Bump topic after last post edit limits

Support
1

Hello,

i have a problem with “topic bumping” feature of my discourse instance. One of our users uses that feature to bump topics in which he posted as a last person but no one answered him.

That’s irritating for everyone but on the other hand, i can’t kick him out off the forum cause he’s (in theory) not doing anything wrong. He just changes few words or typos. The kind of user who writes some crappy formatted content really fast and edits it later for several times. Just to communicate his thoughts fast and revisit them later when everyone knows what he’s thinking about the given topic.

  1. I can’t tell him to stop editing his topics cause all he does is fixing typos, that’s actually a good thing.
  2. He’s not insulting anyone nor spaming nor anything like that. It’s just a pretty clever way of forcing everyone to check his posts again and again. But we don’t have any evidence that he’s doing it on purpose (it’s basically just about fixing typos…)
  3. I don’t want to set edit time limit to some low value cause that would impact all the users

Given it all, i’m looking for an automated solution of dealing with such behaviour (he’s not the only one who uses topic bumping this way). Discourse has a lot of features and settings and maybe i don’t know about some? :slight_smile:

Most obvious way of dealing with that would be to be able to set a edits count limit based on trust level but that’s still not ideal solution.

Thanks in advance, any ideas or tips much appreciated! :slight_smile:

2

What do you consider “low”?
What is it set at now?

The edit time window was discussed much at SitePoint.
Some wanted it as short as it had been at vBulletin.
Others wanted it to be up to a week.

A compromise is needed.

As you posted, too short a window and typos and other revisions can’t be made. Often resulting in “I forgot to say” follow-up posts.

But too long a window opens up the possibility that a post could be edited to have something Moderators might miss or changed in a way that could disrupt the coherence of the topic.

3

Have a policy against it, issue warnings, and start banning people who keep doing it? I am unsure why this needs to be a “feature”, when it is a site policy.

You could also lower the allowed time for old edits, I think out of the box we default to 3 months. Feel free to change that to 5 days or whatever you feel is better.

3 Likes
7

Since this was written, we did introduce different edit time limits for new users versus established users. It made sense – it helps prevent spam and other unwanted behavior by new users, while letting established users have more freedom. The site settings are post edit time limit and tl2 post edit time limit:

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What you could do in this case is lock the edit-happy user to a lower trust level (TL1), which has a stricter, less generous, edit interval.