Editing a post should make the grey unread count appear in the topic list

feature
1

Here’s something that has been bugging me for a while.

Edited posts should make the grey unread count appear in the topic list so you know there is something you haven’t read in that topic. This is especially important for wiki posts/topics. Right now, I have no idea if someone has edited a wiki post even though I have subscribed to the topic. The same of course applies to normal posts as well.

3 Likes
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Shouldn’t this be a request specific to wiki posts, then?

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No, as I wrote it applies to normal posts as well. It’s just that with wiki posts the problem becomes much more frequent and apparent.

edit. People often clarify, correct or add stuff to their posts later as edits like this. We use this feature quite a lot on another forum. But you don’t get any indication that I’ve edited this post even if you had this topic set as Watching.

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I agree.

Recently, a moderator on a Discourse site edited one of my replies to a topic where I listed out some things about a project from my understanding. That edit actually provided updated information and more accuracy, but it was some time after my original reply. So people may have seen my outdated understanding of the situation, and would never know about the edit to have more accurate information.

Granted, in this case there were follow up replies to bump the topic up the list, but I’m not sure how anyone would know that an earlier post was edited without happening to scan for the red pencil.

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I could have sworn that editing a post bumped the topic to the top of the latest list, even though no unread counter appears, but I just tried it and that is not the case today.

I am not sure yet if I like the grey unread count idea, but I don’t have a better one at the moment. Also, since this feature doesn’t exist, its hard to guess how much noise this would add to the topic list from people editing posts since we don’t know how much of that is really going on now.

I assume you think you should also go to the edited post when you enter the topic by clicking the title in the topic list?

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I can’t think of anything better either at the moment. :slight_smile:

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Editing the last post in a topic does that.

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Any news regarding this? Any other ideas?

I doubt this would create too much noice. I think people edit posts in two ways

  1. Right after posting to correct typos and such.
  2. After a while to add something or to change the post in a substantial way

For (1) we have the ninja edit window. It’s unlikely, that you would get other than very occasional notifications caused by these edits.

For (2) you would probably like to get a notification. After all, you’re subscribed to the topic. I can’t think of a better way to implement this than to use what we have already (the grey notification).

I think the notifications and real time updates are one of the best features of Discourse. We use edits quite a lot in our forum. As I said, not getting notifications also makes wiki-posts quite unusable for all. It’s even encouraged to edit the posts in new user education:

Rather than many sequential replies to a topic, please consider a single reply that includes quotes or @name references to previous posts.
You can edit your previous reply to add a quote by highlighting text and selecting the quote reply button that appears.
It’s easier for everyone to read topics that have fewer in-depth replies versus lots of small, individual replies.

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This would be massively complicated. That said longer term we need to offer a way to keep up with wiki changes, so am more open to reviving gray notifications for wiki, but I don’t think it should be done for general posts

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I’ve been doing something on our forums which allows for an interesting workaround.

We have certain topics dedicated to software downloads. When a new version is available we do the following:

  1. edit the download topic, adding a link to the new release
  2. add a post to a related ‘release notes’ topic with the changes included in that version
  3. visit other specific bug/feature topics, and close them with a link to the release notes post for that version

In order to make the download topic bubble to the top on edits, I did the following:

  • closed the topic so the only post is the OP
  • deleted the automatic ‘this topic is closed’ post

So now, the first post is the last post, and it benefits from the special behavior where topics are bumped when the last post is edited.

A similar thing could be done for Wiki topics. Discussion about the wiki post could be held in a related topic. If the wiki topic is closed and that automatic message is deleted, then edits to the wiki topic should let it bubble up.