda cool but kinda useless.

crocogator said:
Then they added a "show" link next to the fave count to see a list of people who favorited the post on a separate page. I doubt many people are going to a separate page to satisfy their curiosity about "I bet THAT guy favorited this!" though, so kinda cool but kinda useless.

Oh, I didn't realise they re-added that.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Probably a little off-topic, but I think there are a few notable restrictions/changes made that weren't directly related to rule changes/uploading guidelines:

• Anonymous commenting used to be a thing.^[1][2][3] The commenter would be labelled as "The Dog In Your Guitar" and were all removed at one point (e.g., post #7814), mandating people to create a proper account to comment. Deleted or lost accounts also went under the same name.
• Flash games used to be a very big thing, with interactive elements that allow users to play games directly on e621. However, it got discontinued on the site with the death of Adobe Flash, though people still cling onto the hope it makes a return.
• We used to have an IRC chat which allowed you to chat with people online in real-time, see e621:irc. It got removed at some point and we switched over to Discord.
• We also used to have a Contributor rank that was one level above Privileged, but it was rarely given out and eventually removed.
• People used to be able to see the who the uploader is for each post, but it got removed because of people began competing over who reposts something first and gets the "poster credit".
• People used to be able to see the full list of users who favourited a post, but it was once removed due to it hogging up too much site resources every time it loaded a post. It eventually got re-added again. In addition, there used to be no limit on how many posts one could favourite, but it got capped for the same reason mentioned.

wait theres a limit to how many posts you can favourite? whats the limit?

baffled_exe said:
wait theres a limit to how many posts you can favourite? whats the limit?

80,000 posts

baffled_exe said:
wait theres a limit to how many posts you can favourite? whats the limit?

Apparently 80000 posts.

Huh! This is all really net info! Thank you all so far!

donovan_dmc said:
80,000 posts

I wonder if anyone has reached it or, if not, whom the user closest to it is. Because that 's a lot of faves!

fuzzy_kobold said:
I wonder if anyone has reached it or, if not, whom the user closest to it is. Because that 's a lot of faves!

Several thousand if not tens of thousands of people have reached it, and a select few people with legacy limits are even higher

Namely:

CrocoGator also has a higher limit of at least 104,000, but their actual limit was not included in the info I have

donovan_dmc said:
CrocoGator also has a higher limit of at least 104,000, but their actual limit was not included in the info I have

I think those users actually have higher limits. My limit is still 80k, meaning I can remove favorites but not add them. If I were ever to remove over 23060 faves... Yeah too much work, lol. Upvotes and sometimes sets are essentially used as my faves.

crocogator said:
I think those users actually have higher limits. My limit is still 80k, meaning I can remove favorites but not add them. If I were ever to remove over 23060 faves... Yeah too much work, lol. Upvotes and sometimes sets are essentially used as my faves.

Ah right, that's why you weren't listed
I now vaguely remember you not getting a higher limit because you were already above the existing limit when they were lowered (since it was already 80k for normal users)

The others do actually have higher limits

fuzzy_kobold said:
I wonder if anyone has reached it or, if not, whom the user closest to it is. Because that 's a lot of faves!

I have. Multiple times. Clearing through them is a PITA.

Anyways, Wolfgang already mentioned it (tysm), but since I already have a write-up with some added info, I figured I might as well add it here.

ⓘ Note

To those that are highly invested in such matters, almost every single special page that's just styled text is actually a wiki page being dynamically inserted into the page. Some examples include:

• All help pages
• For these, you can add .json to the URL to find the corresponding wiki page. E.g. the API help page is at https://e621.net/help/api; add .json to get https://e621.net/help/api.json, which will show you the wiki page is e621:api.
• e621:takedown for takedowns
• e621:terms_of_service for ToS/ToU
• e621:privacy_policy for the privacy policy
• e621:contact for the contact page

This is for a few reasons:

• Transparency: Just like with all wiki pages, if something changes, you can see the revision history.
• Simplicity: If a page doesn't need more capabilities than DText can provide, it's not worth the extra work to hard-code it.
• Less restrictions on changes: If a page was hard-coded, that means we'd need to take the site down to change it. Using a locked wiki page lets staff change them as needed; way less of a pain for everyone.
• Flexibility: By just rendering a wiki page as DText as needed, we can use & reuse these easily; for example, in addition to its wiki page of e621:rules, the Code of Conduct is available as both a help page and a static page, so we just have both of them point to the same wiki page. Another example is actually that small blurb at the top of the page to flag a post; yup, even that is a wiki page, & same goes for the blurb for replacements, but not for reporting a post(/user/whatever); that's currently hard-coded.

If you're curious, you can search the wiki to find these special pages; almost each & every one of them has a prefix of either e621: or help:. Though the only exception I've seen is the uploading guidelines (which can be found through the help page instead), if what you're looking for doesn't show up for those searches, you can also search for it directly; e.g. searching *discord* will bring up e621:discord, the wiki page used for the page to join our Discord server. For the help pages, you can add .json to the URL to find the corresponding wiki page; for example, the API help page is at https://e621.net/help/api, so adding .json will get you https://e621.net/help/api.json, which will show you the underlying wiki page is e621:api.

thegreatwolfgang said:
The commenter would be labelled as "The Dog In Your Guitar"

What like from Ptikobj?

errorist said:
What like from Ptikobj?

Yes, and that post is actually on e6 - post #64189.

thegreatwolfgang said:

• People used to be able to see the who the uploader is for each post, but it got removed because of people began competing over who reposts something first and gets the "poster credit".

I can see post uploaders just fine? Unless that's just for replacements?

kyiiel said:
I can see post uploaders just fine? Unless that's just for replacements?

If you're looking at the list of replacements that's an entirely different thing, otherwise the uploader or the post is likely verified as the artist of the post, which causes the uploader name to show

donovan_dmc said:
If you're looking at the list of replacements that's an entirely different thing, otherwise the uploader or the post is likely verified as the artist of the post, which causes the uploader name to show

Ah, the verified artist was the uploader. Thanks.

donovan_dmc said:
If you're looking at the list of replacements that's an entirely different thing, otherwise the uploader or the post is likely verified as the artist of the post, which causes the uploader name to show

Pray correct me if I'm wrong, but ain't the first name in the Tags/Desc log (IE: The one all the way at the bottom of any list of tag edits) the uploader?

fuzzy_kobold said:
Pray correct me if I'm wrong, but ain't the first name in the Tags/Desc log (IE: The one all the way at the bottom of any list of tag edits) the uploader?

For most posts you're right. Doesn't work for very very early ones tho.
post #89 for example. It says anonymous.

fuzzy_kobold said:
Pray correct me if I'm wrong, but ain't the first name in the Tags/Desc log (IE: The one all the way at the bottom of any list of tag edits) the uploader?

That is the current default method to check, though the tag history would not be accessible for guests/people who are not logged in.