I make a plebefic header post just about every day (Science suggests that in the past year the average is 1 day in 2). That's a lot of posts. When I started saving them and posting them 5 per day, in summer 2007, I really had no notion that it was going to become such a long-term thing. At that point, all the scattered occasions I'd posted them in the past had simply been tagged "badfic", so I kept that tag on them until last week.
Aaaaand as a result, my "badfic" tag was completely unusable for finding any posts
except the header posts. Whenever I'd want to find a specific old post from that tag, I'd have to wade through pages and pages of headers instead.
The obvious solution was to remove the "badfic" tag from the header posts only, but I couldn't think how. I thought there ought to be some kind of batch-edit function. Dreamwidth does have an Edit Entries page, but you can't batch edit tags the way you can edit metadata in many music players. And anyway, I'd have to be able to take "Posts tagged with 'badfic' and 'headers & summaries'" as the group to edit, then overwrite
all the tags on those posts with just one (in order to delete the tag from those posts but leave it on other ones). Dreamwidth doesn't yet have "and" filtering for tags, and Edit Entries doesn't work by tag anyway - the only thing you can do with posts grouped by tag is rename or delete their tags. And there's not a way to search for "Posts tagged 'X' but not 'Y'".
At first I thought that such a batch-edit feature might be useful, so I was considering submitting it to
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dw_suggestions, but then I realized it usually wouldn't be very useful. If you're talking about batch-editing all posts with a certain tag or combination of tags, it would certainly be useful to be able to re-set the security on all of them at once or to delete all of them at once (this might already be in the pipeline - I'm not sure, but it sounds familiar), but the ability to edit all their tags at once? In order to batch-edit the tags, you'd have to overwrite what was already there, and how often would you want to take a group of posts which all have different combinations of tags and erase all of those, thereby losing information? You usually wouldn't. You'd want to rename a single tag, everywhere it appeared.
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waxjism thought I'd have to go through the "headers & summaries" tag and manually delete the "badfic" tag from each and every post, which would probably have taken the next six months or more (more, probably, because I'd get bored and give up). Fortunately I realized I could do it backwards: what I did instead was skim backwards through the "badfic" tag, opening every post that
wasn't to do with plebefic headers in a new window (total: 79; total posts tagged "headers & summaries": 336). In the "edit tags" page for each entry I deleted "badfic" and replaced it with a new tag, "greeble". When that was done I deleted the "badfic" tag from the Manage Tags page, then renamed "greeble" to "badfic". It was still labor-intensive compared with how I wish the internet/computers worked, but at least I was able to finish in a couple of hours.
It's so annoying when you are completely sure that the computer
should be able to do this (like Delicious.com! It should be able to filter out all duplicates on the Recent page instead of showing every single person who saved something!) and it just
can't (yet).
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