A recent spate of over-obsessive tinkering with the tags has exposed a serious bug where some tags become unusable. The bug has been reported and those responsible have been asked to stop.
The tags had a purpose and were valuable for researching duplicates and appending some 'goto' types of questions. To be prevented from applying the relevant tags defeats the operating model of the site.
Tag definitions and tag wikis have also been clobbered.
I can set about to recreate them using a near replica strategy.
So an unusable tag like 'lemonade' is something I can recreate by using 'pink-lemonade' and orange-lemonade.
The upside is that we can tag questions again with something relevant. The downside is that the effort is vulnerable to being lost from unmanaged tinkering. The other downside is that the 'Tags' menu item still displays the tags which have been made unusable and the database will show a profusion of tags some of which are usable and some of which are not.
Shall I recreate the unusable tags? If so I will start the effort.
See below for an example...
I was looking to tag an article with 'standard-visitor-visa' and got this error...
Note that the error message refers to the plural, but I am adding the singular (for which a tag exists). And it gets worse. Calling up the definition, we see there are 167 questions with this tag.
Which seems about right, but if you go to list the 167, you get this surprise...
No questions! And the programme has reverted to the plural. The expected behaviour was stable for a long time, but now doesn't work. Current status: You can no longer apply standard-visitor-visa to a question. Try it! You cannot apply the plural tag either.
The tag wiki seems to have disappeared also.
Question: These types of things don't just jump out of the blue. Something changed. Somebody did something. What was it and how to roll back the change?