Incorrect user attribution for wiki post edits

Summary:

When mentioning users in a wiki post edit, the notifications received by those users comes from the original post author, not the user who made the edit.

Steps to reproduce:

  1. User A creates a topic
  2. Moderator Z makes it a wiki post
  3. User B edits the post mentioning @User_C

Expected Results:

User C receives a notification that User B mentioned him/her in a post

Actual Results:

User C receives a notification that User A mentioned him/her in a post.

Notes:

This post where this was noticed is:


All moderators received a notification from user Zilla despite user jomaxro making the change that mentioned @moderators

Version:

Discourse 1.5.0.beta8 (discourse.stonehearth.net)

System Information:

Windows 10 Pro, Chrome Stable 47

3 Likes

Yeah this would not surprise me, but it is a bit weird to edit a user mention into someone else’s posts.

1 Like

If it was a moderator editing a random post, I would agree. If the post was intentionally made a wiki, I do not find it odd to have a user mention added by another user. The wiki post above is a “directory” of sorts, so each entry references one or more users (as mentions so they can be clicked, the intention is not to notify the users…)

But the purpose of Wikipedia is that you don’t know or even care who the author is, each article is a mixture of hundreds of people posting fragments, so the notification would be “from” the Wikipedia article, not any individual person.

I think I am not being clear, sorry. This particular wiki post is a directory of user created mods (for the game the forum is about). A typical section of the post looks something like this:

## Mod Name ##

Put the Mod Description here.

**State:** Work in Progress / Complete / Planning / Discontinued
**Author:** @(creator's username here)
**Mod Version:** What version is your mod in?
**Game Version:** What version is it compatible with?

Please also provide a link to the mod's topic.

The author is not necessarily the user that made the edit, but the user who made the mod. It would be like a list something on Wikipedia (like this list of forum software). There are links there to different things for each piece of software (like Creator), and some of the creators are links to other pages. Same basic idea.

As I said, the notification is really “from” the article in the wiki case, not any one user. But there is some griefing potential here as well…

Ah, OK. Would there be a way to distinguish that then in the notification? Instead of having the notification come from any user at all, have it come from “wiki”, or “system”?

I agree we should improve this because having it come from some random user is clearly totally incorrect…

4 Likes

I mentioned myself the other day by editing my @name into a topic :mortar_board:

I think we can at least fix the attribution thing, but it does get a bit complicated

In one topic you could have

Sam mentions @xyz
Bob removes mention to @xyz
Foo mentions @xyz

3 Likes

I agree we should fix this, @neil can you give it a shot next week? Current status quo is pretty bad and definite bug territory.

2 Likes

Any update on this? Was @neil able to make any changes to improve this?

1 Like

I made a change today so that when a mention is added to a post, the notification will come from the person who edited the post. It should cause less confusion… :grin:

6 Likes