The tag alias #51746 filthy -> filth has been approved.

Reason: Both tags have about 1.5k posts and almost all posts overlap.
The wiki page for filth describes how both tags are used. The page for filthy does not exist so I'm led to believe they're used in the same way.

EDIT: The tag alias filthy -> filth (forum #310638) has been approved by @bitWolfy.

Just discovered the same issue. Both tags now have over 2k, with less than 100 posts either way having one tag but not the other.

Personally I'm inclined to invalidate them altogether, as they seem both overly broad (does this guy taking a shower really deserve the same tag as this girl shitting in the bath ?) and subjective, along the same lines as cute. But at the very least, we don't need two of them.

Another red flag is that a substantial proportion of both of these tags appear to have been added by the same user.

The bulk update request #1185 is active.

change category filth (3724) -> invalid
change category filthy (0) -> invalid

Reason: Actually, sod it. If you scroll back far enough in that one user's changes history, it appears that "filthy" and "filth" used to be a package deal with "nasty": https://e621.net/post_versions?commit=Search&search%5Btags_added%5D=filthy+filth+nasty&search%5Bupdater_id%5D=192557 until the latter was invalidated and the user was tempbanned for their tagging behaviour. That's evidence enough for me that these tags should not be allowed to stand.

EDIT: The bulk update request #1185 (forum #314726) has been approved by @slyroon.

We also have dirty and messy, which seem to have similar purposes. However, I’m not too sure about invalidating both of these. I could see filth as being separate from these two, and could be useful as a search or blacklist item, at least if it’s used according to the wiki page for it. I think it may be better to just undo all that user’s changes, and alias one of these to the other.

Dirty seems to be used specifically for dirt or mud, whereas messy, according to the wiki, is for bodily fluids. If you invalidate filth and filthy, how would you tag a character that simply appears to be unclean? Like, for example, this? That is neither messy nor dirty, according to their respective wiki definitions, but it is definitely unclean.

scaliespe said:
Dirty seems to be used specifically for dirt or mud, whereas messy, according to the wiki, is for bodily fluids. If you invalidate filth and filthy, how would you tag a character that simply appears to be unclean? Like, for example, this? That is neither messy nor dirty, according to their respective wiki definitions, but it is definitely unclean.

Smelly would be appropriate for that, given the green haze emanating from the character to indicate an unpleasant odor. The problem with a tag like filth is that it overlaps with some instances of dirty (though not all), but can also apply to dirty clothing that may or may not be worn, some garbage visible in the scene, an unkempt room, etc. It's too vague, so invalidating it and having a wiki denote other potentially relevant tags would help.

watsit said:
Smelly would be appropriate for that, given the green haze emanating from the character to indicate an unpleasant odor. The problem with a tag like filth is that it overlaps with some instances of dirty (though not all), but can also apply to dirty clothing that may or may not be worn, some garbage visible in the scene, an unkempt room, etc. It's too vague, so invalidating it and having a wiki denote other potentially relevant tags would help.

Even in that case, the character himself looks pretty grimy, even you took away the green haze. This might be a better example in this case. No visible indication of odor, so it isn’t tagged smelly, though it is actually tagged with both dirty and filthy, despite that not fitting the definition on the wiki for dirty: The state of having dirt, dust, mud, or otherwise filth caked onto a surface.

I just feel like something is missing in having only these other tags. I’d be more in favor of expanding dirty to include general filth or uncleanliness, in a similar manner to how the term “dirty clothes” is used. Perhaps even removing the “caked on” part from the definition would be enough. Though dirty is also being used for a character with food spilled on him/herself as in this post, which definitely does not serve the same purpose as filthy. I’d rather use messy for that, but that seems to be reserved for sexual fluids, for some reason.

If for no other reason than as a useful blacklist term (and, of course, for some people’s fetishes), I think there should be a tag that just indicates characters that appear “gross” - not in the sense of gore or body horror stuff, just grimy. (Gross, of course, is already an invalid tag) My issue is that dirty covers a lot of stuff that probably would not be considered gross, like food and mud and actual dirt. A lot of stuff that I would not actually want to blacklist. Sure, smelly probably covers a majority of such posts, but not all of them. Not all such posts have visible odor clouds or stench lines. scat overlaps pretty commonly as well, but that’s still not the same thing.

filthy -smelly -vomit -trash -dirty_socks -scat -fart -smegma -dirty_clothing -dirty_feet still turns up just over two pages of results. Sure, many of them are mistagged, but some aren’t, and that’s still a lot of tags to subtract that could all be represented by just one tag. That’s why I think it could still be useful - or at least we could reorganize dirty/messy to be more useful, though I’d prefer filthy over dirty. I’m not sure we need dirty, as it’s currently used. Probably just filthy for things that appear grimy or unclean, and messy for things that are covered in some substance, and those may overlap. I’m not sure what point there is in having a character covered in food or mud or feces represented in one tag, and a character covered in cum or saliva in another.

scaliespe said:
Even in that case, the character himself looks pretty grimy, even you took away the green haze. This might be a better example in this case. No visible indication of odor, so it isn’t tagged smelly, though it is actually tagged with both dirty and filthy, despite that not fitting the definition on the wiki for dirty: The state of having dirt, dust, mud, or otherwise filth caked onto a surface.

