There is a huge backlog of these requests, and it seems that they are being made faster than they can get approved/rejected, which means the backlog is only getting bigger.

I’ve only seen two admins work on these, among the millions of other things they already do. Giving a few more people the ability to approve or reject them would help clean up the backlog and keep up with new requests at the same time.

Worried about janitors hastily approving things that probably should’ve had more discussion? Here’s what I propose: janitors can only approve posts with at least 4 upvotes, and an upvote:downvote ratio of at least 4:1 (for this purpose, perhaps, let’s also consider 😐 equivalent to a downvote—or half a downvote, perhaps?) and then the reverse for rejections… at least 4 downvotes with a ratio of at most 1:4.

I’d also like to suggest that when a suggestion thread has been sitting inactive for over a month and the total vote count is less than 4, janitors can reject them even if they don’t have enough downvotes. This would help clear up the huge backlog of random aliases/implications that have one or two or zero votes. These old suggestions often interfere with BURs that some users put a lot of time and thought into, and waiting for an admin to approve/reject all those old suggestions only adds to the already huge amount of time it usually takes to get a BUR approved.

I’ve heard some people suggest that approvals/rejections should be handled by majority vote. This is kinda like that, except that someone who actually has some responsibility on the site has to verify it first so that a group of likeminded users can’t just mass-upvote something stupid to get it passed before anyone has a chance to object. And this would still leave the more disputed suggestions entirely up to the admins.

Part of site affected: aliases/implications

Sounds like a good idea, the backlog of requests is only going to keep growing. I'd imagine if Janitors are trusted enough to approve posts, they can be trusted to use common sense when it comes to requests. Reminds me of the system RateYourMusic.com uses for artist profiles: "Moderators can approve this submission when it receives 4 yes votes and has >= 75% yes votes, or deny it when it receives 4 no votes and has <= 40% yes votes. Admins can approve or deny this submission at any time."

Where would the janitors have time for this shit?
Also if they are good enough to do aliases/implications it's trivial to just promote them to admin.

Also I would not personally touch any of these as couple projects I have had are straight up bad and still in abysmal stage.

mairo said:
Where would the janitors have time for this shit?

If the admins are supposed to have enough time, that feels like a moot point.

That might just mean that we need more admins (and/or janitors if this suggestion were to be implemented).

But if the janitors don’t have time, what’s the next step down? Let privileged users approve them? We have to find someone who can do them, or the requests will eventually pile up into an insurmountable task.

Of course, all the staff already do a lot around here. Perhaps the solution is this suggestion + adding more janitors; even if all the current janitors are too busy for it, some of the new ones might be able to do it, or take some of the workload off everyone else.

Arguably, the best solution would be to get another ImpidiDinkaDoo or, at least, bring in a moderator or admin whom the staff can trust to focus on going over the pending implications/aliases/whatnot and deal with them. Of course, any admin (and moderators?) still can approve or deny the things, but this "lucky" addition would primarily focus on them. Arguably, that person would need to develop or adapt a series of guidelines for approving or denying the things with minimal user and staff fuss, such as waiting at least a month after the last person comments before deciding anything. Perhaps they could compile outstanding aliases and implications into BURs which would be posted for community input once all the old alias/implication requests are rejected. Who can say?

strikerman said:
If the admins are supposed to have enough time, that feels like a moot point.

These are seperate jobs.
The point of janitors is that they handle posts. The point of admins is that they handle users and enforce site rules, they can handle posts but that's not what they should be primarily doing.
So my point does still stand that if there needs to be more handing aliases/implications, those users should be promoted to admins, rather than janitors being put in more work when we already have above what we can handle.

I agree with Mairo that approving alias requests isn't really part of a janitors job, but giving people access to the entire admin tools would be overkill just to accept some requests, especially considering the abuse potential of those tools. I think the best option would be to add a new permission (like how I have been granted the "unrestricted uploads" permission which was previously something that only Contributor+ had) which can be granted to people that are trusted and want it.

There's many people on the forums here that for some reason decide to dedicate hours towards alias requests that would probably gladly take the role. These people also won't have to spread their time between post approvals, tickets, and other tasks.

faucet said:
I agree with Mairo that approving alias requests isn't really part of a janitors job, but giving people access to the entire admin tools would be overkill just to accept some requests, especially considering the abuse potential of those tools. I think the best option would be to add a new permission (like how I have been granted the "unrestricted uploads" permission which was previously something that only Contributor+ had) which can be granted to people that are trusted and want it.

