CormacM said:
As for dust, if you or NNescio can come up with some examples of posts that are visibly dusty, but in a way not captured by light_particles or dust_cloud, and propose a workable definition that we could use for the dust tag, then I suppose it could be kept. Currently, it's ambiguous and unnecessary. I won't touch dust for now.
Had a look around. Examples in subsection due to length:
Examples
1. First, the classic finger swipe motion I mentioned earlier:
post #1901449: Patchy swiping her finger along a bookshelf, leaving a noticeable dust trail.
post #1243999: Speck of dust on end of Mystia's finger, after doing a(n implied) finger swipe while inspecting for dust.
post #1908925: Speck of dust on end of Kaga's finger, again implied to be after doing the dust-inspecting finger swipe.
1a. Related (similar visual elements despite the gesture not being involved):
post #2230231: Speck of dust on back of Admiral's jacket, similar in shape and size to those found on fingers after the 'dust inspection' gesture.
post #574244: Dusty footsteps left by Nazrin's mice on a dusty shelf top (somewhat similar to the dust 'trail' left behind by the finger swipe).
2. Next are things covered in dust:
post #2093748: Hyuuga visibly covered in 'flour' dust (along with dust clouds).
post #1959585: Fried chicken covered in dust.
post #982600: Fish dusted in potato dust.
post #1693310: Dusty red 'carpet' near the bottom of the picture. Might not be too visible depending on monitor color settings.
3. Then we have dust heaps/dust bunnies, which seem to be the most common:
post #4157360: Heap of dust swept into a pile.
post #3746279: Heap of dust in dustpan on bottom right panel.
post #2557046: Heap of dust in dustpan held in Sakuya's hand.
post #2986699: Clump of eraser dust. Also a sentient 'dustpile'-like clump of "Noro" (think that's technically supposed to be slime though)
post #3180167 (and child): Giant clump of dust held by Ryuujou.
post #2324218: Sweeping dust bunnies on floor (along with clumps of fur). Bottom center panel.
post #2128799: Dust bunny on girl's sleeve (bigger than the dust speck on the TTK example earlier).
Character: Dust-chan. Sentient dust bunny from Nyoron Churuya-san, often depicted together with inanimate dust bunnies. Currently 6 examples, or 4~5 if you don't count Dust-chan herself.
4. In some cases there are particles of dustlike material lying on a surface:
post #3756274: Particles of dust on the 'ground', soon to be vacuumed up by a Roomba.
post #4420006: Same as above.
post #3989030: Iron dust on a piece of paper.
post #2252147: Gold dust in a glass (or plastic) phial.
5. Some other misc. examples of 'aerial dust' that I can't quite classify into separate groups:
post #1170420: Remilia being dusted by the sun, with individual dust particles visible.
post #3050445: Visible particulate dust in the air. Not quite the same as light particles (those are visible on the top left, depicted differently), and not quite the same as dust cloud either (individual particles are visible).
post #935242. Visible particulate dust in the air similar to above, along with normal dust clouds. Iku's hair also becomes covered in dust on one of the later panels.
post #2558224: Hazy, finely dispersed dust in the air. Somewhat similar to post #4103867 you mentioned earlier, but more problematic.
That said, I went looking somewhat deeply into how dust is being used and also find it... somewhat problematic now. So, even with all the above examples, perhaps it might be better to use other existing tags or come up with new ones instead of trying to shoehorn all into dust, as they are all somewhat different things. This will let us retire dust or alias it to dust cloud.
So, on that line of thought:
'Type 3' examples can probably be fit into a new dust_bunny tag, or a dust_heap with dust_bunny aliased to it (or we can split into two, but I don't think we need to distinguish between them). There is an existing Dust_Bunny chartag, but that character's name is ambiguous (and only has one post tagged), so we should probably rename that to Dust_Bunny_(Lily_in_the_Gravity Labyrinth). Even if we're not going to use dust_bunny as a tag or alias.
'Type 4' examples can be fit into powder, which is currently underused as this moment. Some can instead be fitted into rubble, I suppose, but we need to rewrite the rubble wiki then as it seems to imply larger 'chunks' of material. And that might still be a bad idea as the debris/rubble paired tags seem to imply destruction of things. Debris might sound like it would fit, but again the wiki implies it's for 'destruction' or energetic impacts. Plus the way it is defined now only limits it to stuff flying around. With rubble being for stationary '"debris" lying on the ground (or other surfaces).
'Type 1' examples should be split into two types, with a proposed dust trail used for dust trails (dust trail combined with footprints in the case of footprints). The 'dust speck' can probably be shoehorned together into 'Type 3' along with dust_heap or dust_bunny.
'Type 2' examples can be fitted inside powder and dirty, I guess.
'Type 5', just use ashes or powder for when people get dusted, I guess, depending on what material it is (ashes for most, but matter transmutation into something like salt would be powder). 'Particulate' dust... just ignore the distinction and treat it as dust cloud? And I guess dusty clothes and/or hair can go under dirty if powder isn't appropriate. Meanwhile haze-like dust clouds too fine to distinguish the 'cloud edges' (or other details beyond the 'hazy effect') would probably be better off tagged haze instead of dust cloud (same with post #4152647 and post #4448072).
Alternatively we can come up with a dusty tag (with the old dust aliased to dust cloud instead of this) for most of the above, and use them in conjunction with other tags as appropriate. This might be able to capture things like "covered in powder" more precisely than just single tags like powder. And maybe a finger swipe tag (can also be used for things like swiping touch surface controls) together with this dusty to indicate the "dust inspection" motion. Though, this approach might instead cause issues with the existing dirty tag as both dusty and dirty sound similar in meaning.
