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.
The change seems inconsistent with what other TL4 powers are. TL4 can edit any other users posts, but not see the history of those edits. If the sole reason is because the setting says âstaffâ on it. Wouldnt it make more sense to just change the wording of the setting instead of the behavior here? It seems like TL4 is intended to be an in between level for users and moderators. Would that not make TL4 entry level staff?
Itâs weird, because if edit history visible to public site setting is disabled, then only staff can see the previous versions of an edited post, and category moderator seems to have staff statusâŚ
Unless they have staff status for topics but not for posts ?
We still have need of this and it is still impacting our Leaders.
Another example of how this is impacting us is that Leaders are now unable to tell if a topic that is unsuitable for its category was moved from another category, if it was moved by staff (e.g. maybe the topic was moved for a non-obvious reason), or if it was just created in the category and OP doesnât know better. This information is used to decide whether the topic can be quickly moved somewhere more appropriate without stepping on anyoneâs toes
This is still a problem. Our leaders can edit posts but canât see the edit history of posts, which doesnât make any sense and has detrimental impact. Please either return the behavior to the way it used to be and reword the setting, or provide a setting to control the permission level where edit history can be viewed.
Since leaders arenât considered âstaff,â if you check this then everyone will be able to see edit histories. Unless something can be done about the TL for a leader (i.e. promote to staff/moderator), this is about the best I can come up with. But then everyone can see the edit histories.
If the solution is not to your satisfaction you may wish to seek out different free open source software that behaves in a manner more to your satisfaction.
@codinghorror
The above solution is not satisfactory because our users would likely feel it to be an invasion of privacy, and would open up potentially sensitive edit history to untrustworthy users.
With all due respect, it is rather bad-tempered to tell us to try to migrate a discussion forum with many thousands of users because of this one issue that neednât exist. Instead of telling us to go away, we would appreciate hearing if this will be tracked and considered, or if there is a good and sound reason not to do this at all.
Discourse decided to change the behavior of a setting to something that does not make sense given the spirit and capabilities of the Leader trust level (i.e. âalmost moderatorsâ, manually appointed, can edit posts, but canât see edit history?), rather than update the description for the setting instead. Since this change was a change to behavior, and the old behavior made sense and was useful, it doesnât make sense to shut down the entire use-case for the old behavior simply because the wording of the setting did not agree with exactly how it worked. This puts a limit on the applicability and flexibility of core Discourse for no good reason.
I donât believe it is terribly offensive to ask for this to have a setting for minimum permission level since viewing edit history goes hand in hand with the ability to edit posts, nor is it to bump this topic after waiting three months to see if there is any interest. Kane seems to agree with this idea, and I imagine other team members would as well. We would like to hear if there is any chance of this happening, if there is anything we can do to highlight this as a good addition for other contributors to tackle, or if not, why.
As @codinghorror mentions in his next post sponsoring a plugin might be the best solution. That being said there is a plugin called Custom Trust Levels that maybe able to do something. But would need to read up more on it.
You might be able to ask for a pull request if a feature is needed.
Another potential minor solution might be a theme component. Though a user with good knowledge can use there browser to unhide the view history
Not sure what the development roadmap looks like but this seems like a reasonable idea. Many settings are now using groups instead of trust level based permissions.
Out of curiosity, what problem are you trying to solve here?
I was working on a long document and had even set it to wiki mode so others could help work on it⌠But they could not see the edit history which would have been helpful.