There's many people on the forums here that for some reason decide to dedicate hours towards alias requests that would probably gladly take the role. These people also won't have to spread their time between post approvals, tickets, and other tasks.

That would be a solution. Aliases and implications aren't much more important that post approvals themselves, unlike tickets and the like.

furrin_gok said:
That would be a solution. Aliases and implications aren't much more important that post approvals themselves, unlike tickets and the like.

Except aliases and implications have potentially wide-ranging impact on post tagging, which is a large part of what makes this site good. Without enough trust to ensure bad aliases and implications don't get approved, that can be a big problem. A bad post being approved is easy to fix (it can always be deleted when someone notices), and a good post being disapproved is also easy to fix (the uploader or someone can message an admin to get it undeleted), and someone who's constantly making bad (dis)approvals can have their rights revoked. But fixing an improper alias or implication can range from someone having to take hours or days of their time, or it may never get fully cleaned up, for each request. One bad apple can make a big mess before their rights can be revoked. Not to mention contentious requests that should probably go through an admin regardless of its vote ratio. You'd need people you can really trust to not put their own feelings in front of what's best for the site, and to recognize when a given request is better handled by the higher-ups, and that would be very thin pickings (I certainly couldn't do it; I'd never feel right approving or denying them myself and end up deferring to others all the time).

There are 30 pages of pending aliases and 17 pages of pending implications. Every single one of them has the potential to interfere with future BURs, and the vast majority has been completely ignored by staff and regular members alike for months or years, never receiving a single vote.

Surely at least one Contributor or similar can be considered adequate enough to have an AIBUR approval/rejection permission? If admins and janitors are too busy with their current tasks and nobody else qualifies, this (relatively important) aspect of the site will only lag behind the current needs of the user base more and more. It is not a sustainable situation.

gattonero2001 said:
There are 30 pages of pending aliases and 17 pages of pending implications. Every single one of them has the potential to interfere with future BURs, and the vast majority has been completely ignored by staff and regular members alike for months or years, never receiving a single vote.

That's probably because the ability to vote on requests wasn't added until last year.

watsit said:
Except aliases and implications have potentially wide-ranging impact on post tagging, which is a large part of what makes this site good. Without enough trust to ensure bad aliases and implications don't get approved, that can be a big problem. A bad post being approved is easy to fix (it can always be deleted when someone notices), and a good post being disapproved is also easy to fix (the uploader or someone can message an admin to get it undeleted), and someone who's constantly making bad (dis)approvals can have their rights revoked. But fixing an improper alias or implication can range from someone having to take hours or days of their time, or it may never get fully cleaned up, for each request. One bad apple can make a big mess before their rights can be revoked. Not to mention contentious requests that should probably go through an admin regardless of its vote ratio. You'd need people you can really trust to not put their own feelings in front of what's best for the site, and to recognize when a given request is better handled by the higher-ups, and that would be very thin pickings (I certainly couldn't do it; I'd never feel right approving or denying them myself and end up deferring to others all the time).

Having the janitors' authority on aliases and implications depend on voting would take care of that. If a suggestion needs upvote supermajority like the OP suggests it would be really hard for a janitor to approve anything bad. I mean if almost all vote in favour then the users clearly think the suggestion is good, and isn't that what really matters? We are doing all this so the site would be better to use so I think it would be a good idea give the people who use it some say.

supina said:
I mean if almost all vote in favour then the users clearly think the suggestion is good, and isn't that what really matters?

Not always. Sometimes a lone dissenting voice is correct, and sometimes few people vote on obvious requests. If that's what it was going to be based on, then it wouldn't be much different from having requests auto-approved/denied when reaching some voting threshold. But the number of votes and the ratio aren't always good determining factors, which is why anyone who's given authority to approve/deny requests should be trustworthy enough to recognize when requests may not be as obvious as it seems, and should be deferred to the admins. The votes can help indicate how users feel about something, but the decision ultimately lies with the person approving or denying the request, which can be different from the consensus if it conflicts with the admins' wishes.

