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Question by example: There is the , and is a synonym for it.

I recently noticed that when I filter for questions with the , the synonym doesn't go "backwards", i.e. I only see those old questions that were genuinely tagged . I had to filter for explicitly to get both the old and the new questions.

Why do synonyms work in this arguably surprising way? Me, I hadn't paid much attention to the fact that someone replaced the old tag by the new one and made a synonym, and I certainly didn't expect that I'd have to change my filters. After all, such tag changes aren't reported in a way I can easily scan and absorb.

So, would it be sensible to make all synonyms behave entirely equally, so that filtering by any one of them selects everything matching any synonymous tag?

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Since on a lot of synonyms they aren't doing batch retagging, this functionality is definitely needed, though it'd make more sense for them to just batch retag.

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  • How do you do batch retagging? Could you do it for C++0x? Though I'm not sure that's perfect - I suppose some of the older questions are really about the pre-standard days, so in some sense having the older tag may be a nice touch. – Kerrek SB Sep 9 '11 at 15:36
  • Moderators can batch retag. If it's a legitimate synonym, then the older questions shouldn't matter, the only problem will be those questions that have both tags will end up with two of the same tag. It it would end up mistagging old questions, then the synonym wasn't legitimate in the first place. – Lance Roberts Sep 9 '11 at 15:45
  • Well, there once was a pre-standard colloquially dubbed "C++0x", but it has now been accepted and published and it's officially called "C++11" now. Nonetheless, older questions may be about nascent feature support, while a C++11-tagged question can arguably be expected to refer to the published standard, regardless of platform support... I don't know. – Kerrek SB Sep 9 '11 at 15:47
  • Yes, on this tag the issue has come up before as per these links. – Lance Roberts Sep 9 '11 at 15:50

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