@saby
That would be fine, in a perfect world. But even when we do it by hand and carefully review each deletion, we end up with goofy “where did that tag come from” situations.
But after we ‘purge’ a tag change hard style, we get people asking how tags ended up on an image, or assuming that the uploader must have added ‘evil tag’ because there’s no change justifying it otherwise.
The problem is repeated tag changes where the retention of the tag is uncertain - at which point in the ‘battle’ did the tag stop changing?
I’ve seen at least a dozen cases where being able to point people to the horrific mess of tag changes in the history saved an artist from the drama of being personally blamed for the tags that they ended up with.
If it could be made to result in a rational set of tag changes that would be fine, but when a tag change ‘event’ runs to dozens of pages of history, some from BPs making good changes to fight the vandal and then other BPs adding their own ‘help’ the the mess, even we have trouble sometimes figuring out where a tag came from.
And when you remember that we sometimes revert pages of tags in a single click - sometimes we’re the ones who ‘added the bad tag’ because someone before us had reverted the bad change by hand. Then “that tag is there because staff said so” drama happens.
The history shows the history. Deleting the mess would be wonderful, but once there’s a room where all the display cases have been wrecked and put back together and one or two things disappeared forever or something weird was added, being able to see ‘how did we get here’ is better than ‘that’s just how it is now’.
blocks of tag change history
To illustrate, let’s work it.
- A vandal adds
this is a bad tag.
- A helpful user removes it.
- Staff reverts, purges, and hides the vandal’s tag changes and histories
- The image now shows the helpful user removed
this is a bad tag.
Where did this is a bad tag come from? Did the artist or uploader add it?
- A helpful user reports that the artist uploaded an image with
this is a bad tag on it.
Today, this happens without the ‘purge and hide’ phase. So when working the report you look at the history and Wow ok that’s all the ‘how did we get here’ work you need to do look at that mess. Now find the moment where something went left when it should have gone right, fix it, close report.
With the ‘purge and hide’ now you have to fix the tag, hide the fix from public view, reply to the reporter (and any resulting drama) that it wasn’t the artist but a vandal and instead of showing the history of the tag changes you just have to believe us, bro.