I'd rather have it be based on time. Something like they "request" an approval or denial, and it bumps the thread up with a mention that a staff member is trying to resolve it in that manner. Once the thread has been bumped, it takes time before the request can be completed, in which time other users can weigh in where they hadn't before.

watsit said:
Sometimes a lone dissenting voice is correct

Well, yeah. I’m going to use topic #30671 as a recent example.

I mean, maybe I’m wrong, but nobody has told me why I’m wrong yet, so I’m going to continue to think I’m right. But, regardless…

If that's what it was going to be based on, then it wouldn't be much different from having requests auto-approved/denied when reaching some voting threshold. But the number of votes and the ratio aren't always good determining factors, which is why anyone who's given authority to approve/deny requests should be trustworthy enough to recognize when requests may not be as obvious as it seems, and should be deferred to the admins. The votes can help indicate how users feel about something, but the decision ultimately lies with the person approving or denying the request, which can be different from the consensus if it conflicts with the admins' wishes.

It would be different from using a voting threshold, as I stated in the OP, because, hypothetically, a group of likeminded users could spam-upvote a bad suggestion to get it approved without review.

Still, I’d trust our janitors to recognize when something actually is obvious or when it needs to be passed higher up the chain of command. They could notice that lone dissenting voice, and if nobody has provided an adequate rebuttal, they would ideally decide to wait for an admin to take a look at it.

I think it's time to bump and revisit this - the approval of tag relations has yet again slowed to a halt and the "we're planning to reject all pending requests from 2017" has been dead in the water for 3 months now.

Admins clearly have better things to do, whether it's other tasks on the website or their personal lives, this is only going to get worse if it isn't dealt with. The lack of things being approved is constantly resulting in duplicate and conflicting requests, most of which are completely trivial and could easily be accepted. At this rate, 2023 is just going to be another shitshow on the backlog that we'll be dealing with in 2029.

Multiple people who were in support of this idea have obtained staff ranks since, and I'm sure would still be willing to help deal with this mess. The moderator rank being used again has proven very effective with destroying the ticket backlog, it's about time something similar is done for tag relation requests.

faucet said:
Multiple people who were in support of this idea have obtained staff ranks since, and I'm sure would still be willing to help deal with this mess. The moderator rank being used again has proven very effective with destroying the ticket backlog, it's about time something similar is done for tag relation requests.

IMO there should be a new staff rank added, with the authority to make large-scale changes to tags. It would have neither the Janitor's ability to approve posts nor the Moderator's ability to handle tickets, completing the tripartite delegation of admin powers. I propose the name "Bureaucrat".

(If anyone else snoops the git logs you might know that the "Contributor" rank was officially removed recently, so there's clearly both the ability to change the number of ranks and - if database schemas or something are a concern - now the space to introduce a new one in its place.)

wat8548 said:
IMO there should be a new staff rank added, with the authority to make large-scale changes to tags. It would have neither the Janitor's ability to approve posts nor the Moderator's ability to handle tickets, completing the tripartite delegation of admin powers. I propose the name "Bureaucrat".

(If anyone else snoops the git logs you might know that the "Contributor" rank was officially removed recently, so there's clearly both the ability to change the number of ranks and - if database schemas or something are a concern - now the space to introduce a new one in its place.)

Fs in the chat for the...what? Dozen or so contributors that got demoted, lmao

At that point, why not repurpose the contributor role as the beuracrat role that you proposed? Seems like an easier thing to do than making a new one. If i'm wrong then, well i'm not a coding guy.

Either way, we need more people helping with the requests, otherwise they're not gonna get done. If that means giving moderators and/or janitors the ability to do so, great. If it's a new rank or special permissions, even better.

I agree with the idea of creating a new role focused on aliases and implications approvals.

And maybe there could be added a "undo" function to aliases, implications and BURs, if there's too much of a concern in regards to improper approval of these.

This site has a fantastic tagging system, extensive wiki, and very responsive staff, but this is the one department e6 is lacking in — not that I blame the admins, they're busy people, either in running the site, or their personal lives — but it can't be denied that there's an ever growing backlog of BURs, aliases and implication requests, and while their efforts are appreciated I don't think the small pool of admins like Earlopain and Rainbow Dash are able to keep up.

Common sense and extremely helpful requests that fix frequently added redundant/bad tags, or resolve bad implications/aliasing with universal and large amounts of approval from the community are buried under the backlog, some sitting dormant for months to a year or more.

