Is there any way to have Discourse resend a post when it has been edited by the user to make corrections or changes?
Hi Andrew 
What do you mean by “resend” a post?
I mean, say a user needs to correct a post and edits it. Then people who only use the email function of Discourse don’t see the corrected post, as I understand it. So I am asking is there a way to have the edited/updated post sent out again either automatically or by a manual process? Or a notification of update sent by email?
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I don’t believe this is possible and by design
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This is a problem for those folks then if there are significant edits made to posts they will never see.
If you have an official e-mail newsletter then you could publish important edits in that.
If it’s a critical error, the only workaround I can think of would be to have the user create a new post for the correction. If they do that, any users who are watching the topic or the category will receive an email notification about the edit.
For most cases, the email time window mins site setting is intended to handle this issue. Its default value causes a 10 minute delay from the time a post is saved until email notifications are generated for it. Hopefully that gives users a chance to edit any obvious errors in their posts.
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Good to know about this, had thought default may have been immediate to send out post as it is originally published.
The five minute window to do minor edits without edit history being published is also helpful, although in some circumstances it may be ideal to have records of all edit history. Is there a way for an administrator to review the original post and all edit history?
You can have some control over this via site settings, but if an edit history revision is not created, there is no way for an admin to view the changes.
The settings are:
editing grace period: For (n) seconds after posting, editing will not create a new version in the post history.editing grace period max diff: Maximum number of character changes allowed in editing grace period, if more changed store another post revision (trust level 0 and 1)editing grace period max diff high trust: Maximum number of character changes allowed in editing grace period, if more changed store another post revision (trust level 2 and up)
If the edit occurs outside of the editing grace period, or if the edit changes more than (by default) 100 characters for TL0 and TL1 users, or 400 characters for >= TL2 users, a revision will be created. If the edit doesn’t trigger any of those conditions, no revision will be created and there won’t be a way to see what was changed.
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Oh ok, that is sophisticated how all that works.
Solution then is to set edit grace to zero, this is safest.
It depends on your situation. Looking at the code now, there are a few things that will trigger a new revision to be created if a post is edited within the edit grace period:
- the post has been flagged
- the post is edited by another user (for example a staff member)
- an “edit reason” is supplied when the post is edited
- the post’s owner is changed
It seems they really thought this through
Very impressive that, for a flagged post would be most important.
I am sort of confused how it is possible that there is no edit history for a post if it has been published and is visible in other countries. With the grace edit system this allows edits to happen without publishing the history, and this could mean that previous publications are therefore deleted without a trace?
Copies could be made by anyone who sees a post before it is edited, or if e-mail is generated of an initial post right away. When I publish writing knowing there will be five minutes of grace before edits are published, this is helpful to know I don’t need to be so stressed about proof-reading before it is made permanent. This can then become a race to finish all editing within five minutes to avoid it showing up as an edited statement.
This seems to be straying quite far from the original support request:
Perhaps we should focus the topic back on that.
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Well for the support request it looked like that was answered as a no, there isn’t a way for that. If there is would be good to know about that, otherwise would be a new feature request.
When you say this, do you mean people who literally never visit or login to a forum site but only read e-mails sent by Discourse?
Have reviewed the administrator settings for e-mail and I don’t see an option for new e-mails to be generated and sent out for when posts are edited. Potentially that could probably be integrated as a new feature setting for the mailing-list mode.
There is an option to allow people to post new topics over e-mail, that by default is not enabled. If enabled the trust tier can be adjusted for that, default is level #2:
Yes. On this site, that forms the great majority of the users, for whatever reason (they have mostly come from an old mailing list group). I find it haed to get them to use the web interface, although I keep trying! And yes, users are enabled to submit new topics by email, and to reply of course.
So, yes, I think this would be a good feature request.
And by the way, I am talking about edits made after any grace periods.
Thanks for clarification, I agree that would be a good feature for people to be notified about if there are edits.
Good statement here by Simon.
This is also written in the default terms of sevice that e-mails will be sent if the terms are edited:
For updates that contain substantial changes, the company agrees to e-mail you, if you’ve created an account and provided a valid e-mail address