Furbitron - Experiments - e621 tag backlog

This page looks at the counts of outstanding tag aliases, tag implications, and BURs on e621, how those counts have changed through 2023, and which e621 staff members have been approving them.

Summary

e621's program of rejecting old pending aliases, implications, and BURs, at a "one year per month" rate, appears to have been abandoned in June 2023.

As of the end of September, 2023, pending tag aliases, implications, and BURs are growing at rates of between about 49 to 103 per month.

As of the end of September, 2023, the oldest pending tag alias and tag implication are both about 6.7 years old. The oldest pending BUR is about 3.3 years old.

As of the end of September, 2023, e621 basically only has two staff members approving tag aliases, implications, and BURs: NotMeNotYou and Rainbow Dash.

Background
Alias, implication, and BUR backlog
Backlog growth in 2023
Fighting the growth
Conclusions

If you already understand how aliases, implications, and BURs work on e621, and just want to see the graphs and numbers, skip to the Backlog growth in 2023 section.

Background

Like most other furry art sites, e621 allows each submission to have a number of tags - key words that describe the contents of the image.

Unlike some other furry art sites, e621's tag system is very extensive, and users of the site can easily add, delete, and modify almost all of the tags on almost every submission.

To assist in standardizing the tags, which makes searching by tags work better, e621 supports the ideas of "tag aliases" and "tag implications".

An alias replaces one tag with a more-preferred tag. For example, if a user tries to tag a submission with "bunny", the alias system automatically changes that tag to "rabbit". Aliases are also used when an artist has changed names; the alias system will automatically change the old artist tag to the new one.

An implication adds additional tags that are related to the tag a user has applied. For example, if a user tries to tag a submission with "rabbit", the implication system automatically adds the tags "leporid", "lagomorph", and "mammal".

New aliases and implications can be proposed by any registered user of e621. There is a dedicated area on the e621 forum for these proposals, where they are discussed and voted on by other users.

Sometimes the conclusion is that the proposed alias or implication is not useful, so the proposal is rejected. Sometimes the proposal is modified into something more useful. Once other users generally agree that the proposal would be useful, a member of the e621 staff approves the proposal, which makes it apply to all tagging activity on the site from that point forward.

Aliases and implications can normally only be proposed for one tag at a time. In some cases, it is convenient to group several related aliases or implications together, for discussion as a single group. This can be done with a "bulk update request" or "BUR". BURs are proposed and discussed on the e621 forums in the same way that single tag aliases or implications are.

For example, when a new generation of Pokémon is introduced, e621's custom is to have the name of each new Pokémon imply a tag like "generation_12_pokemon". Rather than make about 100 separate implication requests for this, a BUR allows all of the proposed implications to be listed in a single place, discussed, and approved all at one time.

(BURs also have some additional capabilities that simple aliases and implications don't have, but that is out of scope for this page.)

Alias, implication, and BUR backlog

Approval of tag aliases, implications, and BURs on e621 is not instant or automatic. There is usually at least a few days' worth of discussion and voting before approval is granted. The approval has to be manually done by a member of e621 staff.

The time for approval can also vary widely. For example, Furbitron is aware of some aliases that were proposed in 2020 and 2021 that took anywhere from one week, to six months, to twenty months to be approved.

Due to this variability, the backlog of pending aliases, implications, and BURs has tended to grow over time.

In July 2022, one of the e621 staff bumped a forum thread that invited users to name pending alias and implication requests that could probably be approved quickly by the staff. Several users did so, and several of the pending requests were approved. The same member of staff bumped the thread again in December 2022, which resulted in some additional approvals of old requests, through about March 2023.

The backlog still continued to grow. In response, the lead e621 staff member made a forum post in mid-May 2023, advising that the staff planned to reject all pending requests from 2016 on the first of June, 2023. That post also asked users to bring up any pending requests from 2016 that they thought had merit. A subsequent post in the thread also claimed that the plan was to reject pending requests from 2017 on the first of July, and to continue rejecting old pending requests at the "one year per month" rate.

Several users brought up requests that were still pending from 2016, and some of those were approved. On the first of June, the remaining pending requests from 2016 were rejected.

On the second of June, the lead staff member made a forum post announcing that the staff planned to reject all pending requests from 2017 on the first of July, 2023. They again called on users to bring up pending requests from 2017 that they thought had merit, and some users did so. However, the first of July came and went without any further action on the pending requests from 2017.

After that, approvals of pending tag aliases, implications, and BURs seemed to come to a screeching halt. As of this writing, e621 staff have not provided any information on why that may be.

Backlog growth in 2023

There are a couple of different ways to find out how many pending aliases and implications there are on e621: by using the e621 API, or by using the database export files e621 provides.

e621's API does not directly provide a count of pending aliases or implications, and its API limits are lower than the current counts of pending aliases and implications, so it's not possible to get this information with a single query. By making multiple queries, though, it's possible to get a count of pending aliases and implications. Furbitron did this in late September, 2023.

The database export files provided by e621 include pending aliases and implications, so it's possible to get a count from them. Furbitron does not normally use these files, so it does not regularly fetch them. Furbitron does have a few copies of the export files from various dates, and for these graphs, more were downloaded from archive.org's periodic backups of e621's database export page.

