Recently it was changed so TL4 (Leader) can never see edit history if edit history is hidden from the public.
Our discussion forum is extremely large-scale with many thousands of users. We use TL4 as a pseudo-moderator role and manually appoint it to trusted community members because these veteran users use the forum more naturally and in-depth than the moderators that are paid to manage the community. They see a lot more problems than moderators and staff, and know where to recategorize topics, but these users cannot be fully appointed as moderators because there is information elsewhere on the forum that they are not allowed to view. Since this trust level has the ability to edit most aspects of topics, move them around, etc, we find it strange that edit history is now permanently hidden from them like it is hidden from the rest of the community.
This change is detrimental to us because these users used this extra permission to gain context on topics that had gone bad where the users involved edited their posts or marked them for deletion. In cases like this these posts were originally posted in a state that horrifically broke rules, eluded to the user posting being underage for our community (important for legal reasons), or potentially at risk of self harm in some extreme cases, but were edited afterwards. TL4 on our forum are active users and have close contact with forum staff and other important people who can have these issues swiftly dealt with by skilled moderators who do not leisurely read the forum due to its scale and niche, which is why itâs important they have this insight. Waiting for flagged posts to get handled is not always fast enough for certain cases.
The justification for this change on the linked thread is to have this behavior match the site setting as described, but the rigidity of this setting is harming our community.
We would like to be able to set a minimum trust level for viewing edit history so as not to impede our Leaders.