Bigol'Skitty said:
So after having found out about parenthetical searching, I just found out that you can use - with parenthetical searches to remove a whole set of tags!
So for instance, while ~miso_souperstar ~r-mk (~butt_focus ~areola) will show every post that has any combination of those tags and artists, ~miso_souperstar ~r-mk -(~ butt_focus ~areola) will show all posts by the r-mk or miso without those tags. Yet another way to avoid posts you don’t want to see. Almost like the people who work on this site put genuine effort into QoL. Shocker. Love you admins and developers! <3

tag_1 -( ~tag_2 ~tag_3 ) is identical to just tag_1 -tag_2 -tag_3
the first is saying:

• posts with tag_1
• excluding:
• any of tag_2 or tag_3

the second is saying:

• posts with tag_1
• excluding tag_2
• excluding tag_3

dba_afish said:
tag_1 -( ~tag_2 ~tag_3 ) is identical to just tag_1 -tag_2 -tag_3
[...]

A cleverly designed poll might be able to find out some things about how usable these features are in practice.

Of course anyone who is any good at programming should be able to use all the boolean ops. But I've seen enough in various instances, to think that people are often confused by anything more than basic AND + NOT operations with no parenthetical clauses.

I'm not really against technically-superfluous usages like the above, they can be 'syntactical sugar' -- but if they are causing confusion, then perhaps they should be discouraged. (I've seen this particular confusion twice recently)

(I suppose the other side of the argument might be : "it's not any more confusing than blacklist rules already are". On the other other hand, there is generally exactly one way to correctly write a given blacklist rule, not multiple ways.)