The only way to find out how many pending BURs there are is to make multiple queries to e621. BURs are not represented in the database export files. Furbitron made the queries for BURs in late September, 2023, which is why these graphs only show recent data for BURs.

Important: These graphs don't automatically update every day. They were created one time, in early October, 2023, based on data collected from December 2022 to the end of September, 2023.

Since the available data points are relatively sparse, there may be some variations between the data points that are not shown on these graphs.

First, a look at the pending aliases, implications, and BURs during the first nine months of 2023. Furbitron has database export files from mid-December 2022, so those were included as the start of the data.

Line graph of count of e621 pending aliases,
implications, and BURs, 2023

As you can see, the low point was in late May. At that time, there were about 790 aliases and 760 implications pending. Pending BURs were at about 2,100 in late September, rising to about 2,110 by the end of September.

Based on data from late May to the end of September, the alias backlog grew by about 103 aliases per month, and the implication backlog grew by about 49 implications per month.

Based on a small sample size - data from the last week of September - the BUR backlog grew by about 65 BURs per month.

Next, a look at the age of the oldest pending aliases, implication, and BUR. This data only changes greatly if the oldest item is either accepted or rejected, but it will always change slightly every day.

Line graph of age of oldest e621 pending alias,
implication, and BUR, 2023

2023 started with the oldest pending alias being about 6.3 years old, and the oldest pending implication being about 6.0 years old. By the end of September, this had grown to about 6.7 years for both aliases and implications.

The oldest pending BUR is about 3.3 years old, as of the end of September.

Fighting the growth

e621 has an undocumented API endpoint called "mod actions". By experiment, it seems to report "administrative actions done by anyone", and not just "things the staff members have done". For example, if a user deactivates their own account, or hides their own forum post, the mod-actions API will report that. Tag aliases and implications initially proposed by users, and either accepted or rejected by staff, are also reported by the mod-actions API.

Interestingly, the mod-actions API does not report when individual submissions are approved or rejected.

The mod-actions API can potentially report five tag-related actions: "tag_alias_create", "tag_alias_update", "tag_implication_create", "tag_implication_update", and "nuke_tag". However, "tag_implication_create" and "tag_implication_update" have not been reported for any mod action since December 2021.

Also, the mod-actions API doesn't seem to provide any information on BUR creation or updates.

First, a graph of every mod action reported by the API, done by anyone on e621, for the first nine months of 2023:

Line graph of total mod actions reported by e621
API, 2023-01 to 2023-09

The rate is relatively constant, except for an increase from approximately mid-May to mid-June.

Next, a graph of the mod actions "tag_alias_create", "tag_alias_update", and "nuke_tag", done by anyone on e621, for the first nine months of 2023:

Line graph of tag-related mod actions reported by
e621 API, 2023-01 to 2023-09

Here, the increased rate from mid-May to mid-June is more apparent, probably due to the increased activity for pending aliases and implications from 2016 in May, the mass rejection of remaining pending items from 2016 on June 1st, and increased activity for pending items from 2017 in early June.

The mod-actions API also reports which user did the mod action. As an overview, here is a graph of every mod action, done by 1) any user with a rank other than "user" or "privileged" 2) who had at least 10 mod actions, for the first nine months of 2023.

Line graph of mod actions, by user, users with at
least 10 actions, 2023-01 to 2023-09

From this, it's easy to see when bitWolfy retired from the staff in late May, having done about 10,900 mod actions in 2023. It's also possible to see some of the other staff members increasing their activity, starting in mid-May.

Since some of the staff members have done relatively few mod actions, it's possible to simplify the above graph somewhat, by limiting it to staff members that had at least 100 mod actions for the first nine months of 2023.

Line graph of mod actions, by user, users with at
least 100 actions, 2023-01 to 2023-09

Again, it's easy to see when bitWolfy retired in late May, and the increased action by some other staff members starting in mid-May.

Finally, here is a graph of only the mod actions "tag_alias_create", "tag_alias_update", and "nuke_tag", done by 1) any user with a rank other than "user" or "privileged" 2) who had at least 100 mod actions, for the first nine months of 2023.

Line graph of tag-related mod actions, by user,
users with at least 100 actions, 2023-01 to 2023-09

Again, bitWolfy's retirement in late May is clear.

furrypickle did some tag-related mod actions through late April, but has done very few since that time.

gattonero2001 did a lot of tag-related mod actions in January and February, and then didn't do many until mid-May. They then did quite a number of tag-related mod actions until mid-June, and then did very few through mid-September.

Millcore did a few tag-related mod actions in March and April.

NotMeNotYou has done tag-related mod actions at a fairly steady pace through September. However, this pace is slower than what bitWolfy did before retiring.

Rainbow Dash did a few tag-related mod actions through early May, and then started doing them more regularly, keeping up that pace through the end of September. However, this pace is slower than what bitWolfy did before retiring.

Conclusions

The program of rejecting old pending aliases, implications, and BURs, at a "one year per month" rate, appears to have been abandoned in June 2023.

As of the end of September, 2023, pending tag aliases are growing at the rate of about 103 a month, and pending tag implications are growing at the rate of about 49 a month. Pending BURs are growing at the rate of about 65 a month, but this calculation is based on a small sample size of about one week of data.