edit: WAM here refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_and_messy_fetishism

The WAM tags all point to messy, which is then used to mean bodily fluids, which is mostly unrelated to WAM as a fetish. The "see also" part also mentions some WAM-related tags, which I can only guess related to an older meaning of that tag. The "dirty" tag seems to be its new replacement, but unfortunately the overwhelming majority of posts under that tag don't seem to be WAM related (a lot of "I haven't showered in a week" dirty, rather than "I fell into a vat of ooze" dirty).

The current structure of WAM tags can be contrasted with the foot tags: feet, foot_fetish, foot_focus, and foot_play are all different things, but all WAM-related terms are funnelled down into "messy", and even if it were corrected to point to "dirty" instead, it just means that the character is visually a little grubby, rather than dirty in a way that appeals to someone that enjoys WAM. It's the difference between the dry observation that a character has feet, and the observation that the picture is one that focuses on them or poses them in a way that appeals to people entertaining a foot fetish.

For example, if you're looking for WAM posts under that tag right now you might pick these out of the crowd:
- https://e621.net/posts/3202616?q=dirty
- https://e621.net/posts/3353445?q=dirty
- https://e621.net/posts/3262617?q=dirty
- or even https://e621.net/posts/3264239?q=dirty
But otherwise, unfortunately it looks like right now the "dirty" tag is as good a predictor of a post catering to a stinky-feet fetish as it is of a WAM fetish, even though it seems to have been intended as the hub tag for WAM content.

On a similar note, posts like this one have an element of both "dirty" and "mud", but I don't think it rises to the level of WAM fetish content at all. It's a nice pic for different more platonic reasons, but not scratching that precise itch, which means that even combining related tags isn't really a viable way to focus on this content. On the other extreme, things like slime don't seem to register as "dirty" to most people, so if you combine those tags then you really don't find much at all, let alone WAM content.

There are some tags out there like "wam" (somehow not aliased to wam_fetish) and "mud_covered", but their usage seems quite rare (both in the double-digits) and at least the first of the two seems like it's one otherwise reasonable decision away from being aliased up to wam_fetish and all the way up to messy and/or dirty.

At the risk of making this post more harebrained with another minor quibble: "dirty" isn't really a term I would associate with people looking for WAM content, or at least not in the same way that you know someone into bondage is going to type "bondage" in the search box. It feels similar to if someone had aliased "bondage" to a name like "detained" -- not necessarily wrong but too broad in some ways, too narrow in other ways, and not something you'd think of sitting at the search bar or tag box.

I don't know if there's an easy solution to all of this but I think unhooking wam_fetish from messy/dirty and maybe sending it to wam instead might be a workable option. (Ditto for all the other tags relating to wet_and_messy etc). I don't come here often so please take this with a grain of salt.

i have never even heard of wam fetish.

Ditto for all the other tags relating to wet_and_messy etc

oh

aversioncapacitor' said:
oh

yeah, you have to read the whole post before you can even tell what is even being talked about

There was a long discussion about this in topic #29682.

wat8548 said:
There was a long discussion about this in topic #29682.

Thanks for the link. Unfortunately the topic seems to be focused on the dirt(y)/filth(y) tags themselves, and more on the usefulness as a tool for blacklisting rather than positive searching, so it seems like that end of the discussion was left loose by the time the topic concluded. The solution proposed there for this particular situation was to let "messy" refer to WAM content, which seems reasonable enough to me, with the caveat that people seem to misunderstand that phrasing quite regularly (e.g. english users of pixiv sometimes misuse that tag (メッシー) for diaper content, and on furaffinity it would be hard to even call that a misuse).

Right now the problem that I am running into is that the site has no possible way to search for WAM content, but if I were to tag it myself to solve this problem then I would have to choose between tagging it under "dirty" (flooded with unrelated content), "messy" (seems to be a bad alias given its wiki page), or "wam" (seems to only exist by accident), and none of those really make sense. I'd like to take the third option as things are now, because it feels like a loophole by which this content can be tagged without being shuffled into the much larger deck of general ick, but the fact that all other iterations of this tag have been aliased away suggests that using the "wam" tag would be intentionally going against the grain of the current tagging system.

forreasonsunknown said:
Thanks for the link. Unfortunately the topic seems to be focused on the dirt(y)/filth(y) tags themselves, and more on the usefulness as a tool for blacklisting rather than positive searching, so it seems like that end of the discussion was left loose by the time the topic concluded. The solution proposed there for this particular situation was to let "messy" refer to WAM content, which seems reasonable enough to me, with the caveat that people seem to misunderstand that phrasing quite regularly (e.g. english users of pixiv sometimes misuse that tag (メッシー) for diaper content, and on furaffinity it would be hard to even call that a misuse).

Right now the problem that I am running into is that the site has no possible way to search for WAM content, but if I were to tag it myself to solve this problem then I would have to choose between tagging it under "dirty" (flooded with unrelated content), "messy" (seems to be a bad alias given its wiki page), or "wam" (seems to only exist by accident), and none of those really make sense. I'd like to take the third option as things are now, because it feels like a loophole by which this content can be tagged without being shuffled into the much larger deck of general ick, but the fact that all other iterations of this tag have been aliased away suggests that using the "wam" tag would be intentionally going against the grain of the current tagging system.

As I pointed out in the other thread, all the WAM-related aliases were a bad idea given how “messy” is currently defined, and something needs to be done about it eventually. Unfortunately, we’re still under a heavy backlog of alias and implication requests, so it’s not likely that anything will be done about it anytime soon. In the meantime, I think using the “accidental” wam tag for this content is acceptable, since there doesn’t currently exist any other tag suitable for that purpose. If/when these tags can be sorted out, wam can then be aliased to the new correct tag, whatever it may be, which will then move all the posts over to the correct tag.

Personally, I think the tag should just be called wet_and_messy since that’s even what Wikipedia calls it. Then, perhaps messy ought to be invalidated because, as you pointed out, it’s probably associated with messy_diaper which is definitely not the same thing. Current use of messy can be merged with dirty (I’ve never liked the distinction that messy only applies to sexual fluids - why? Why not just dirty + cum or whatever fluid you want?), which would be used for any kind of mess on a character that doesn’t extend into WAM territory - or perhaps WAM is a subset of dirty, with the tag implying dirty as well - there are lots of examples of dirty characters that don’t apply to WAM.

oh i get it. the wet and messy tags are messy. that’s actually quite funny