As of 2014-01-04, striped_legwear now implicates socks. Was this intentional or a mistake caused by a series of aliases/implications?
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As of 2014-01-04, striped_legwear now implicates socks. Was this intentional or a mistake caused by a series of aliases/implications?
The implication points to forum #80443, which certainly had a request for an implication for striped_socks to socks, but never brought up striped_legwear... and considering the implication makes no sense, I have to say it must be a mistake somehow.
The implication was originally striped_socks -> socks. Then later striped_socks was aliased to striped_legwear (topic #10070). The implication remained as it was for a little while, even though striped_socks was no longer a tag.
Then just recently bugged implications like that were automatically updated. This means that the striped_socks -> socks implication was changed to be striped_legwear -> socks instead.
Updated
jxh2154 said:
So is the bug fixed, or...? I've removed the incorrect alias manually for now.
Well... it's not really a bug. I added that feature a while ago that moves aliases/implications so that they don't have to be moved manually, since people forget to move them manually like 99.9% of the time. While it's usually convenient, it means that when creating aliases between two tags that aren't actually the same (such as striped_socks -> striped_legwear) implications like this need to be manually deleted first, before creating the alias; otherwise the site will automatically move the implication and cause problems like this.
We could get rid of the feature, which would prevent errors like this, but it's also going to result in ones that actually should be moved not being moved. I believe ones that should be moved are more common than ones like this which shouldn't be moved, so I dunno if removing it is really a great idea, but either way it's not perfect.
Log said:
Maybe add a warning? "Executing this alias will also move these implications are you sure you want to do this?"
Hmm, that seems like a good idea. Might be tricky to implement though, since the confirmation page would need to preserve the submitted form data, and since there are three completely different ways of creating an alias.