The latter case has smegma, which I think is enough to warrant dirty since it's a result of not being clean. Excluding that, he otherwise just looks overweight, sweaty, and "hairy", which I don't think that should be enough to warrant a filth/filthy tag.

scaliespe said:
If for no other reason than as a useful blacklist term (and, of course, for some people’s fetishes), I think there should be a tag that just indicates characters that appear “gross” - not in the sense of gore or body horror stuff, just grimy.

There is the ugly_bastard tag. Not used much though, and I'm not sure how much I like the idea of that tag as it's leaning a bit into subjective territory (much like gross). And indeed, there's a number of posts with the tag that clearly shouldn't qualify. And that's ultimately the issue, defining the TWYS elements for the concept that also wouldn't be grossly mistagged.

watsit said:
There is the ugly_bastard tag. Not used much though, and I'm not sure how much I like the idea of that tag as it's leaning a bit into subjective territory (much like gross). And indeed, there's a number of posts with the tag that clearly shouldn't qualify. And that's ultimately the issue, defining the TWYS elements for the concept that also wouldn't be grossly mistagged.

ugly_bastard is certainly not an appropriate tag, as it refers to a quite specific hentai trope that doesn't even imply uncleanliness of any sort. Unsurprisingly, they don't show up much in furry art - post #1382459 was one of the only correctly tagged images I could see on the front page.

It's a valid (if niche) tag, which definitely needs serious cleanup, but it has nothing to do with this discussion.

As for the actual question, I am not sure there is value in having one huge umbrella tag which covers so many different subjects that nobody would ever want to search for or blacklist all of them. How many images do we have of a character spilling ice cream on their chest? Should they share a tag with characters covered in cum, or worse?

scaliespe said:
filthy -smelly -vomit -trash -dirty_socks -scat -fart -smegma -dirty_clothing -dirty_feet still turns up just over two pages of results.

I got it down to one page by subtracting urine. Most of the remaining images appear to be mistagged.

wat8548 said:
As for the actual question, I am not sure there is value in having one huge umbrella tag which covers so many different subjects that nobody would ever want to search for or blacklist all of them. How many images do we have of a character spilling ice cream on their chest? Should they share a tag with characters covered in cum, or worse?

There are a number of variants of wet_and_messy_fetishism all aliased to messy currently. This, for some reason, is despite the fact that that particular fetish often involves things like food or mud, which is represented by the dirty tag instead. Dirty is also being used to describe characters covered in actual dirt or who are filthy or unclean without necessarily being coated in some substance. And what do those have to do with each other? As far as that somewhat common fetish is concerned, being messy with food, mud, or cum are all related, while being dirty is not. Then, on the other hand, there appears to be a fetish for filthiness itself, which doesn’t usually seem to involve a character being covered in a substance—although there can obviously be some overlap depending on the substance. If we’re trying to organize fetish art either for finding or blacklisting, why would we have WAM split between two separate tags, messy and dirty, and have a largely unrelated fetish sharing the latter tag? From a TWYS perspective, perhaps both need to take a shower, but I don’t see that being useful.

My contention is that we only really need two tags here: I’d suggest filthy for characters that appear filthy, which can include things like smegma, dirt, odor, and general uncleanliness depicted in an image; and another tag, messy, for images depicting a character that has a mess of some substance on them. I don’t think those two should be conflated as they currently are.

wat8548 said:
I got it down to one page by subtracting urine. Most of the remaining images appear to be mistagged.

I left out urine for the same reason I left out dirty—it doesn’t necessarily count as filthy, while the rest of these probably (at least for the most part) do. Perhaps that can be debated, but the wiki page for filth does state that watersports is excluded, so my idea was that the images that have both filth and urine tagged are filthy because they’re filthy in some way, not just because it contains urine. The urine may be the reason for the filthiness, but it may not always be. But, regardless, the point of that was to show that there is an entire group of tags relating to filth that are all independent of each other, so an umbrella tag would be useful. So, let’s say you find filthiness to be unappealing, and you want to blacklist art of it so you don’t have to see it. Does it make sense to have to blacklist smelly vomit trash dirty_socks scat fart smegma dirty_clothing dirty_feet (and possibly other things I missed—include urine too, if you like) just to cover everything that might easily be summed up as filthy? No, because with that many tags, and due to mistagging or undertagging, you’ll still end up with quite a few results that are currently tagged filthy but will still slip by your blacklist. And even a few of those, like, say, this or this don’t even appear to be mistagged… they’re just filthy without containing any of the other items on my hypothetical blacklist. And some of those tags, like trash, might end up blacklisting art that is not filthy at all, such as when a full trashcan is seen in the background of an otherwise not filth-themed image.

scaliespe said:
My contention is that we only really need two tags here: I’d suggest filthy for characters that appear filthy, which can include things like smegma, dirt, odor, and general uncleanliness depicted in an image; and another tag, messy, for images depicting a character that has a mess of some substance on them. I don’t think those two should be conflated as they currently are.

