I've noticed a number of recent helpful BURs/alias requests getting blocked due to years old BURs that have been stuck in pending for 1-4 years, they often have little discussion, and few votes, if any.

Maybe it would be a good idea to have the auto mod automatically reject or "fail" a request after a year to prevent a pileup of forgotten requests causing issues as they are now. Or have some sort of function like the 30 day auto-deletion for posts that rejects the request after a year? Are there any technical reasons why this would be a problem?

Like I mentioned in the other thread, I don't think it's a good idea to auto-reject requests after a period of time because alias and implication requests can take a lot of time for someone to deal with, and a possibly valid request shouldn't be rejected just because no one has been able to deal with it yet. The 30-day auto-delete for posts is there because 30 days is enough for 99% of posts to have been looked at by someone who can deal with it, and a determination to be made. Alias/implication requests can take years before someone can take a good look at it and make a determination, in part because there are fewer moderators that can accept/reject requests than there are for image posts.

watsit said:
Like I mentioned in the other thread, I don't think it's a good idea to auto-reject requests after a period of time because alias and implication requests can take a lot of time for someone to deal with, and a possibly valid request shouldn't be rejected just because no one has been able to deal with it yet. The 30-day auto-delete for posts is there because 30 days is enough for 99% of posts to have been looked at by someone who can deal with it, and a determination to be made. Alias/implication requests can take years before someone can take a good look at it and make a determination, in part because there are fewer moderators that can accept/reject requests than there are for image posts.

You're not wrong that it can take a while, but a year is a lot of time to allow a BUR or alias to sit pending, if there is still an interest in it after a year, someone can always re-request the same change be made. Ideally, maybe, there could be some way to tie an auto-reject to the amount of votes the request has or the most recent post in the thread, so something that has been sitting for a long time but has received positive feedback or has people still interested in it doesn't get deleted... but that would be a lot more complicated.

As it stands right now, there are long forgotten threads dating back three or four years with no sign of ever being addressed, which that are only getting in the way of recent requests, and only adding to the backlog of requests that need to be sifted through.

In a well maintained system with no backlogs this might be a decent idea, but unfortunately we don't have one of those. I've seen plenty of 4 year+ implications that are perfectly good and just need to be bumped and voted on.

I still think the solution is more people that can approve requests, no matter how good of a job bitWolfy does the backlog is still too much for one person to handle.

Requests being left pending for years is a symptom of an underlying problem. Removing the symptom won't make the problem go away. Personally I think the approval/rejection could happen by direct voting in cases where there is a sufficiently clear consensus in the votes, but maybe that's just me.

supina said:
Requests being left pending for years is a symptom of an underlying problem. Removing the symptom won't make the problem go away. Personally I think the approval/rejection could happen by direct voting in cases where there is a sufficiently clear consensus in the votes, but maybe that's just me.

I agree about the underlying problem, but I'm not a fan of using votes to auto-approve or reject. It's very possible for a suggestion to be invalid due to something overlooked by most of the voters.

faucet said:
I've seen plenty of 4 year+ implications that are perfectly good and just need to be bumped and voted on.

supina said:
Requests being left pending for years is a symptom of an underlying problem. Removing the symptom won't make the problem go away.

Just to highlight for anyone who might not have caught everything over the years, the reason there are so many "4 year+" requests is that prior to 2016 most were being handled by a single admin, who then left due to a messy alias/implication incident, leaving nobody at all dealing with them until around the time of the site rework in 2020 (4 years)

on that note

faucet said:
no matter how good of a job bitWolfy does the backlog is still too much for one person to handle.

Though I don't like the idea of passing it to janitors. Just look at this current request.

Maybe we should have something similar to a janitor role, but only for dealing with alias/implication requests. maybe have it where multiple janitors might need to agree for it to pass or something, but this new role will take a while to implement, if at all...

There's a template for Feature Requests.

I'd say no. Not at all. That's a horrible idea, because if discussion won't happen, it won't happen. Bump the old thread to garner discussion if it's needed, don't force a rejection that causes people to assume it was a bad idea and avoid discussion.

furrin_gok said:
I'd say no. Not at all. That's a horrible idea, because if discussion won't happen, it won't happen. Bump the old thread to garner discussion if it's needed, don't force a rejection that causes people to assume it was a bad idea and avoid discussion.

If the problem is that people will assume it was a bad idea, then that can be fixed by including "the request XYZ was rejected because it expired" in the automod message.

People accidentally recreate existing pending requests all the time. I have done it more than once, and my pending requests have been recreated by others more than once as well.

magnuseffect said:
Though I don't like the idea of passing it to janitors. Just look at this current request.

You can disagree with the request without ridiculing me, you know?

gattonero2001 said:
If the problem is that people will assume it was a bad idea, then that can be fixed by including "the request XYZ was rejected because it expired" in the automod message.

In that case, wouldn't an appropriate response be to just recreate it so an admin can actually deal with it some time? In which case, why bother auto-rejecting it if it's just going to be recreated after being auto-modded, creating more noise and possibly messing up the vote statistics?

magnuseffect said:
Just to highlight for anyone who might not have caught everything over the years, the reason there are so many "4 year+" requests is that prior to 2016 most were being handled by a single admin, who then left due to a messy alias/implication incident, leaving nobody at all dealing with them until around the time of the site rework in 2020 (4 years)

Yikes, I don't mean to dig for drama, but... what happened? Is there any forum thread where this went down? I can't imagine how a single alias/implication can be so bad that it causes someone to quit.

gattonero2001 said:
You can disagree with the request without ridiculing me, you know?

My sole intent was pointing out that if Janitors had alias/implication permissions [any janitor] could have bypassed the forum request form entirely for something equivalent to this, which after all has previously been a problem within the admin team.

hungrymaple said:
Yikes, I don't mean to dig for drama, but... what happened? Is there any forum thread where this went down? I can't imagine how a single alias/implication can be so bad that it causes someone to quit.

topic #16575
See this post and Ratte's post 4 below it.

For what it's worth I'm pretty sure the issue the thread was created to address has been solved now, but it took years longer to sort out.

magnuseffect said:
topic #16575
See this post and Ratte's post 4 below it.

For what it's worth I'm pretty sure the issue the thread was created to address has been solved now, but it took years longer to sort out.

Wow, that was a total shitshow. I'm so glad the admins eventually saw sense. (topic #30993 for anyone interested in the conclusion.)

hungrymaple said:
Yikes, I don't mean to dig for drama, but... what happened? Is there any forum thread where this went down? I can't imagine how a single alias/implication can be so bad that it causes someone to quit.

I don't remember who they're referring to, but there certainly were some terrible tag alias/implication discussions that had gone on back then. For example, the great foreskin alias reversal thread definitely left a sour taste in both regular users' and staff members' mouths when it was going on, since it was a 3-page back & forth that eventually ended with the alias just being removed, causing both foreskin and uncut to exist for a time.

As for my opinion on this, I also believe this suggestion is not a good idea. Essentially making a time limit before an alias/implication/bur topic is deleted won't incentivize users or staff members to discuss them, since e6 is "powered" entirely by volunteer work and nobody is forced to interact with the forum. If topics being undiscussed and eventually getting buried by the others is a problem, then some possible solutions are to either provide an incentive to discuss them (like positive records), get more volunteers that want to discuss them, or make some sort of system that resurfaces old topics.