I've been recently working on removing the rationale tag and this has received some complaints in the chat room, as 90 different questions "flooded" the front page.
Is it okay to do so in the future (provided the edits are in good faith) or should one do major changes slowly to avoid filling up the active questions queue?
For me it's absolutely fine and just part of the way the site is designed to work.
They have plenty of timing traps they have built into the code such as editing comments too quickly in succession. They have not chosen to prevent "activity" even though they could have.
People who feel all "butthurt" - that's what the kids say these days isn't it? (-; Are not under any obligation to only look at the "activity" page if they are offended by lots of activity.
People who use SE a lot should be completely aware that the "active tab" is only one of several options. If what they really want to see is the new questions, they should be looking at the "newest" page instead.
Telling people they're "flooding" is as dumb as telling them they're "wasting their vote" if they don't vote for a major party or the expected winner. It amounts to being annoyed that somebody is doing lots of work!
Now if the "flooder" is making bad changes rather than good changes, well the "activity" tab also makes it easy to spot them. Win! Win!
Now stop doing Stack Exchange while you're at work and be sure to do less work while you're at it. You don't want to get fired for "flooding" your company's activity.
Until SE implements the following feature: Give mods/communities better tools for large retagging jobs I'm afraid that manually editing the tags out is the only way to go about this. By design this leads to flooding of the home page. There is absolutely nothing one can do about it, aside from waiting between re-tags as Fiksdal suggests. Quite frankly, when I find the time to re-tag posts I usually don't have that much time to allow me to wait between jobs. So by design I say it is OK to flood the home page.
I think flooding the front page of any forum or Q&A site is poor behavior, it is usually frowned upon and it does disrupt the normal flow of things. If a multiple action has to be done, it should be done in such a way it does not overwhelm the site.
I know there are ways to still get the newer questions on Stack Exchange, but many of us use the 'recent activities' to view whether there are activities that need action. Having about 80 of the recent questions up at the top because of the removal of one tag will not help with the quality of the site, as important the removal of the tag might be.
In my view, massive actions should not be done question by question, but behind the screens, by either a mod or a tech and if the technology is not yet available, lets wait till it has been made.
A good alternative to this is to do five questions at a time. Do five questions, then wait maybe 45 minutes and do five more. Sure, it takes longer that way, but it doesn't all have to be done by one person. One can make a meta post or even a chat message:
I've started doing work X, editing five questions. If someone has time, please continue the work later. Try not to flood the front page too much. Stick to five questions at a time and keep something like 45 minutes gap between batches.
That way, multiple people can join in the work, and it won't be so much work after all.
I think this is indeed traditionally frowned upon (vaguely recall reading about this) but one practical reason hasn't been mentioned: It reduces exposure to new questions asked right before a series of minor edits. Most questions receive an answer in the first few hours and then kind of disappear from attention. If they get immediately displaced by other questions and moved further down the list of recently active questions, they will get less exposure.
There are few mechanisms to counter that (you can look for them through tags and full-text search, we do periodical sweeps through unanswered question, older questions get bumped to the top, automatically or by an edit) but depriving questions of their main period of attention makes the site less useful for those who asked them. You can wish contributors would look elsewhere and find them anyway but it's just not happening so frequently, that's a simple fact.
Note that the fact heavy users can look elsewhere than the activity tab or, conversely, dislike it when they see many old questions, is neither here nor there, I am talking about the actual problems it causes for occasional users who come to ask their first question, looking at the problem from the opposite angle, as it were.
I don't see the problem with mass edits, if there's work to be done on some tag there's no point postponing it because it might flood the front page.
That said, I've made this search query into a bookmark in my browser to always get the newest questions, not just the ones with activity, I rarely use the 'active' tab.
https://travel.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&q=is%3aquestion%20closed%3ano%20answers%3a0