It's definitely time for either expanded moderator abilities, or a user role for specifically approving and rejecting BUR/A/I requests. If admins are concerned about bad approvals, maybe it could be required that a short "approval reason" is given by the approver?

maplebytes said: ...

I think the unfortunate reality of the situation is that anyone who tries to take on the bulk of the AIBUR queue ends up burning out fairly quickly.

Millcore is gone, although for different reasons
BitWolfy is gone, in part because of the AIBUR situation
Gattonero is burnt out, I feel like, and hadn't been working on AIBURs for a while now
Dash is on tickets full-time these days and only handles AIBURs sporadically

I don't know if throwing moderators and janitors at it would help. Ideally, we would have a dedicated team of people who are interested in tagging working on this.
Unfortunately, from what I understand, it's fairly easy to fuck up the tagging system by approving a wrong alias or implication, so trusting people with that power is difficult.
The issue isn't that a request could be approved for a bad reason, it is that reversing it is not straightforward and requires manual work.

cinder said:
Unfortunately, from what I understand, it's fairly easy to fuck up the tagging system by approving a wrong alias or implication, so trusting people with that power is difficult.
The issue isn't that a request could be approved for a bad reason, it is that reversing it is not straightforward and requires manual work.

and I'm going to guess that there's not any way to sort of preview or sandbox the change.

sipothac said:
and I'm going to guess that there's not any way to sort of preview or sandbox the change.

No, I don't think so.

I wouldn't know if adding something like that is feasible, it's not really my area of expertise.
Earlopain would know more.

cinder said:
I think the unfortunate reality of the situation is that anyone who tries to take on the bulk of the AIBUR queue ends up burning out fairly quickly.

The issue isn't that a request could be approved for a bad reason, it is that reversing it is not straightforward and requires manual work.

To reduce workload on the admins and avoid them burning out further, but also avoid bad approvals, and reduce workload on staff,
there could be a new role/permission which allows the user to reject AIBURs but not approve them. This reduces workload since the ones left are mostly good.

And hey, they can also deal with the project that is about rejecting aliases before a certain date

I like the idea of making a special rank for tagging powers. Janitors are good at approving posts, not necessarily maintaining the tag system. A new rank could be given to people who have demonstrated an understanding of the tagging system (tagging posts well, making good alias and implication suggestions, etc.).

wat8548 said:
IMO there should be a new staff rank added, with the authority to make large-scale changes to tags. It would have neither the Janitor's ability to approve posts nor the Moderator's ability to handle tickets, completing the tripartite delegation of admin powers. I propose the name "Bureaucrat".

I was just thinking about this suggestion today, partially because requests continue to pile up but mostly because I'm now realizing that it was potentially a pun and now I want to know if it was intentional.

cinder said:
...by approving a wrong alias or implication...

That should almost scare anyone away from wanting to have that power to F.U.B.A. belief. I mean, that has the potential to be very very annoying to clean up, especially if no one notices for a few months.

snpthecat said:
...a new role/permission which allows the user to reject AIBURs but not approve them...

That kind of mitigates it, yeah.

sipothac said:
I was just thinking about this suggestion today, partially because requests continue to pile up but mostly because I'm now realizing that it was potentially a pun and now I want to know if it was intentional.

New title: Boorucrat? :D

Hmm, how do I figure out which deleted post is no longer deleted? I guess I'll go look at mod actions.

vulpes_artifex said:
I like the idea of making a special rank for tagging powers. Janitors are good at approving posts, not necessarily maintaining the tag system. A new rank could be given to people who have demonstrated an understanding of the tagging system (tagging posts well, making good alias and implication suggestions, etc.).

I've been told before when we had the recruitment drive, that Discord is a hard requirement. :(

It's insane to think of how much posts/year is speeding up. Check dates of post #1000000 post #2000000 post #3000000 post #4000000 and tell me it's not getting faster, faster.

alphamule said:

It's insane to think of how much posts/year is speeding up. Check dates of post #1000000 post #2000000 post #3000000 post #4000000 and tell me it's not getting faster, faster.

Fun fact: the rate at which acceleration itself changes is known as jerk.

sipothac said:
I was just thinking about this suggestion today, partially because requests continue to pile up but mostly because I'm now realizing that it was potentially a pun and now I want to know if it was intentional.

I'm not that smart, I just stole it from Wikipedia.

e6 needs more admins