On Furbooru, essentially all
character
category tags are styled in the form of
character (franchise)
. But
oc
category tags don’t follow this same system. In fact, 273 out of the 372 existing OC tags have no extra information other than the character name. This will undoubtedly lead to conflicts down the line.
After asking a staff member about this, and bringing up the possibility of conflicts, I was informed that the person who next encountered a name conflict could simply append a new (parenthesized designation) to the OC tag name. But this leads to problems, beyond the relative unfairness of the first-come first-serve nature of these tags…
For example, there are plenty of existing cases on Derpibooru where there are multiple OCs with the same name that inadvertently shared the same tag name, which leads to a problem because these entirely different OCs may then become indistinguishable for search or for filtering purposes. In addition, there was at least one case where a conflict resulted in an actual altercation between users.
Another problem that was raised was the problem of there being
community oc
s, or characters which have essentially lost their original ownership due to popularity, but are not canon to a particular source material - sort of like a
generic trademark.
Upon asking about these cases, I was informed (rather unexpectedly) that these cases would be recast as the blue
character
category tags, even when these characters are not canon to a particular source material. This was because I had an implicit expectation that the blue tags were generally reserved for officially licensed/trademarked characters, and that the OC tags were primarily fan creations.
So if this is intended to actually be the case, and not just something that was poorly communicated to me in private, is there any meaningful distinction between the
character
category and the
oc
category? If there isn’t, could you please explain your rationale?