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I was trying to suggest a retag of this question on Seasoned Advice, but the system won't let me; I get the familiar message

Edits must be at least 6 characters; is there something else to improve in this post?

In general, that's not true for retagging; if you don't change the question body at all, it should work. I suspect the logic checking the edit is thrown off guard because of the title warning:

The question you're asking appears subjective and is likely to be closed

I found this similar question, but I cannot find any evidence (in SEDE) for invisible characters being present in the question's source. Also, that's supposed to be .

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  • Do you know that it is due to the tag notice? It seems that this may not actually be possible (submitting tag-only edit suggestions).
    – Catija
    Commented Feb 5, 2018 at 22:19
  • 1
    @Catija It's supposed to be possible. On a small number of questions, you get an error message saying that "edits must have at least 6 characters", but that's a bug.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Feb 5, 2018 at 23:09

1 Answer 1

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There was a single zero-width space at the end of the post body. These are stripped on submission now... Unfortunately, that's done before the system compares the revisions to see what has changed. So it saw the tag edits and a one-character body edit.

The subjective title warning is entirely incidental. As usual, the fault lies with Unicode.

This generally happens when characters are stripped out from the body currently, but weren't stripped out in the prior revision of the post. The system sees the stripping as a body edit and thus prevents you from submitting the edit since the body edit was under 6 characters.

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  • So that's one possible cause of my getting that message even when I make no edits to the body? What are the general causes of this happening?
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Feb 5, 2018 at 23:01
  • General cause is stuff the system strips from the post prior to checking against the last revision, @Ano. In cases where these manage to sneak into the post body anyway, they'll trigger this the next time someone tries to edit.
    – Shog9 Mod
    Commented Feb 6, 2018 at 2:59
  • So this situation occurs if a post was made before the stripping algorithm was changed? Is that why I see the error message I mention in this comment more often on old posts?
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Feb 6, 2018 at 3:13
  • Yep, that's the most common cause, @Ano. Can also happen if the check is skipped on edits, if the check is done before stripping but applied against revisions where the stripping has already happened, etc.
    – Shog9 Mod
    Commented Feb 6, 2018 at 3:21
  • Here is another case where it looks like this bug happens. If you have a minute or two, I think the user there will appreciate a reply.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Dec 11, 2018 at 9:36
  • @Shog You asked me to remind you if I ever saw/heard of this problem.
    – Rob
    Commented Apr 21, 2019 at 18:40
  • Where'd you run into it again, @Rob?
    – Shog9 Mod
    Commented Apr 24, 2019 at 22:57
  • @Shog9 - Here, and there. I usually don't edit tags but I recall editing a short tag (several months ago) without other edits and it was accepted; so I thought it was fixed. Now I see this report here, it's the first reoccurrence since that time - so I'm linking the two, letting you know. Maybe it occurs rarely but remains an unfixed bug.
    – Rob
    Commented Apr 24, 2019 at 23:35

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