I'm seeing most of posts for the last 2-3 days having a tag "-invalid_tag", which automatically gets blacklisted.
And it's not just post list page, it's actually there on every image.
What's going on?

... you have -invalid_tag on your blacklist.
You should probably remove that from there.

bitwolfy said:
... you have -invalid_tag on your blacklist.
You should probably remove that from there.

Huh. That's odd. I guess a previously existing tag has been aliased to that?

ihaterule34 said:
Huh. That's odd. I guess a previously existing tag has been aliased to that?

That seems likely.
Probably one of these: https://e621.net/tag_aliases?search[name_matches]=invalid_tag&search[order]=created_at

bitwolfy said:
That seems likely.
Probably one of these: https://e621.net/tag_aliases?search[name_matches]=invalid_tag&search[order]=created_at

Since when did aliases edit users' blacklists? Surely the point of aliases is that you can continue to use the old name in all contexts?

Although I guess in this case the outcome would be the same, but you'd at least be able to tell which tag it used to be. I guess we can chalk this up as another reason why invalid_tag aliases are a bad idea in general, if not one I ever expected to become relevant.

wat8548 said:
Since when did aliases edit users' blacklists? Surely the point of aliases is that you can continue to use the old name in all contexts?

Although I guess in this case the outcome would be the same, but you'd at least be able to tell which tag it used to be.

In this case, I think it makes sense to. If someone has blah blah cute in their blacklist, then cute gets aliased to invalid_tag unbeknownst to them, and their blacklist stops working since almost everything doesn't have invalid_tag, would that person know cute is the culprit if they're not meticulously checking the alias requests? At least with it changing to invalid_tag, it's easier to see what the problem is.

wat8548 said:
Since when did aliases edit users' blacklists? Surely the point of aliases is that you can continue to use the old name in all contexts?

Although I guess in this case the outcome would be the same, but you'd at least be able to tell which tag it used to be. I guess we can chalk this up as another reason why invalid_tag aliases are a bad idea in general, if not one I ever expected to become relevant.

Could be since last year's update, but probably longer.
The site resolves all aliases when you edit the blacklist, so that it does not have to do that every time you open a new page.

watsit said:
In this case, I think it makes sense to. If someone has blah blah cute in their blacklist, then cute gets aliased to invalid_tag unbeknownst to them, and their blacklist stops working since almost everything doesn't have invalid_tag, would that person know cute is the culprit if they're not meticulously checking the alias requests?

They'd presumably notice after clicking on an image which they thought should have been blacklisted and attempting to add the invalidated tag to it. Even the most braindead "blacklist no worky" forum posts have always at least gone to the effort of making sure that the tag that was supposedly blacklisted is present on the posts.

wat8548 said:
They'd presumably notice after clicking on an image which they thought should have been blacklisted and attempting to add the invalidated tag to it. Even the most braindead "blacklist no worky" forum posts have always at least gone to the effort of making sure that the tag that was supposedly blacklisted is present on the posts.

Not necessarily in all cases. Suppose hypothetically that cbt starts being used to mean something other than cock_and_ball_torture, so cbt gets aliased to cbt_(disambiguation). A user who had cbt blacklisted will see the undesired pics, check for the cock_and_ball_torture tag on said pics, notice the tag is already there, and get confused. This is to some degree unavoidable. However, at the very least, if the user's blacklist automatically gets updated with cbt_(disambiguation) (as is apparently how things work currently), the user might notice it and realize what happened.

Oh, wait, nevermind. It automatically updates to cock_and_ball_torture when adding cbt to your blacklist.