Editing Titles in Discourse

What’s the deal with people being able to edit titles? Can only Regulars do this? I ask because on another forum, we are having some issues with people editing topic titles.

Yes, that’s a feature reserved to Regulars:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-do-user-trust-levels-do/4924/6?u=steko

But I assume each forum will have its own social rules around this?

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The key word here is Trust

I can think of two common cases where changing a topic title is appropriate.

A new(er) member posts a less than accurately descriptive title. eg.

“Please help me with this”

Such a title does not convey what the topic is about so it would be justifiable to edit it to something better eg.

“Need help understanding Profile Preference Settings”

Another common case is misspelled words. Though I imagine most humans can figure out what was meant, automated Search isn’t always so intelligent. eg.

“Howto: Stting up an email servere”

should be edited to

“Howto: Setting up an email server”

I guess some people might be more the “spelling / grammar police” type and feel an urge to “polish” titles, but I would hope that such an urge would be generally suppressed.

That is, that most having the capability to edit topic tiles would not assume the role of “proof-reader” or “copy editor”.

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Hi All,

We’re having a lot of issues and complaints regarding a large number of users being able to edit all thread titles.

Is it possible to make this an admin only function or perhaps limit thread title editing to the first 5 mins after a thread is posted? I’ve looked and can’t see any options to limit thread title editing - even removing the edit option for all users (which meant admins couldn’t edit posts) still allowed users to edit thread titles.

Would really appreiciate some help.

Many thanks
Sean

Just press the pencil icon next to the date to see who edited anything.

It should be in the edit history of the first post. You’d have to know which topics are making users mad and see if there is a common person involved

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Ok. So I have to moderate? Is there no way thread title editing could be curtailed? Obviously it is sometimes useful but getting tonnes of complaints from users and I assumed there is just a combination of settings that I’m missing.

The only thought I have is you have your TL 3 settings too low and to raise them. It will take 2 weeks for it to kick people out of TL 3 (as there is a grace period), but that is the only setting I can think of at this moment.

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Is it not possible to move title editing to a TL 4 option? I’ve made it really hard for anyone to become level 4, I think.

TL4 is manual by default.

TL3 should be hard. Here we have only ~30 TL3 users in a 23k user base with 1.6k active.

You have 153 TL3 with 850 active users (17%), maybe raise reqs a bit.

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I’ve just massively upped the requirements to 100% of posts and 10,000+ for the other elements. I’m assuming they only need to fulfil one quotient?

Will this change demote everyone to level 2 tomorrow?

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Whereabouts did you see those stats? This is what our admin panel says:

Yes, in less than 24h it should work.

Used public /about and /badges pages :smile:

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No, they have to fulfill all of them. Posts Read, Flags received, Flags given, et al.

For the record, we only have 42 TL 3 users on our instance (several of them were assigned and locked into TL 3 as they are “staff, but not moderators”).

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Hello there,

Is there a way to be notified about edits being made in topic titles (or event content) by users of trust level 3 or 4?

The most relevant report I have found is the one located at /admin/reports/post_edits , right? Could there be also a notification when this kind of edits occurs? Like when a post is being marked for review etc.?

Having TL3 and 4 users edit the topic titles is a nice feature if you indeed trust the community, but I am afraid there will be a time that some of them will take advantage and start messing around with titles.

Thank you,
Ilias

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Hello you should get notifications like this if someone edits something. However, I’m unsure exactly what has to be fulfilled for this to be triggered.

You can always demote them or send them a warning if they do this.

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Thanks for the reply.

I can’t seem to find this kind of notifications when having a look at what is set for review (at /review).

You are right about warning ore demoting them, but in order to do so I first need to find out that they are messing around with titles, this is where the notifications come in :slight_smile:

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The owner of any post is notified when their post is edited.

By that logic, as the owner of the first post in the topic, the person who created the topic is notified when the title is edited.

If you don’t want TL3 to be able to edit titles, turn that off in your site settings:

trusted users can edit others

Allow users with high trust levels to edit content from other users

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@codinghorror Is it possible to enable editing of wiki titles specifically? I don’t see it as a feature right now but it would be nice to have that.

Unfortunately no, either the ability is off or on altogether.

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