Filtering by category

So I recently decided to filter out the tag oc only, but as you may notice in its tag history it wasn’t particularly effective because there are still tens of thousands of uploads that are clearly oc only but aren’t tagged as such. Still, I want to avoid just filtering out the tag oc as a whole, because I don’t necessarily want to filter out images like for example >>205 where the image is still largely canon-related, just with ocs as background fill. And, yeah, I guess it would also let the opposite through, but those ain’t as common.
 
The easiest solution out of this that I could think of was to just filter out anything that has the tag oc but does not have any tag for canon characters but I can’t exactly add three thousand exception tags to a filter. Or maybe I can but I’d rather not. I have tried with combinations like character, category:character, or *character:**, but as far as I could tell, those don’t seem to work.
 
So here’s my question; is there a way to filter images by the condition of whether do they have any tag belonging to a specific category?

As far as I’m aware, there is no way to filter a specific category. We’re working hard on tagging images with proper tags though, so if any “oc only” images leak through your filter, it’s only temporary since there are dozens of people at work, filling in the missing tags. If you want, you could also help with that and tag “oc only” (I do that with some fetish tags that don’t get placed and that I filter out), we’ll greatly appreciate it if you do that!

I’ve been doing that for a few days now, but just saying, it’s not exactly going to be an easy job. Just consider this. The tag oc without oc only, and excluding all canon characters that have more than 1000 uploads still leaves over 70k images. Even assuming that the remaining characters could take, say, 10k, it still leaves sixty thousand images that more than likely should be tagged as oc only, but aren’t.

I hear you, but the way our current searching mechanism works, it’s simply not designed to search by tag attribute, it’s designed to search for image attributes. I will see if any tagging discussion can take place in regards to your concern.

It won’t solve the problem completely, but you may heavily reduce amount of images you don’t want to see by adding (oc, solo) in your complex filter.