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When one has the retag privilege, but not the edit privilege, then retagging using "edit" rather than "retag" gets one a confusing message:

Oops! Your edit couldn't be submitted because:

  • You have the privilege to retag questions; to suggest an edit please include a change to the title and/or the body as well

I suggest to change this into something like:

To just retag a question without editing title or body, please step back, and don't choose the edit-link but the retag-link beneath.


Background:

I accidentally chose the "edit" link to retag a question, while using "retag" would have been the right way. I explain my behaviour with the different, but similar looking user interfaces for my accounts on different sites. For example:

  • link|edit|close|flag on German L&U, rep: 1840
  • link|edit|retag|close|flag on Code Golf, rep: 797
  • link|edit|retag|flag on Code Review, rep: 330
  • link|edit|close|flag on Stack Overflow, rep: 4767

I used the edit-link before somewhere else, where it was appropriate, and didn't search for another link.

The current error message assumes I intended to change body + tags, or headline + tags, but had forgotten to edit the other. But in reality, I had never planned to edit something else but the tags, and had the privilege to do so. I didn't understand what it tried to tell me, until I ranted about it and it was explained to me by a moderator.

From the user perspective, a silent acceptance of tag-edits would be preferable. But that has been discussed elsewhere, the result being "it's too rare to need to do that, it would be a complex change". So at least the message could be improved.

This post might remind you about an answer I posted yesterday, but I was encouraged to open a new post on meta. So here we go.

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  • As for your retag privileges on SO: these have been superseded by your edit privileges there. Hence no "retag" link for you any more. In other words: on Code Golf and Code Review it's kind of suggest edit|retag while on German L&U and SO it's edit. Confusing, yes. (But unrelated to the above, I feel, so I edited it out of the question.)
    – Arjan
    Commented Dec 5, 2011 at 10:40
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    In the post where waffles explains that silently treating as just a retag is a lot of work, he also writes: "the suggested edit queue is a scarce resource. We do not want to flood it with work that we know people are perfectly capable of doing without direct peer review." A better error message certainly would help avoiding people adding fake edits to title or body!
    – Arjan
    Commented Dec 5, 2011 at 10:58
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    Retag as a separate privilege has been removed.
    – Shog9
    Commented Sep 10, 2013 at 6:43

1 Answer 1

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We have improved the error message you receive when the intent is only to retag a question. Hopefully this clears up some confusion.

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