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I like and use general tags; they're very helpful for finding specific images. For instance, post #53278 has been a favorite of mine for a while, but I lost the image when my computer crashed. I couldn't remember the artist, but I remembered she was wearing lingerie and thighhighs. A search of those two tags found the image very quickly and I was most pleased.

General tags are also useful when you want to upload an image that may already be here. Sometimes the dupe detector doesn't work and general tags can be a lot more reliable. I was going to upload a picture of Saber wearing thighhighs and a quick search of saber+thighhighs showed me it was already there. Searching tags is a lot quicker than using the dupe detector for those with slow internet speeds. Uploading something that's around 3mb takes a while for some people and it's also almost as annoying to have to downscale and then upload. I seed my torrents constantly and never limit my bandwidth, so I don't usually have a lot to spare. Searching tags is simply much easier and quicker for me most of the time.

Another importance of general tags is to help people find images they wouldn't find otherwise. Some really nice pictures are drawn by artists with very few pictures uploaded here, or they simply aren't very popular artists yet. If we only tagged their name, it would be more difficult for people to find and appreciate their work. See post #84631, post #83656 and post #82889 as examples. The more accurate, well maintained tags something has, the easier it is for the user to find.

I never made it a point to add general tags very much since I felt like I was taking work away from vistigris, but as long as the mods don't want them gone, I'd be happy to maintain them.