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Related to It should be possible to retag a question without bumping it to the front page but different because that question asks about editing existing tags for consistency, while I also care about adding tags to questions or removing poorly chosen tags, particularly in the context of SE2.0 sites, not solvable with moderator mass tag merging.

I do a lot of retagging on the math.stackexchange SE2.0 site, so I've noticed that when a lot of questions have had their tags modified, they get bumped to the front page as 'recently modified' even though none of the substance of the questions or answers have been changed.

This is particularly troublesome early in the site's life since new questions do not get asked quickly enough to mitigate the problem, and any users can create new tags, so many extraneous/useless tags get created. Since tags are so fluid early on, there is a lot of reliance on users to make sure correct tagging is maintained, especially since we don't even have site-specific moderators yet!

Edit: Chacha102's answer describing why retags should be visible is a good one. I suppose the request is not that retagged questions should be hidden entirely, but that the default behavior of the "active" questions should be to show only substantive changes, with the list including modified tags as a separate sort method or user option.

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2 Answers 2

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The reason all posts are bumped to the beginning, even for tag changes, is to ensure accuracy. If you could edit tags and not bump them to the front, a malicious user could edit any really old posts and put any tags they want on them, and there would be no community supervision. By making all changes to posts bump them to the front, it makes sure that all the changes being made have a chance to be checked by members of the community.

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  • good point. I have edited my question.
    – Larry Wang
    Aug 3, 2010 at 7:11
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    I don't agree with this reason. It is a huge overkill to bother all users because of a very unlikely scenario, almost none of retaggings are malicious. Also the OP is always notified when their post is edited, if there is malicious retagging they will be notified and can correct it/report it to moderators, so there is no need to notify all users that a tag has changed.
    – Kaveh
    Nov 8, 2010 at 1:16
  • @kaveh See Jeff's Response to your comment.
    – Tyler Carter
    Nov 8, 2010 at 2:10
  • that does not answer what I have said here. Jeff himself has said that users can use the new questions page in place of active questions to avoid seeing tag-edits. Users are running the sites voluntarily, it does not make sense at all to force them to do some task or annoy them if they don't want to do it. IMHO, this is completely reasonable feature-request to sort questions based on latest significant activity if the users want it. If some users want to check tag-edits, they still will be able, if some users does not want to do it, it shouldn't be force in them.
    – Kaveh
    Nov 8, 2010 at 4:21
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    There is a very simple fix: disable the bumping for users with enough reputation.
    – Yuval Filmus
    Jun 3, 2011 at 22:28
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This is by design. If the front page is dominated by edits, that tells you there are a lot of edits to vet.

If you don't want to see edits, I suggest you look at the

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions?sort=newest

page rather than the home page default tab, or the active tab. That's just new questions.

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  • @Jeff: I know about this tab, the downside is that it does not show recent answers or edits, which I would like to see. Perhaps the real solution is to let the user decide what merits a question being placed on the 'active' tab? Showing new comments could be useful at times too.
    – Larry Wang
    Aug 3, 2010 at 7:13
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    @Jeff, people use active questions page to see recent updates. Editing tags does not add any information to a question or its answers, and as far as I understand, editing tags is a mainly organizational task. Most users like using active questions page, but they don't want to reread a question just because its tags have changed, it annoys them when it happens. I suggest that you at least consider an option for users who don't want to see tag-edits on that page. (ps: I don't check SO meta regularly, I have posted a similar feature request on cstheory meta.)
    – Kaveh
    Nov 8, 2010 at 1:15
  • @kaveh I simply don't agree; all activity needs to be vetted and just because you haven't seen a question doesn't mean others have. Also, if something is worthy of editing it's worthy of bumping.
    – Jeff Atwood
    Nov 8, 2010 at 1:33
  • @Jeff: I just hoped that you might consider adding an option for people who don't want to see these tagging edits. I check the site very regularly so I don't miss questions, I am more concerned that I annoy other users when I add tags to questions(we try to keep each question tagged with at least one top level arXiv tag similar to MO, but some users don't follow it and post questions without any top level arXiv tags.) My feeling is that the active questions page shows where the interesting action is taking place and tag edits are not interesting for most users, but of course you know better.
    – Kaveh
    Nov 8, 2010 at 2:37
  • (another reason that I feel some users might get annoyed by tag edits is the following situation: some user posts an answer, it causes the question to go to the top of the page and it is noted that the question is edited by that user. Lots of people might be interested in what that specific user has written, when I edit tags it causes the system to say that I was the last person who has edited the question, and since I do a fair amount of retagging it may cause other users to skip that question, while they wouldn't skip it if they knew that that specific user has posted something there.
    – Kaveh
    Nov 8, 2010 at 2:53
  • [continued] so I think it can be a very useful feature to let users see who was the last user who has performed a significant action on a question.)
    – Kaveh
    Nov 8, 2010 at 2:56
  • @kaveh there already is this option -- see the body of my post, above: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions (the sort param is now newest by default..) aka, "click the giant questions button"
    – Jeff Atwood
    Nov 8, 2010 at 4:48
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    @Jeff: The sort=newest sorts by the time the questions are posted, that is different from what I am saying. The one I am suggesting is something between sort=newest and sort=active. I have posted it as a feature request here.
    – Kaveh
    Nov 8, 2010 at 5:17

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