Tags not combined, after combination proposal met threshold and was closed

On 7 November 2020, I proposed combining the tags Kent UK and Kent (England). The proposal had been closed by 6 March 2021, when I found it in the tag combinations Closed list, showing as "threshold met" with 8 Yes votes and 0 No votes. However, three months later the tags are still separate.

As possible evidence of a wider problem, I'll note some of my earlier combination proposals that have also been closed without being carried out. Although I can't easily find the result of the vote in these cases (I was lucky to happen upon the Kent result in the Closed list), I would expect them to have passed the vote uncontroversially:

• Albert Einstein and Einstein Albert (proposed 27 May 2020)
• truthfulness and truthfullness (proposed 12 July 2020)
• coronavirus, corona virus and Corona-virus (proposed 10 August 2020)

Note that this isn't the same problem as reported by SandraArdnas in the topic "Tags not combined in months". That was about proposals reaching the vote threshold but not being closed, whereas this topic is about proposals being closed but not carried out.

Give it a day; I'm running everything now.

Thank you! I've just checked again and the tags mentioned in my post above haven't been combined. In fact, I'm not sure that any tag combination I've proposed since mid-2020 has actually happened.

I've been wondering if this has been a problem for a couple of years now. I occasionally have had this déjà-vu feeling that I've proposed a combination before and likewise I've seen proposals from other users that were ones I already did (and likewise I probably proposed some that other users have previously proposed).

Edward, thanks for documenting this. It's often difficult to find a past proposal as there isn't any easy way to search old proposals other than stepping through them page by page.

>4 xaagmabag: It seems to happen intermittently. Some approved and closed sets combine/separate without a glitch and then there's a group where nothing ever happens after being closed. It's hard to keep track of so hard to report. I caught it once https://www.librarything.com/topic/299683#n6902354 but unless for some reason you check a specific pair soon after closing, it goes unnoticed

Tim to investigate this when current process is done.

*bump*
I've noticed this is still an issue, with several recently closed votes having met a threshold yet not being merged.

Yes, I occasionally bump into ones I know I proposed and they were approved and closed, but I again see them separate. The latest I remember seeing were various iterations of Booker Prize that were supposed to end up with the main tag. Tried to find concrete example, but gave up after a while, couldn't find on what work I saw several of the kind booker-prize, booker-prize-award and such. As it is hard to keep track when they go through and when nothing happens, would it be possible for the system to make some kind of check and report if combining failed when it should have been combined?

It would be nice if there were a better way to track it in general (personally, I'd like to be able to track "tag combinations {user} proposed"), but at the moment it seems to me that nothing is combining when it's supposed to, so I'm not sure what reporting individual failures would do. If I go to the tag combinations voting page and select "closed" items, it's pretty easy to find examples of tags that claim to have hit the threshold upon closing but aren't actually combined. I didn't go through an exhaustive list, obviously, but I didn't find a single counterexample.

Here are some examples:
+ heresie d'horus and Horus Heresy are supposed to be combined after a 6 to 0 vote.
+ https://www.librarything.com/tag/sports+romance and https://www.librarything.com/tag/romance%3A+sports are supposed to be combined along with a slew of other romance trope ones I suggested.
+ "Series: The Riftwar Saga" and "Series: Riftwar Saga" are supposed to be combined.
+ For an entertaining example, "too stupid to live", "tstl-too-stupid-to-live" and "too-stupid-to-live" are all supposed to be combined and aren't.