Shuu (finally) has character tags! Going forward, instead of typing character names into a free-form text field, you will now select character tags just as you would select a source or artist tag.

As part of the migration, we have created many (approximately 50,000) character tags based on the old character field data. These tags were then applied to old images automatically. Currently, there are many duplicate and similar character tags such as "Miki Sayaka", "Sayaka Miki", "Miki Sakaya", etc. Our plan is to group these similar tags and merge them into a single tag. The mods and taggers will be working towards this goal but as there are many such groups of similar tags it will take some time.

In the meantime, please tag your images with the character tag that best fits, such as "Miki Sayaka" in the above example. Please apply only one tag per character. There is no need to apply any of the typo or alternate order tags.

Hope this all makes sense. If not, please ask and I'll try to explain better.

Gonna be a lotta work to purge out the typo tags. Glad this is finally here though.

I think I'll need a bit of guiding on how to deal with these... ;v;
You see, I tried to fix a typo tag... (Kagamine RIn) and I failed miserably... and I'm not sure I know how to "merge" (alias) character tags like "Rin Kagamine" and "Kagamine Rin"
...am I even supposed to post these here? xD I think I might be doing something bad

Oh, hey mod and taggers. I have written some pages that will help us clean up the typos/dupes. No need to do it manually ^^. More info on that in the tagging team forum!

Posted the update to the Facebook page!

Another question would be how to deal with characters with multiple names. Not just dub names, but "secret identity" type deal, like Pretty Cure or comic book heroes. Would the real name be aliased to the superhero name, or vice versa?

that's actually being discussed at the moment :3

I like this update. How do I tag characters that aren't in the system, yet?

As of now, new tags will need to be created by the tagging team.