[Discussion] Official guidelines for moving tags

I'm not aware of anything actually written down for this. Anyways, it'd be nice to have some guidelines for when to do an alias, versus a mass update, versus just moving the tags manually. The end goal of the discussion would be to create a new wiki page and then use it as reference.

My own thoughts on this are that if there are less than 50 posts, that a tag can be moved manually. As far as the disambiguation between aliases and mass updates go, well I'm still kind of perplexed by when and why one should be used versus the other.

Anyways, thoughts?

You can't get something like this down to an automated science. As an example, what if a tag has 49 posts today when you yell at a user in a thread for requesting something on it, but it has 51 posts the next day when an admin sees the thread?

seika0 said:

You can't get something like this down to an automated science. As an example, what if a tag has 49 posts today when you yell at a user in a thread for requesting something on it, but it has 51 posts the next day when an admin sees the thread?

Well that's why I mentioned them more as guidelines then as hard and fast rules. I'm interested in this topic because I'm confused on it myself, and there are probably a whole lot of others users who are just as confused. Like I said... something to go by as a guideline, so that we know how to do this thing.

In general, the default choice should be an alias. An alias should be used when it's likely that anyone will still use the old tag. This depends mainly on how popular or well-known the tag is, not strictly on its size. Size is a factor, but it's not the only factor. An artist can have a large following even if they have a small number of posts.

The main reasons not to use an alias are:

• The tag is ambiguous and an alias would cause confusion.
• The tag could possibly be used by a different artist or character in the future.
• An alias would get very little use.
• An alias would create unnecessary clutter in autocomplete or in the wiki.

Sometimes people think that aliases should be avoided because too many aliases could strain the website. This isn't really true. Aliases are basically free. It's more about not accumulating a bunch of aliases that nobody uses.

When it comes to manual moves, please don't move well-known tags without discussion. This especially applies to artist tags. I sometimes see people moving well-known artists with hundreds of posts and it drives me nuts. We have literally thousands of broken saved searches now because of people moving artists manually. In many cases these moves aren't even necessary, they're just fiddling around with artist qualifiers. I have a huge backlog of saved searches I have to fix now because of this.