Where do you draw the dividing line? For example, how wet does dirt have to become before it officially counts as mud?

To me, "a mess of some substance" sounds like it would fall under the umbrella of "general uncleanliness". Also it seems as if you're proposing to relocate scat under the messy tag, which I'm not sure would meet your apparent goal of making it better serve the fetish as you describe it.

scaliespe said:
I left out urine for the same reason I left out dirty—it doesn’t necessarily count as filthy, while the rest of these probably (at least for the most part) do.

Should probably tell the person who tagged post #2621589 that, then. (You'll never guess who.)

scaliespe said:
And even a few of those, like, say, this or this don’t even appear to be mistagged… they’re just filthy without containing any of the other items on my hypothetical blacklist.

I disagree, both of those appear dirty to me. Or at least I don't have any better ideas as to what that ambiguous brown substance might be. The second one even literally calls itself "Dirty" in the description.

I remain unconvinced that there are any valid circumstances where a picture might be tagged filthy but not any more specific tag.

wat8548 said:
Where do you draw the dividing line? For example, how wet does dirt have to become before it officially counts as mud?

How likely is it that you’ll see much art of semi-wet dirt? It’s probably just either wet or dry, and if there is art depicting some kind of grey area, we’ll just handle it how we handle any other tagging grey area on this site—just make a judgement call.

wat8548 said:

To me, "a mess of some substance" sounds like it would fall under the umbrella of "general uncleanliness". Also it seems as if you're proposing to relocate scat under the messy tag, which I'm not sure would meet your apparent goal of making it better serve the fetish as you describe it.

Alright, ‘general uncleanliness’ might have been too broad of a term. I meant something more like ‘unsanitary.’ That’s why I prefer the term filthy over dirty… filth seems to imply an unsanitary condition more than dirty does, though they are used interchangeably in common parlance, so we could use either one.

Some scat would go under messy, yes, but not all of it. And scat actually can be part of the WAM fetish as I understand it—it just has to do with being, well… wet and/or messy. But currently, why is it split between dirty and messy? Why is messy only for sexual fluids or saliva? It seems very arbitrary and I’m not sure what purpose it serves to separate them like that.

wat8548 said:

I disagree, both of those appear dirty to me. Or at least I don't have any better ideas as to what that ambiguous brown substance might be. The second one even literally calls itself "Dirty" in the description.

I remain unconvinced that there are any valid circumstances where a picture might be tagged filthy but not any more specific tag.

Dirty could describe them, yes. Like I said, either filthy or dirty could be used for what I’m proposing. I just don’t like how dirty is currently used, while the current usage of filthy (minus some tagging errors by the aforementioned user) seems more useful. The problem is, I don’t see how to blacklist those items and similar things other than with the filthy or dirty tags. But dirty, as it’s currently used, would also blacklist a lot of stuff like this and, well, a large amount of what’s currently tagged dirty -filthy. In this case, it would be less tagging work to keep filthy how it mostly is already, and alias or invalidate dirty.

The tag alias filthy -> filth (forum #310638) has been approved by @bitWolfy.

Update: since this thread was last active, the filthy filth nasty user has been permanently banned.

Other users are continuing to tag filth for subjective reasons such as "peeing_on_furniture is inherently nasty".

Most of the remaining images in filth -smelly -vomit -trash -dirty_socks -scat -fart -smegma -dirty_clothing -dirty_feet -urine -dirty either should be tagged dirty instead or it's not clear why they were tagged filth in the first place. Chief suspect number two.

I appreciate there's room for discussion about which types of mess are considered "unsanitary" or whatever, but this tag is unsalvageable. Are there even any messes other than food or sexual fluids which people wouldn't prefer to see filed under "dirty"?

The bulk update request #1185 (forum #314726) has been approved by @slyroon.

So it's been decided now that filth was just too broad a tag? Which tags should the wiki point to, besides the tags already mentioned above

Just saw this tag was invalidated, curious what to tag images with "shaded buttholes" that looks like they didn't wipe but also aren't clear enough to TWYS as scat. Momiji-kun (fair warning, a lot of it is cub and implied noncon cub so I don't want to direct link) 'shades' buttholes and butts brown, but also draws it looking like it's the skin color so it doesn't quite qualify TWYS as scat. I'm not going digging for it again, but at least one of their pics has a discussion that the artist is specifically doing this to sidestep e6's scat tags just to be a troll. I don't like most of this artist's stuff but there is the occasional pic that's interesting. I was using the filth tag (along with several others) to at least filter out most of what I don't want to see. I know this is an edge case, but it was a useful tag. I tagged a whole bunch to try to help other people filter it and now the tag is invalidated and the pics are back in my searches again.