Someone posted a personal attack in one of their posts on the Discourse forum I’m using, and I flagged it as “Inappropriate” a minute after it was posted. The post was edited shortly after and the personal attack was removed – there is no edited pencil icon for the post since it was edited so quickly. When the moderators notice the flag in whatever backend moderation queue there is, will they see the post as it was when I flagged it, or the latest, edited version? I’m trying to figure out if I need to undo the flag (will be awkward if the moderators don’t see the post as it was when I flagged it) or not.
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Yeah edits within grace period are invisible and not logged anywhere except for the Rails logs which are very hard to get to.
I follow the concern here but the issue is very rare. Long term we can start storing grace period edits and then purging them after N days. Its a rather complex change that is not scheduled yet but we are ok with in principle.
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If it’s a real problem just set grace period to zero. Then all edits are logged forever even trivial, 5-seconds-later type.
Nothing necessary to do here, reallly.
Just to provide a bit more detail. It depends on the flag you use. In this case using Inappropriate would not have shown the moderators the exact verbiage, but using Something Else would have, as the Message moderators would have received would have one-boxed the post in question (assuming it was in a public category).
One thing to note, the Flags Admin area, does show the edit, but when the Moderator views the Message, it shows the original content (screenshots below).
Admin > Flags Area (shows edited message)
Clicking Reply: (shows original message)
Might be off my rocker here, but what if, we changed the logic for the grace edit window to only apply if no flags are on the given post and it is within the edit time frame?
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This is an excellent suggestion, grace period should simply reset after a post is flagged. It eliminates an element of griefing. Though, in practice I have never seen this pattern but you never know and people can be krazy.
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Thinking on this a bit more, I believe we just recently had a similar scenario (ping @Mittineague and @Technobear who dealt with it on our instance – or at least noticed it).
Granted it does seem super rare that this occurs, but part of me feels that way because those who are handling these type of flags have nothing to go on to identify the edit took place (as there is no history that the mods can see to identify it).
So I do know it happens, but with what frequency, I can’t say because I’m not confident I’ve caught all of them.
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I have been doing some “paper trail” testing on my localhost.
There are a few settings that might be involved and I haven’t tested all the different possibilities.
Admin -> Settings -> Posting
editing grace period {300}
For (n) seconds after posting, editing will not create a new version in the post history.
post edit time limit {86400}
The author can edit or delete their post for (n) minutes after posting. Set to 0 for forever.
edit history visible to public {true}
Allow everyone to see previous versions of an edited post. When disabled, only staff members can view.
delete removed posts after {24}
Posts removed by the author will be automatically deleted after (n) hours. If set to 0, posts will be deleted immediately.
delete old hidden posts {true}
Auto-delete any hidden posts that stay hidden for more than 30 days.
Admin -> Settings -> Spam
cooldown minutes after hiding posts {10}
Number of minutes a user must wait before they can edit a post hidden via community flagging
Admin -> Settings -> User Preferences
default other edit history public {true}
Make the post revisions public by default.
BTW I can no longer find the “edit history public” setting in Profile Preferences,
I could be missing something, and it could be this has changed and may be involved with the problem.
I guess there are two ways to look at it.
One,
a user makes a post that is a policy violation
it gets Flagged
they see the error of their way and either correct or remove the post
System wipes the slate clean
Moderators have no need to see the “juvy” record
Two,
a user makes a post that is a policy violation
it gets Flagged
they realize they were caught and either correct or remove the post
System wipes the slate clean
Moderators should be able to see the “juvy” record of the repeat offender
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That preference is only available when edit history visible to public is turned off. Basically, you can opt back into public edit history, but you can’t opt out of it.
I agree with @cpradio’s suggestion of “the edit grace period is expired if there’s an active flag on the post”. A very elegant solution.
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Okay, this is now done via:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/6f0137dec999bb7ab5bed6d1b4782fe9f54c0b34
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Hmm this is not what was discussed, grace period should be zero but not disable editing entirely…
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Good catch. I missed that entirely, and I (shamefully looks down) looked at the code too.
Oops, fix is on the way. Fixed:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/094f7a73d5c6961c2761cabb6a2332645e5fa493
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When will this go live on other Discourse forums?
Magic eight ball says “outlook is good”
We have no way of controlling when people upgrade (outside of our hosting) this is up to site operators
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