Usefulness of the recent BUR changes

(I was debating whether to put this in the changelog discussion or make a separate thread, but since the rule has been added a couple months ago, and is pretty important, i'm going to make a separate thread)

Back in forum #176795, a new rule was added to BURs:

Aliases must be used for tags with more than 200 posts. Renames can't be used for tags with more than 200 posts.

As far as i know, this rule was added without previous discussion. I think the main purpose behind it was to lessen the amount of missed searches of popular tags.
The problem i'm seeing is that some disambiguation tags are getting aliased, which i feel causes more harm than good. In topic #17953 and topic #17788 other BURs were made to override the rule, which makes me doubt the rule's usefulness.

I also doubt the usefulness of the other limiting rules, such as the post count requirement. Reverse_bunnysuit is, unsurprisingly, much more popular than reverse outfit, but under the current rules, it can't be aliased. It could be argued that it's because of this that the rule was made, to avoid having a flooded tag, but it's also true that you could just search reverse_outfit -reverse_bunnysuit.

I agree, and I think more of an explanation for these changes would be insightful. As mentioned, for many of the new BUR rules, examples can be conjured to demonstrate how acting outside of them would be justified. For example, I can't make Spectrier/Glastrier implicate gen 8 pokemon and legendary pokemon because they're too low population and different tag categories, despite the fact that every other Pokemon does this.

Yeah, this seems like one of those things that should be a warning perhaps instead of an absolute error. There are situations like already mentioned where forcing an alias is a bad idea, and there are probably other situations besides those.

The bottom line though is that it should be the Admins that are the final enforcement of BUR policy instead of the system. Also, BURs are editable by anyone, so if there is a rename that needs to be an alias or vice versa, then that can be hashed out and fixed via the thread. Admins would be the last line of defense, and if something doesn't pass muster, then they could just say "fix X before it'll be approved".

Bumping

These changes are deliberate. As a general rule, I don't approve of moving large tags without aliases, and I don't approve implications between two tags that are 95% the same.

I think all large tag moves should be aliases because it's frustrating to users to have well-known tags constantly move around, especially when there's no alias directing you to the new tag. This has especially become a problem over the last year or so as tag moves have become more frequent. One of the reasons why I removed the ability to disable autocomplete was because we're moving tags all the time now, and we just assumed people could use autocomplete to find the new tags, which wasn't always the case.

Most of these ambiguity problems are only minor issues. Nagi is a good example, the last time that tag was mistagged was once in 2017 and twice in 2013. If can live with an ambiguous character tag for 10+ years, we can live with an alias for a couple months longer while people get acclimated to the new tag.

The final straw was when people wanted to rename just about every Fate tag in existence without any aliases. Just no.

As for implications, we have too many bad umbrella tags where the umbrella tag almost entirely consists of a single subtag. Some examples:

• insect -> bug
• no hat -> no headwear
• grenade -> explosive
• spider web -> silk

Implications like this are pointless, they're "umbrellas" that are either virtually identical to the subtag, or that for all practical purposes only contain one thing.

BrokenEagle98 said:

Yeah, this seems like one of those things that should be a warning perhaps instead of an absolute error. There are situations like already mentioned where forcing an alias is a bad idea, and there are probably other situations besides those.

In the past warnings about aliases/implications were routinely ignored. That's why these are hard errors instead of warnings.

Thank you for your answer.
I understand the reasoning behind it now, but i still feel it causes more harm than good.

As for implications, we have too many bad umbrella tags where the umbrella tag almost entirely consists of a single subtag. Some examples:

[...]

Implications like this are pointless, they're "umbrellas" that are either virtually identical to the subtag, or that for all practical purposes only contain one thing.

Although i understand the reasoning, i still don't particularly agree. This makes it harder to make a combination of many tags because of a single tag.
Excluding a single tag from an umbrella tag feels counterintuitive. Maybe there's a better way to solve this?