Is there a way to track topic content that I'm marking as "will require future editing"?

I’m currently setting things up for my community and am doing quite a bit of copywriting (lots of first, second, third and fourth drafts… :sweat_smile: ). Some of the content is starting to look decent, but there are bits and pieces that still need to be finalised. For example, I’ll write a note “include screenshots for detailed steps” because I’m not going to do the screenshots now. Or “need to decide if we keep this paragraph here or move it to the top”.

Is there a feature/plugin/something in Discourse that can help me keep track of all these “copyediting notes” I’m leaving all over the place?

(And extra question: is there a way, when we’ll be ready to go live, to “purge” edit history for a topic and remove responses that were back-and-forth about the work in progress cleanly?)

Thanks!

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Perhaps you can bookmark them with a custom label? You can also set a reminder.

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Yes:

As for the responses, you mean replies, as post? Then sure you can remove posts, unless I misunderstood something.

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I was under the impression that when you removed replies it remained visible that a reply was there at some point and had been removed. Not the case?

Thanks for your responses! Bookmarking is an idea but I think I maybe also just need to highlight the places in the topics where the notes are to make them visible at a glance. Some of the topics (documents) are longish…

Only admin and moderators can see that posts were deleted :slight_smile:

But I think you refer to the “(This post was deleted …])” you sometimes see, those posts, deleted by their author, are removed after 24h (can be changed in settings).

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Do you want those highlights public or private? If public, you can use <mark></mark>.

If private, you can use a [wrap] that will highlight text only for admins/moderators/yourself with a bit of CSS, but that might not be what you’re looking for.

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for the moment public is fine!! Thanks… I’ll try that.

That could come in handy, what is a Wrap content

Yeah sorry that was a bit vague: you can customize content using special tags to which you add custom CSS rules:

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Oh perfect! Going to dust off my 20-year-old CSS skills :sweat_smile:

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If you wish to have inline notes in posts, you could use footnotes, perhaps? Then simply remove them and hide the edit history like what Canapin said above.

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Oh, footnotes? How does that work? Sounds like a good idea!

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So I can just add this bit anywhere:

^[This is a footnote]

Which appears like so:

Some text[1].

The Footnote plugin (included) has a setting display footnotes inline. Above is what happens when it’s enabled, and it looks like this when disabled:


  1. This is a footnote ↩︎

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For notes, i setup a personal notebook on all my Discourse instances. it’s just a PM to myself that i add a link to in the sidebar. super easy to get to and post notes about whatever i want. notes are already in markdown format so easy to copy and paste later, and can even bookmark entries for reminders.

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I was wondering if Quote Callouts could work as an off-the-shelf option?

Just as an extra tidbit for the OP edit history - if you make use of the schedule publishing or shared draft features, the post revisions are deleted on publish (which may be useful as hiding lots of edit revisions can be a chore :slight_smile:)

Alternatively, there’s also the hidden can permanently delete site setting which (once enabled) will allow you to purge all the post revisions in a button press. You need to hide one first, and then the ‘delete’ button turns up.

There’s a bit more info on how to enable hidden site settings here: Using Hidden Site Settings

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