New way to track edits on wiki posts?

[Moin]

For several years the reply to “How do I ensure a wiki post is bumped when it’s edited?” was to close the topic to prevent replies and delete all replies below the wiki. Then edits on the wiki post were edits on the last post and edits on the last post meant that the topic was bumped.

When wikis are edited, they should be bumped

This has come up many, many times before. Best option here is to immediately close the wiki topic and delete the “closed” small post. Then the wiki will be the latest post and all edits will cause timestamp bumps. This idea was discussed previously, but has not been implemented at this time:

Editing a post should make the grey unread count appear in the topic list

I’ve been doing something on our forums which allows for an interesting workaround. We have certain topics dedicated to software downloads. When a new version is available we do the following: edit the download topic, adding a link to the new release add a post to a related ‘release notes’ topic with the changes included in that version visit other specific bug/feature topics, and close them with a link to the release notes post for that version In order to make the download topic bubble to…

Updating a wiki post, doesn't put it to the top of latest

You’ll need to make sure you always edit the last post as a part of your cycle, then.

Wiki Updates and Tab for Wikis

A little workaround here is to delete the “@robmeade closed this topic” post. Then the first post is the last post, and any edits would bump the topic. Personally I think it would be a cool feature. It’s not on any official roadmap right now, but there’s a topic here: I think a lot of communities do this by having a category dedicated to wikis. On meta we have howto, where a large number of topics are wikis. You can toggle the category setting so that all new topics in a category are auto…

Now edits on the last post no longer cause a bump in the topic list. So how does everyone track edits on wikis now?

I know you can watch topics to receive notifications about wiki edits. But for me it’s not the same. I cannot set a single topic to be watched by all users by default. But they would all see when the topic was bumped. Even visitors can see that a topic is bumped while you need to log in to see your notifications.
Also I think the bug report that those notifications aren’t reliable is still open Sporadic Wiki Post notifications and there was another report recently which also mentioned that notifications do not always work Subsequent Wiki Edits by Same User Don’t Trigger Notifications. So notifications and watching don’t seem like a replacement for bumping wikis after an edit for me.

[tobiaseigen]

This sounds like a feature request. How would you like Discourse to notify about wiki edits?

Wikis are already special so maybe we need a new site setting to enable wiki edit notifications and a user pref about when to be notified about them.

[Moin]

If I had a great idea, I would have created a feature request or replied to one of the many existing ones.
I’d take bumping back. But I don’t think it’s helpful to ask for a feature that was removed.
I understand that it can be annoying for small typos. But I guess there were reasons why you decided to remove bumping on all edits, instead of, for example, preventing it on small changes, similar to how small edits aren’t tracked within the editing grace period.

So I just try to find workarounds for the side effects of that change.
We encourage users to edit their posts to add new information instead of replying again. But who will notice the new information if that no longer bumps the topic?

Anything based on notifications won’t help for visitors. To receive notifications, you need to be logged in. To see a topic at the top of latest, this wasn’t necessary.

So I guess I need a reply or, better, a small action post announcing the fact that there was an edit. I know staff can bump a topic, but that doesn’t help on edits by users. So maybe I need a bump option for regular users.

Create reply when editing wiki would also fix the issue for wiki edits. But on wikis that are edited often, this could mean lots of replies that are only helpful as long as they are the last post. No one is interested in the 50 posts that are notifications of wiki edits 2 years ago.

So I don’t think this is a feature request. I don’t have a solution. I have a problem because the solution I had was removed.

[tobiaseigen]

I like the idea of a small action post upon editing. But agree that will create clutter. Maybe they could be hidden behind a link to hide/show them?

When you and your members edit wikis, do you add a note to explain the edit reason? That could go in the small action post.