Why do I have so many tags that point to only 1 note?

OldGrantonian
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Why do I have so many tags that point to only 1 note?

Postby OldGrantonian » Mon Nov 15, 2021 12:51 pm

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I have CN 3.13 PRO in Win 10 Pro, 21H1.

I've been lazy about tagging. Up till now, it hasn't been an issue, because long before tags were invented by Al Gore, I included one or more "keywords" as part of any title in emails, memos, etc. Even emails to my own family. So my normal CN search is with keywords in the text box.

I now want to start tagging.

Currently I have 55 tags. I've been ignoring these up till now. I see 115 tags for Amazon, 318 tags for Anki. These were added by me recently - in two operations, after using keyword searches.

The remaining tags have each been used for 1, 2, or 3 notes. About 80% of these point to only one note - which is a silly use of 53 tags.

Question 1: Does anyone know how these tags were added? My memory might be failing, but I don't think it's as bad as that.

In the Help, I read the complete section on "Managing Notes with Tags", and the section "Autotagging Rules". I have never used rules.

Question 2: How can I remove these tags which only have 1, 2, or 3 notes?

It would probably take only 53 seconds to delete 53 tags, but I'm wondering if they would all be restored by tomorrow morning :shock:

BTW: One tag in the list is: "-tag:pending" (exactly as in the quotes). I mention that because it might help in trying to figure out where my tags are coming from.

How would that tag ever be added to the list? It's so complex that it would need to be a copy-paste by mistake. But where would the original text be for copying? Anyway, there is not actually a tag "pending" in the list.

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Addendum

New info found today:

BTW: I don't want to re-write any of my previous text above, because it took me a long time to write - it's tricky. Sorry about that.

So here's the new info.

As mentioned above, there's a CN tag labelled "-tag:pending".

When I clicked on that tag, I found a note dated 2019. The note contained the following text:

- deck:"FrenchSimpleSentences" -tag:pending is:new 67 cards

The text in that note was copy-pasted from the Anki flashcard app. It's a simple query from the Anki deck browser, with the number of cards that match the query.

After reading the note about Anki, I immediately searched the CN tag list for any other text from that same Anki note.

I found the following tags:

67 !!
cards
is:new
French
-tag:pending

For info, the following tags were not found:

deck
Simple
Sentences

Conclusion: IMHO, CN has "hijacked" the contents of the note, extracted some of the key words, and added those key words as tags in CN !!

I feel like Sherlock Holmes, or Columbo, or Porfiry Petrovitch :-)

I would be grateful for any help on this.

BTW: I still think CN is the best ;)

Thanks.
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Re: Why do I have so many tags that point to only 1 note?

Postby CintaNotes Developer » Thu Nov 18, 2021 5:05 pm

Hi :)

> Question 1: Does anyone know how these tags were added? My memory might be failing, but I don't think it's as bad as that.

Probably text from Anki got by mistake into the "Tags" field instead of the main text field,
and CintaNotes created a tag from every word of this text. Just an idea how this could have happened!

> Question 2: How can I remove these tags which only have 1, 2, or 3 notes?

I think the fastest way would be to Ctrl+Click all these tags on the tag sidebar (it is easy since it displays tag usage counts),
then right-click and choose "Delete" (make sure to NOT mark the checkbox to also delete the notes!)

> BTW: I still think CN is the best
Oh, thanks a lot!
Alex

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