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I'm not sure when this started, but I've only noticed it in the last hour. It appears that questions not tagged with a particular tag are appearing within that tags listings. Example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/cmd?tab=Newest

This is making it difficult to focus attention on my preferred subjects.

I have logged out and cleared my browser cache to be sure it's not a problem on my end.

enter image description here

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    The word 'cmd' does appear in those questions, so I guess the search engine is FUBAR ...
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Jul 25, 2022 at 16:01
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    I assume so, because the first question in my screenshot is showing under the Anaconda tag, despite that tag not being specified. The biggest issue will be for more common strings which also match an existing tag, and which would practically ruin the site experience for many people if not fixed quickly.
    – Compo
    Commented Jul 25, 2022 at 16:05
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    Also on MSO: "Questions tagged X" shows questions without tag X
    – Meta Andrew T.
    Commented Jul 25, 2022 at 16:07
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    @Glorfindel I think that observation is spot on– searching [cmd] seems to pull the exact same results as searching for cmd is:q now.
    – zcoop98
    Commented Jul 25, 2022 at 16:25
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    Also a note that [tag] is:q still seems to pull the intended results, as a temporary work around for the moment.
    – zcoop98
    Commented Jul 25, 2022 at 16:28
  • I've added additional information to my question body, based upon the fore-mentioned possible workaround.
    – Compo
    Commented Jul 25, 2022 at 17:10
  • @Compo your second report with is:q isn't a bug. You search for the term batch-file, not for the tag. To search for tag, you have to put [ before it and ] after it. The system do it for us automagically for the most popular tags, but it's not good idea to count on that behavior, better always enclose tags with the proper characters when searching.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Jul 25, 2022 at 17:20
  • Apologies, and noted @ShadowTheKidWizard. Offtopic: However, the string batch-file did not appear in that question either! Only the case insensitive substring BATCH/batch. Does that mean the the search is treating the character - always as a space or word separator?
    – Compo
    Commented Jul 25, 2022 at 17:23
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    Interesting. I could definitely reproduce the issue earlier (I saw that the [electron] tag page on SO earlier was returning questions that didn’t have the tag, as mentioned in the linked MSO post), but it doesn't seem to be happening anymore. Glad it’s fixed itself, I guess... I suppose I'll mark it as [status-completed], since whatever the issue was seems to be resolved now.
    – V2Blast
    Commented Jul 25, 2022 at 17:41
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    It looks like the devs have confirmed what was causing the issue, and will be deploying a fix soon. They'll post an answer once they've confirmed that the issue is fixed.
    – V2Blast
    Commented Jul 26, 2022 at 16:11
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    Thanks for the heads up @V2Blast. I'm happy to have played my small part.
    – Compo
    Commented Jul 26, 2022 at 17:20

1 Answer 1

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Stack Overflow Developer responsible for this bug here! I've been investigating a different way to retrieve the Posts-associated-with-a-Tag data, starting with the Newest-sorted data and, unfortunately, when I turned it on for a short duration on the Stack Overflow site it exhibited an incorrect behaviour which I hadn't seen in the testing that I had performed locally and on other sites.

The new code is behind a feature flag and so can be toggled on or off easily, which explains why the bug appeared and then disappeared and then briefly came back.

I'm confident that it is now working correctly (following a code deployment yesterday) and the flag is enabled again here (meta) and on the Stack Overflow site - so those sites are using the new code.

Thanks for reporting this bug and please accept my apologies for the inconvenience!

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    Thanks for the answer. "I'm confident that it is now working correctly and the flag is enabled again here" - not sure what you mean by this? 1) Does it mean it's now working with the different way to retrieve the Posts-associated-with-a-Tag data? Or rolled back to the previous version? 2) By "here" you mean MSE only?
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Jul 28, 2022 at 10:23
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    Sorry that it wasn't clear, I've edited the answer to try to address you questions - in summary, I deployed another code change to fix the bug and then set the feature to "on" for meta and public Q&A such that they are using the new retrieval mechanism.
    – Dan Roberts StaffMod
    Commented Jul 28, 2022 at 10:38
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    Hi Dan. Glad to know this has been fixed :) Could you also update the post over at MSO?
    – Justin
    Commented Jul 28, 2022 at 11:18
  • @DanRoberts what does "the public Q&A site" mean? Stack Overflow? Or all the SE sites?
    – Marijn
    Commented Jul 28, 2022 at 12:51
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    I meant the Stack Overflow site - sorry, I was using terminology that I do internally with my team. I've updated the answer text to clarify.
    – Dan Roberts StaffMod
    Commented Jul 28, 2022 at 13:04

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