7

Once upon a time in SF land, there are mass-killing and burnination ritual of tag. This mass-killing initiated at Mar 10, 2011 and lasted until July 6, 2011. The last-killing blow is done by Jeff Atwood himself.

In the present, looks like the still haunted us. You can see it yourself by

This happened when you edit other questions as well, for example

I tried to compare the Tags data from SEDE. And the result is there are no [vmware] in Tags table. Also, this question - How do I get the Activation Key in Windows 2003 Server - doesn't have [vmware] tag.

So what can we do to kill this ghost once and for all?

5
  • 2
    Confimed in Chrome 41 and FireFox 36
    – user9517
    Mar 29, 2015 at 22:14
  • 1
    I don't understand what was the problem with the vmware tag. The hyper-v tag didn't have any similar mass-killing, I hope nobody is working here for the micro$oft.
    – peterh
    Apr 3, 2015 at 19:19
  • 2
    VMware is a company. Hyper-V is a product. There are many products that are prefixed with "VMware <something>." If the user is asking about vSphere or ESXi or View, they should use a more descriptive tag. Having a VMware tag would be akin to having a Microsoft tag, which would be equally useless.
    – MDMarra
    Apr 8, 2015 at 23:47
  • This is still happening as of today.
    – user186340
    May 13, 2015 at 15:43
  • @André, yes. Apparently this bug is only minor. So, perhaps devs has seen this bug but this it has given low-priority because it did not affect the usability of SF
    – masegaloeh
    May 13, 2015 at 21:31

2 Answers 2

4

It's just about as killed as killed can get. In fact, is in our list of blacklisted inputs right along side . I'm afraid I don't know how those tags are being translated in the edit screen to those banned tagged. This looks like a bug!

4

After digging out SEDE once more , I found some explanation why this happened. But still I need SE-dev to finding the root cause of this inconsistency.

Inconsistency when viewing and editing post

The source of the problem lies in dual data source when you edit and view the post. When you view the post, web page pull data from rendered content (with HTML form) in Posts table . But when you edit it, web page pull data from raw content (with Markdown form) in PostHistory table. Normally, when you submit the post, both table updated with same data (but different forms). Unfortunately sometimes these two data can be out of sync, like this case.

To prove this, I wrote a query in SEDE to compares actual tags saved in PostTags table and raw tags recorded in PostHistory table. The result almost ~350 questions in Server Fault have this inconsistency. Almost all questions have in its PostHistory entry although it has been converted to another tag in PostTags table.

My hypotesis is when Jeff Atwood "manually" converted to another , something wrong happened

  1. He forgot to update PostHistory table :(
  2. He didn't forgot to update PostHistory table but in the next-day one of fellow dev rollback the database :(

As for the solution for this kind of "bug": It can be fixed quickly by SE-developers. Of cource we I can manually edit it, but it'll bump many questions in frontpage.

Additional note:

So, this event has happened in the past too. Especially when image links has been converted from i.imgur.com to i.stack.imgur.com. SE developers has been "forced" to manually baked up fresh post bodies so it matched the revision history version.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .