Aliasing png → invalid_tag
Link to alias

Reason:

Not needed; search for type:png instead.

In that regard should we invalidate 1:1 too? Nobody will be looking for it and you can just search on ratio:1:1.

And flash? As there are already type:swf?

I remember there being some reason to keep the flash tag. Maybe. I just can't remember what it was, and can't find the thread.

By the way, gif is aliased to animated, for whatever reason. It's causing occasional mistags, though fortunately gifs are so rare nowadays that it doesn't happen often.

If I had to have wild guess, then I would say that there might be many people who doesn't know that flash embed filetype is swf, while gif has become almost synonym to animated stuff withing browser.
But it's still stupid when it's identical to type:swf, but instead has to be inserted manually.

animated_png is also still a tag, but content is really low and compatibility is even lower (firefox and safari, near impossible to create those things).

animated_gif to be aliased to animated makes sense and it's easy to narrow down certain filetype with type:gif, but regular gif should most definitely be invalid_tag.

Mario69 said:
animated_png is also still a tag, but content is really low and compatibility is even lower (firefox and safari, near impossible to create those things).

Animated_png is useful for keeping track of those. Because of the incompatibility, users often untag animated from APNG, thinking that it's been mistagged.

Personally if it were possible to ""alias"" "flash" to "type:swf", that would be my choice if I were an admin. This is not "normally" possible as I understand it (ie. you can't make a real alias that does that) but could probably be managed with a little special casing on search fields (so that the substitution has already been done by the time it gets to the server)

To explain the above: In my particular case, the unhelpful thumbnails of flashes generally mean I either exclude swfs or search exclusively -for- them. As you can see I am familiar with swfs, but I still think 'flash' is better (easy to remember, quick to type) for a frequent term than anything with : in it ever will be.

Invalidating tags that = metatags makes sense on the surface but I have one major concern. Using too many metatags in the same search hasn't always worked properly (with each other, or with other search features).

There's this post by tony which shows how searching for two file types within the same search gives broken results (which is still true ). The search is impractical, but it shows how metatags are still not as foolproof as regular tags are in searches. Because many metatags have an equivalent normal tag, it's kept this from becoming too big of an issue when they do act up (the normal tag can be substituted when needed).

But for example, metatags do not work with ~. This means that broadening a search to include more than one specific file type isn't possible with metatags as the only way to search file types. You'd only be able to search one file type at a time or all file types at once. Most of those regular file-type equivalent tags have already been aliased away, leaving us with limited options for this. =/ But I think that was why the last few haven't been invalidated, especially flash which is a big one. Though animated_png is a special case and should be kept regardless.

Metatags are ideal to search things like file types, but they currently have limitations that need to be solved first.

In theory, you wouldn't need ~ for the ratio metatags because range syntax should allow you to search within a set range. But trying to use range syntax with the ratio metatags to search inclusively within the range of "between x and y" appears to be broken. (It ignores the second ratio entirely, looks like).

But these are the sorts of things that really should be worked out before we rely on metatags exclusively for these things like ratio and file types.