Curiosity got the better of me due to paraspite's comment in forum #161338... Is new aliasing as well as new implication an instantaneous processes? As in do they reflect immediately on the posts themselves, e.g. in the case of aliases will searching for straight actually do an "OR" search for all current aliases? Wondering since quite a few of my tag history changes contains "+male/male -gay" and similar.

The servers essentially just start a background process to mass edit* them, but the change isn't attributed to a specific user. The result is kind of awkward and inelegant as you've seen; since the changes aren't attributed to a specific user they just tend to fall onto the next person who edits them. There's probably a better way to show this change, but I don't know exactly what is involved with doing that. There was some quirks with searching gay and male/male for a short period of time when those were done, presumably because whatever caches the results couldn't update while it was being processed (it took several hours to process those during non-peak time).

The changes themselves are pretty much instantaneous as they process them (except the tag count in certain areas of the site, namely the sidebar of posts). In other words before approving it, searching for multi_colored_hair would pull up something like ~15,000, 15 minutes after approving it might show ~23000 results, and 30 minutes after will now show ~30000 results. You can actually just keep refreshing the tag index page to watch the totals change if you happen to know a bigger one just got approved.

*It actually works slightly differently than the mass edit tool in that the changes don't count towards user tag edits (anymore).

parasprite said:
The servers essentially just start a background process to mass edit* them, but the change isn't attributed to a specific user. The result is kind of awkward and inelegant as you've seen; since the changes aren't attributed to a specific user they just tend to fall onto the next person who edits them. There's probably a better way to show this change, but I don't know exactly what is involved with doing that.

...
Why not have a user account that exists specifically for the purpose of owning those changes?

savageorange said:
...
Why not have a user account that exists specifically for the purpose of owning those changes?

It just hasn't been done yet. It was only recently disabled (since Pickle became admin IIRC) and there hasn't been much work on it since then. I'll ask the devs later today if they haven't answered this already by then (I have non e6-related errands to run :P ).

Oh what succulent information I got :D

Personally I don't really see the point of a separate, quite pointless, tag history record being created for these "automated" changes when all the attributing does is make me (and maybe no-one else?) go: "I wonder why it behaves like that, oh well, it works just fine anyway". That said I wouldn't object it.

It should look like this: https://e621.net/forum/show/147842

Lance_Armstrong said:
It should look like this: https://e621.net/forum/show/147842

Like that concept a lot more than having a dummy user spewing out "pointless" information in tag history. Though it feels like it might be hard to implement/adapt to current database, but i dunno.

Lance_Armstrong said:
It should look like this: https://e621.net/forum/show/147842

If the server nearly instantaneously adds the correct tags, the user should get those edits in their tag history item. That way they can use aliases like "f" and "m" etc. and still look pro.

Chessax said:
Like that concept a lot more than having a dummy user spewing out "pointless" information in tag history. Though it feels like it might be hard to implement/adapt to current database, but i dunno.

What lance is proposing is the ideal solution (ie. what you would do if you have the time to do things right). What I'm proposing is a solution (what you can do if you don't have time to do things right).
Neither of them should be irreconcilable with the current database design.

Lance_Armstrong said:
If the server nearly instantaneously adds the correct tags, the user should get those edits in their tag history item. That way they can use aliases like "f" and "m" etc. and still look pro.

savageorange said:
What lance is proposing is the ideal solution (ie. what you would do if you have the time to do things right). What I'm proposing is a solution (what you can do if you don't have time to do things right).
Neither of them should be irreconcilable with the current database design.

Well, the current system already enables you to tag things as straight, m, f (or even just m/f), ass (i.e. be a lazy ass), etc, because the system will replace those with the proper tag and imply other tags as it saves them. Lance's solution would do the same with the addition that new aliases and implications will blend seamlessly with the old tag history. Only strange thing would be that you in some way actually change history, but would make that history easier to read and interpret. Also note that type case was perviously conserved, and I believe that now if you update a post with upper case in it you will get a tag change attributed, because I've seen e.g. "+capcom -Capcom" and similar.

Just as an example I added tags to post #667162: I added 16 tags but only 5 were proper tags and the system attributed me for 19 proper tags and of those 19 only the mentioned 5 were tags left unprocessed (but downcased) (the tags were: "M F GLOVE HIGH_HEELS GRINNINC C: HIGH-HEELS SHORT_DRESS EYE_LASHES LOOKING_AT_THE_VIEWER TRANSPARENT_BG DUO GREEN_EYES CYAN_EYES TEAL_EYES ARM_AROUND_SHOULDERS").

I'm only guessing now, but the API suggests that tag history is not stored as differences but as the full tags of the post at a certain time. If so, you would probably have to rebuild not only the system but the database as well, which is definitely not an impossible task but probably something you don't want to do without serious consideration. Of course you could keep the database and do a workaround, but it might be quite ineffective considering we are approaching 10,000,000 tag changes (with my edit at 9,527,983).

Lots of blabbering and a lot of speculation... Before I was mad, now talkative, I seem to be in a strange mood today...