Just saw a BUR with one change get approved recently that was originally posted 9 months ago, does stuff like that usually take this long?

Unfortunately Millcore is the only one who is really handling them.. among almost every other admin task on the website. Sometimes they get approved quickly and others take months, even years.

If you're talking about the trio BUR, that was approved 8 months ago (relatively recently, depending on your perspective). But there's no real time-frame for alias and implication requests being approved. Some can sit waiting for years, and others can be handled in days. Whenever an admin gets time to, they'll go through a whole bunch at once approving or rejecting them. Occasionally one or two will be approved by itself instead of as part of a collection of approvals/rejections.

i'm glad you brought this up, i was worried that my request from 5 months ago had fallen through the cracks forever. it's sad that there aren't more people available to do BURs and implications, it seems like the backlog is huge. and, i was waiting for my prior one to be processed before i applied for any more ... but maybe i should just do it anyway.

cogfrick said:
i'm glad you brought this up, i was worried that my request from 5 months ago had fallen through the cracks forever. it's sad that there aren't more people available to do BURs and implications, it seems like the backlog is huge. and, i was waiting for my prior one to be processed before i applied for any more ... but maybe i should just do it anyway.

You absolutely should, I have some that have been waiting for years. It's not as if they're processed in any kind of order, either - my oldest requests still haven't been approved, but a handful of newer ones have.

I wonder if it would be possible to make the suggestions be auto-approved after a certain time if they have gotten enough upvotes and no downvotes?

supina said:
I wonder if it would be possible to make the suggestions be auto-approved after a certain time if they have gotten enough upvotes and no downvotes?

That's not a great idea.

The actual solution would be to get more people working on approving / rejecting aliases and implications.
Same problem as with the tickets, actually. But at least the ticket queue isn't backed up like this.

bitwolfy said:
The actual solution would be to get more people working on approving / rejecting aliases and implications.
Same problem as with the tickets, actually. But at least the ticket queue isn't backed up like this.

But that problem would solve itself if there was an incentive to upvote or downvote requests. Right now voting is seemingly pointless.

The only possible downside I can think of is if someone creates a bunch of accounts to cheat votes, but as long as there's a time delay after the last vote above the threshold it'll be possible for someone to spot it and stop the auto-approval/rejection by casting a single opposing vote. Having new votes bump the thread (and maybe some kind of indication in the title when the threshold is met) would help.

There are a ton of no-brainer requests which could be easily cleared with this system.

wat8548 said:
But that problem would solve itself if there was an incentive to upvote or downvote requests. Right now voting is seemingly pointless.

e6 isn't a democracy, though. A request's vote tally is to provide insight for the staff on matters they can be swayed on, but just as an image post having a bunch of upvotes (and no downvotes) won't prevent it from being deleted if the staff deem it to be violating a rule, alias/implication requests having a bunch of upvotes shouldn't prevent it from being rejected if the staff deem it to be a direction they don't want the tags to go (and if an alias/implication request gets applied by mistake because it wasn't handled in time, it can be very hard and time-consuming to fix). Similarly, just as a post with a bunch of downvotes (and no upvotes) won't cause an image to be deleted if the staff deem it's not breaking any rules, a request having a bunch of downvotes shouldn't cause it to be rejected if the staff would deem it's a good idea (and if a request is rejected, even automatically, it's unlikely it'll be requested again soon, if ever).

It sounds like the main concern would be something accidentally getting auto-approved. However the delay could be several months long which would leave plenty of time to make sure the suggestion is all right. If a single neutral or downvote by anybody would stop the auto-approval process it would be very unlikely for something bad to slip through. Meanwhile obvious suggestions would no longer be left hanging for years and the staff workload would be simultaneously reduced.