Can we have an Edit Log please?

A list of all edits viewable by Admin (perhaps sortable by member).

I think this would be useful for some very good reasons:

  • Help keep a lookout for edit-spam
  • Help see which members are being helpful (those adding tags, re-categorising Topics, editing titles, etc) (and so to see who would make good moderators)
  • Help ensure workload between Mods is equal

What should be logged?

Perhaps…

  • Post edits
  • Title edits
  • Re-categorisation of Topics
  • Appending/editing of tags
  • Post deletions

Maybe if time allows (or this proves a success), go further, and add logs for:

  • Topics that have been pinned/unpinned
  • Wikis (made/unmade)
  • Anything else that would allow an admin to quickly overview what’s been going on on the forum

I think this would be very useful for large companies/busy admins in particular :slight_smile:

This is usually handled by reducing the editing grace period (defaults to 5 minutes / 300 seconds) and post edit time limit (defaults to 60 days / 86400 minutes) in the site settings. I see absolutely no reason for a bunch of other custom features when those site settings control it perfectly.

Also note that thanks to @gerhard people who flagged a post to threshold are now notified when the flagged post was edited.

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Not sure what you mean Jeff - how is it handled when they have 60 days to come back and edit their older posts and nobody is notified of such edits?

Our edit period is 12 hours and they sneak in even with that. But edit spam was just one aspect - being able to see who’s regularly doing housekeeping tasks around the forum would be incredibly handy.

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Set it to 1 day, or even lower, as needed. That’s my point.

Couldn’t this be a data explorer query? Grab the last months worth of edit history?

Not sure I understand why this should be a full blown feature

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Even that is too low and too much of an inconvenience for genuine users - they shouldn’t have to suffer. As I mentioned though, edit spam is just one aspect. Having these kind of logs makes it super easy for Admins to get an overview of which members are ‘helping out’ i.e potential mod material.

I hadn’t seen the data explorer plugin, however I still think this is one of those features that once you have, you would find difficult to live without (if you have a busy or relatively busy forum) particularly if it is expanded to have a similar (configurable) page for moderators.

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There could be a page somewhere that shows all recent edits, I suppose… we could put pr-welcome on this as needed.

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Don’t we have a report or data explorer query that shows this now?

Yes, confirmed, there is the “post edits” report on your admin dashboard on the reports tab.

There might be an equivalent in Data Explorer too @rishabh?

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Yes, we ship a query with the Data Explorer that targets recent edits made by TL0/TL1 users. It’s right here:

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We could add a line here with the number of post edits a user has made

Post edits: 20

Where the 20 is clickable to link to a list links to posts, or pop open a modal with links to the posts. I don’t think we want to build a whole UI to view post revisions, we can just link to the posts.

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This once again has been fixed, at least this issue in specific. Not sure if it was by the Discourse team or a pr, but it’s there.

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