Changing documentation posts to system user

I noticed here on meta that the documentation posts have what appear to be the system user as the author.

On our site we tend to just leave the author as the person who created the post, however for older posts it feels a bit odd to have them showing a user who may not be active any more.

Is there any reason why we shouldn’t change the post author to our system user for documentation type posts?

I think one of the reasons not to use @system is that if anyone flags the post (eg. a ‘something else’ flag to inform you of a typo or error, etc) then those flags don’t currently appear in the review queue and quietly disappear into the void. :slight_smile: [1]

The @Discourse user is the main one for meta docs. It originally began in a similar way to what you say, as having ‘official’/current docs faced by an inactive member wasn’t ideal (and it also cuts down on quote and link notifications for active members who owned the popular ones that are widely shared).

I think as long as the people responsible for updating the guide have it set to Watching to keep an eye out for any feedback (or at least check in regularly) then it can work quite well.


  1. though the ‘something else’ flags do generate a PM to moderators, so maybe those don’t get quite as lost as off-topic, etc :thinking: It may depend on whether anyone has changed the notification level of the moderators inbox ↩︎

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Oh, I would have expected that errors would be reported through making a reply to the post.

This could be accomplished by watching the whole category, correct?

Thanks!

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I was thinking of Watching the individual topics, but a blanket Watching for the category should work as well. :+1: (or even a tag if there was a particular subset of the docs they were responsible for).

Though too many notifications about things can also be a recipe for missing stuff in the flood, so I’d try and steer as close to a Goldilocks zone as you can to try and avoid that situation.

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