3 votes

Migration of sub-tags/communities

Was asked to post here about this:

Is there a plan for migrating sub-tags (or top-level groups too)? The scenario I'm thinking of is that things may either fork, or change their name unanimously.

Let's say a tech product changes its official name from XX to be YY, Would there be a way to migrate
~tech.XX.stuff to ~tech.YY.stuff?

I can't say that this will be a common occurrence, but may affect historical usefulness of the tagging system, as people looking for things in the past won't be able to easily - plus it may divide communities once existing (do they keep posting in the old tag or the new one?).

For now, this isn't too important as @Deimos (from what it seems?) is in charge of creating new topics and presumably modify them too, but for the future (according to this) we may start having user created groups pop-up.

Cheers,

2 comments

  1. [2]
    cfabbro
    (edited )
    Link
    Yes, there is. I wish I could find the comment that @deimos made ages ago where he talked about this, but IIRC he said moving around and renaming things (like groups or tags) in the database is...

    Let's say a tech product changes its official name from XX to be YY, Would there be a way to migrate
    ~tech.XX.stuff to ~tech.YY.stuff?

    Yes, there is. I wish I could find the comment that @deimos made ages ago where he talked about this, but IIRC he said moving around and renaming things (like groups or tags) in the database is rather trivial. In fact he has already done so on a few occasions with some of the group names. E.g. ~health was originally ~lifestyle, and when the renaming occurred all the non-health ~lifestyle topics were moved to ~misc

    The ability to do that sort of data migration is one of the reasons that tags and groups have the same hierarchical structure and naming conventions, so they can be used essentially interchangeably and groups can be spun off using tags or even folded into one another if necessary. E.g. If a subgroup became so inactive that its existence can't be justified anymore, it can be removed and its topics simply folded back into its parent group (or moved to ~misc) and a tag simply added to all the migrated topics so that they are still categorized properly. And vice versa... if a subject comes to dominate a group too much, a subgroup can be created for it and all the related topics migrated to that new subgroup.

    plus it may divide communities once existing (do they keep posting in the old tag or the new one?

    That is unlikely to happen since, while user created groups may be allowed eventually, group hierarchy oversight will likely always be in the hands of the admins. That and URL redirects, disambiguation pages (like Wikipedia uses) and "did you mean?" suggestions can also easily be applied to any database modifications too so that people don't get confused. E.g. If Apple decided to rebrand as Orange then ~tech.apple could simply be renamed to and redirected to ~tech.orange and tag searches for apple could simply have a "did you mean orange?" type suggestion in the results. As for which tag users should keep using, I think it's rather obvious the rebranded official name tag should be used going forward and all the previous topics tagged with apple could even be changed to orange, or edited to include both, or even make the tags synonymous in the relevant tech related groups. There are lots of options for solutions to these problems.

    7 votes
    1. name
      Link Parent
      Perfect, thanks for your input.

      Perfect, thanks for your input.

      1 vote