So this is something I’ve noticed a dozen times when requesting an alias or a BUR. When making ‘invalid’ requests, I get the following message:

Error: Antecedent name has already been taken

I’m certain that this is something many other users have experienced as well. It is THIS very error that make many requests impossible, particularly when the former tag has aliases that prevent it from being itself aliased to another tag (not to mention family-related ‘lore’ tags ). This is such a pain in the bottom!

My question to those who are behind the coding/programming/maintenance of this website:

• Isn’t there a way to write a code that will allow tags with existing aliases to all be moved to a new tag when making a request?
• If not, what problem prevents this from being fixed?

It is actually possible, but you can only do it with single alias requests, not BURs. I think this has been requested before and rejected on the basis that it would increase the amount of work required to check a BUR before approval.

It wouldn't be so bad if single requests allowed you to specify a topic number like BURs do.