@Ganix
Generally, using a bot to mass-change tags would definitely be in violation of rule #2, and a great way to ensure that your API key mysteriously disappears from the database. But this is more of a unique situation stemming from a misunderstanding, instead of someone acting with malicious or negligent intent.
To be honest, permission for such a thing wouldn’t really be all that common either. Usually when it comes to tag changes, it’s always been up to the site staff to actually implement an agreed-upon change, not the member requesting the change. This is largely in part due to the fact that site staff have access to tools that allow bulk-editing of tags in a more controlled and thorough manner.
This is especially true when it comes to mass-replacing a tag. Gyro’s bot simply removed “hippogriff” and added the “griffling” tag. It worked well, but that’s all it did. What it didn’t do though was update any watch lists or filters that referenced the hippogriff tag - that’s something that only the mod tools can do. That means that anyone watching the hippogriff tag would’ve stopped seeing them in their watch lists, while anyone filtering that tag would’ve started seeing them again.
If someone wanted to try out a bulk-tagging script they wrote, we’d likely be willing to work with them and let them play around, but that would have to come from a site developer, since we’d have to verify there was no collateral damage, and make sure that anything that it couldn’t handle (like filters and watch lists) were still updated appropriately.
This all stemmed from a huge misunderstanding though. Stuff like this is typically only “approved” once a general consensus is reached. However, since staff have always carried out/implemented whatever was decided, we really never have had anything explicitly stating that either - if it was approved, the staff would do it, and if it wasn’t, then they wouldn’t do it. This was kinda a unique situation that we’ve not really faced before, at least to this extent.
Since it was a misunderstanding though, I’m not holding it against Gyrotech. I’m not particularly thrilled about how things transpired, but he didn’t do anything wrong either, as he did follow the proper procedure and we didn’t have any kinda documentation stating how tag change suggestions are approved and/or implemented. So I’ll work with the tagging staff (once I’m less sleep deprived) to come up with a written guide about how suggestions are handled, and possibly re-word that section of the rules as well, to hopefully prevent this from recurring in the future.
TL;DR: No one did anything wrong, but things were definitely done in the wrong way