[sothis]

thanks everyone for all the helpful, well-explained opinions. :)

while on the plane i had thought about how to make 'mature' a little more specific, and i wonder about 'mature subject matter'. 'mature themes' would work as well, but regardless i think putting something after 'mature' would make it clear that it's the subject matter we're talking about, not necessarily an age stamp.

i don't necessarily think we should break down the tags as specifically as gundevil. that means someone would have to verify, for example, that there's very specific things; plus i think it'll confuse people.

but this is exactly why i'm not sure if everything HAS to be tagged. for example, only posting 'nudity' if there's a strong amount.

i mean, something like 'implied sex' will just turn off a lot of people - what if it's only one scene out of 26 episodes? we have no way of saying how much is in the anime or manga, there will just be a tag there. thats also why we only put up major tags period, so we dont overload people. so for example, black lagoon was brought up as an example of mature themes, because a few times the char implies who he's slept with. i'd disagree with adding the tag in this case. unless it's rampant, imo it shouldnt be put up, as it would be somewhat of a false impression of what the anime/manga is about.

think about movies we saw as a kid (even things like princess bride, or newer movies like shrek) - there's a lot of masked innuendo in there, but as kids we have no idea - not till later ;). even if there's an unmasked bit in there, we still tend to not understand. that doesnt mean, imo, they deserve a mature themes tag.

so i lilke the idea of 'mature themes' for THEMES of content (rape, etc)... but then we'd still need a sex-type tag to tag the actual ACTS of the themes. if rape is discussed at length throughout the anime but never shown, even slightly, then it probably would get mature themes but not a sex tag.

i'm still just stuck on if we should have a tag for minor sexual content; i think overtagging with such a tag will mean people avoid a lot of good stuff.

now, another question:
should we have other age-appropriate type tags? i dont want to move to a rating scale because it would be arbitrary. but right now we have 'family friendly' and potentially 'mature themes' - if we dont do adult, are there others we're missing? we could potentially put these on the tags homepage in a section, in case people want to find age-appropriate ones immediately.