The discussion revolves around the Trust Level 4 (TL4) privilege and the associated “edit-all-posts” capability. ChrisBeach wants to promote trusted members to TL4 but is hesitant due to concerns about giving non-staff members the power to edit all posts. They would like a site setting to disable this privilege for TL4 members.
ChrisBeach explains that although auditing and notifications are in place, they are not sufficient to prevent potential “breaches of trust” if a TL4 member were to make a bad edit. ChrisBeach lists split/merge, tagging, and closing topics as desirable TL4 capabilities.
Moin points out that a setting to control the “edit all post groups” was added in https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/21493, allowing site administrators to remove the TL4 group from this setting and prevent them from editing other users’ posts.
I’d like to promote a few trusted members to TL4, but our existing mod team is concerned about giving edit-all-posts privileges to non-staff members.
In fact, one of the candidates for TL4 was reluctant to accept it because of the edit-all-posts privilege.
It’d be great if a site setting could be added so I can disable edit-all-posts privilege for TL4 members.
Why? Full edit revisions are always stored and by default users get notified of any edits on their posts.
Yes - the auditing is there (although no edit log is visible to the mod team - we’d have to click on individual posts to find out if they’d been edited by a TL4).
This auditing is helpful, but would not prevent a bad edit happening, which may come as a shock to members unfamiliar with the trust level system. People are very sensitive about having their posts edited. Even by known members of the team, let alone seemingly random forum members.
It would be rare, but a bad edit might feel like a “breach of trust” to a member, and I’m careful to avoid this.
What do you want tl4 to be able to do?
Split/merge, tagging and closing topics would all be useful.
I’ve seen concerns like this before. My gut is “just tell the TL4 people not to edit stuff,” but that’s not good enough for some people.
At some point it may make sense to have site settings that define what TL4 is. Until then, from my naive perspective, it seems like a plugin that would turn off editing for TL4 would be pretty trivial, right?
In https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/21493, the edit all post groups setting was added. You can remove the trust level 4 group from the setting to prevent TL4 from editing other users’ posts.