The discussion revolves around the ability to perform mass actions on search results in Discourse. lisajill initially requests the feature, specifically to add tags to multiple posts at once. sam mentions that a full search page exists, but lisajill is unable to access it due to version issues.
After resolving the version issue, sam notes that batch select is currently lost due to a major refactoring of search. However, sam provides a workaround using secret query params. codinghorror suggests adding a left column for staff/admins to select multiple items, while cpradio mentions the challenges of implementing bulk actions for both topics and posts.
A discussion ensues about the type of search results returned, with codinghorror suggesting that search results should always be at the topic level, but sam explains that search returns a list of posts. Ultimately, sam implements bulk actions for search results, with some caveats, including a 50-result cap. sam later updates the feature to include “Select All” and “Clear All” buttons.
I’d like to request the ability to perform bulk edits on search results. Our particular use case is that I need to be able to search for keywords and mass add tags to posts (preferably without changing existing tags on those touched posts).
I can imagine there would be other use cases as well…
Thanks!
I think that ties pretty well with the feature for a full search page.
Which you can do now 
https://meta.discourse.org/search?search=tags
I will be improving fullpage search but there is an initial bit of work checked in
What version does that come in, @sam? On our installation I get:
The page you requested doesn’t exist or is private.
On version 1.3.0.beta5.
Thanks!
It should exist there. It does on our staging environment which is 1.3.0-beta5
I can’t get to it- full admin account.
Do you see a green smiley or red smiley on the Version area in the Admin area? As we’re having a weird issue with our Prod instance. We are on 1.3.0.beta4, but it shows 1.3.0.beta5 with a red smiley. Our staging environment is 1.3.0.beta5 with a green smiley.
And our Prod instance has
<meta name="generator" content="Discourse 1.3.0.beta4 - https://github.com/discourse/discourse version a6d72099b4a58ec34b49f77c27769433a220baed">
Staging instance (where it does work) has
<meta name="generator" content="Discourse 1.3.0.beta5 - https://github.com/discourse/discourse version 4ea33608a486eba0f619cc84c2b15de3922a9032">
red smiley.
Okay, what does your meta generator tag say when you view source? My guess is you really are on 1.3.0.beta4
<meta name="generator" content="Discourse 1.3.0.beta4 - https://github.com/discourse/discourse version c5059682ecd2b7cff39b09f01c7ff42dcc2c7b16">
You are correct. Thank you - very helpful.
Just a note, with a major refactoring we had to do on search, as a casualty batch select is now lost. you can still pass secret query params to do this, but search is much more like google now.
This is a huge bummer, @sam - when can we expect to re-gain this feature?
To be clear this is an important, regular-use feature for us.
Thanks.
You can still do this.
Discourse Meta but yeah it is not ideal.
It is very hard to fit the concept of “mass actions” on to a list that returns posts. Thinking about this.
I don’t think it’s so hard – have a left column with a selection present for staff / admins. I can think of lots of actions where “search + take staff action on results” would be useful.
Except all bulk actions today deal with Topics, not Posts. The new Full Page Search returns both Topics and Posts, so now Bulk Actions has to learn about posts and potentially react differently (such as, find its topic ID and act on that instead).
I strongly disagree with this @sam we should always return at the “page” level, e.g. topics.
We always return a grouped search result, picking at most 1 post from each topic.
But its crazy to suggest that we link these entities always to post #1, even if the text is in post #78.
Search returns a list of posts, no two ways about it.
I see – this is fine – @cpradio implied it would be a bunch of random posts as search results.
Sorry, wasn’t my intent. I’m glad that we’re all on the same page now though 
I should also mention, that I would also find value in bulk actions being permitted on search results, but I also realize challenges must be overcome to make that work.
This is now implemented per:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/5865bd2abbac66e1ef5b475b491a2358a1d9d610
There are 2 caveats that I would like to address
This 50 cap makes “super ultra huge” bulk selection very annoying.