I understand more options and distractions mat not be welcome (+ work and potential problems for not much), I just put the idea out there: Right now, any edit on the last post seems to bump the topic (probably only for a certain period of time, I guess), even just a small correction.
A “no bump” or “don’t bump” checkbox when editing the last topic in this situation (where a bump will happen by default) would allow users to choose to not bump if they decide so.
The feature already exists: simply use the “reset bump date” option in the topic level admin wrench.
Yes, I saw this has already been discussed here on meta by doing a search. I meant the ability for each USER to choose to not have HIS topic bumped if he does an edit (just a checkbox to click on).
This happened to me 2 times recently, here on meta: I posted something. Got a notification my post had been liked. I clicked on the post to see exactly which one it was. It happened to be the last one of the topic. I saw a small mistake (typo, grammar, etc.), corrected it, and … bumped the topic on latest for no good reason. I can see how in some communities, I could even have been accused by some to have done this small correction to bump the topic on purpose.
Maybe you add something to your post by editing it and judge it isn’t worth to have the topic bumped. And/or don’t want to annoy people (maybe you even edit it multiple times).
Not important. Can be considered unusual and not frequent enough to make sense. But it could also be a useful small feature. So, as said, I put it out there.
Yeah, I often find this annoying.
Especially so on Meta.
I make a lot of detailed posts because of the nature of my involvement here, and it is annoying that I end up hogging the top of Latest when I’m just amending some information in my last post. This might happen several times in the space of 30 minutes.
Perhaps I’m just being over paranoid, but it’s definitely an issue.
I respect that adding such a feature might clutter the interface.
Perhaps there should be some kind of timeout where the Topic doesn’t get bumped within a set edit time window (avoiding the need to change the interface). Without digging perhaps that already exists? However, that’s not my user experience.
I guess it’s tough to make a generic decision on the behaviour here? Some sites would want a bump on any change, others might prefer it didn’t happen?
I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure it’s a good thing to be wary to not annoy or disturb others. And as for fearing a little that some are going to complain, well… that tends to happen. We’ve all seen it one day.
I guess it IS the case. The time frame is a little longer, and that’s also GOOD. I think it’s a great feature that topics are bumped on edit: If you want to add something, you add it through an edit rather than create a new post, and for your new information to be seen, the BUMP IS GOOD. No question about it. It’s even great. BUT, when it’s just corrections or small cosmetic changes, it isn’t. Thus this box near the validation button of the edit would improve things I guess.
(I guess some of us read again their posts after posting and feel the need to change small things when they see a way to improve it just a little.)
Yep a good example of a BAD bump would be correcting a typo.
Just digging into the source code here, but please chime in if you know that any bump thresholds exist …
I’m leaning towards a sensible site setting to block bumping within a time window or char threshold and if at all possible a way to block a bump if the user has sufficient TL.
OK there IS a site setting and editing grace period, phew, but let me dig up what causes a new ‘version’.
Isn’t that 5 minutes currently here on meta ? The time during when the edits aren’t tracked either. I guess it must be possible to just increase that time amount. And that tracking edits and bumps go together.
Let’s say it’s a partial solution. There’s good and less good going that way, I feel (only my opinion).
Yes, you found it during the time I was typing 
OK, a new ‘version’ seems to depend on time windows. This window seems to move with a out of bounds edit to the last post (which will bump the Topic), so you get a new grace period applied for a time after the bumping change if my interpretation is correct?:
Weird but it always feels more sensitive than that … but the specs are the source of truth, so let’s run with this behaviour as the de facto situation.
So basically you are suggesting adding in an explicit opt-in to a ‘ninja edit’?
You could definitely increase the grace period and see if that works for you:
But that won’t solve your experience on 3rd party sites 
One other way to handle this might be to modify the grace period by the user’s TL + 1?
so eg TL0 gets 300 seconds, TL1 600 seconds and so on …
… oh but wait, this has already been thought about 
CONCLUSION: a lot of tools already exist here?
Yes, this may already be pretty great. I would have argued that a bump would still be warranted if you add a whole paragraph (the equivalent of a new post), but this indeed seems to already have been thought about with the “max diff” 
(and yes, “increase”. Initially, I had misunderstood when you talked about a “time window”: I was thinking about a period of time AFTER which there is no bump anymore. Like, if you edit weeks later. But that may not exist. I didn’t think at first at the 5 minutes BEFORE it starts to bump. I guess that’s what is called the “ninja edit” if I understood correctly. I thought about this just later in the discussion above.)
No, that would never be helpful IMO. I was suggesting the opposite: An opt-out for when you’re AFTER the “ninja edit” period. Oh, I got it. Opt-in to a ninja edit, not opt-in to a bump while in the ninja edit period Yes, that was what I was suggesting ! 
There may be a case for an unlimited “min diff” ? Like 5 or 10 characters. This would automatically rule out all small corrections. Unless this already exists ? (the flip side is that some people may notice a mistake which could disappear without any recording of an edit. Could that be contentious ? Or correcting a number in a heated debate for example. That’s already more borderline) [Note: The latter is what we are also risking with an increase of the grace period (during a “live” discussion)]
Yes, normally editing the last post in a topic will bump the topic, just the way that adding a new reply to a topic would bump the topic. If there is only one post in the topic, this rule also applies when you edit the topic or category, which are considered elements of the first post. Sometimes this indeed catches people by surprise, but it tends to be specific to the “I have a ton of topics on my forum that are only a single post” scenario.
The editing grace period, which defaults to 5 minutes, has been a built in feature since the very first version of Discourse was released to the world in 2013. For the first 5 minutes after submitting your reply, you can edit that reply as much as you like* and the topic will not be bumped.
I’m curious why this behavior would be such a big problem… can you describe specific scenarios, with examples, where you are constantly “accidentally” bumping topics via editing? 
* However! One tweak we added later – due to spammers – is this: if you change “too much” of a post, we force a revision, even during the editing grace period. There are site settings to control this, and we make a distinction between new users and established users.
You can go up and have again a look at the first few posts from Robert and myself after your initial answer above. You may feel it’s too “occasional” to be considered ? (hence your use of the word “constantly”. Or maybe you just meant “reproductible” ? I’m not sure.)
@merefield I just thought again about your idea of increasing the “grace period”, and that’s not bad at all. Currently, the parameters to edit the grace period are working for BOTH the “ninja edit” AND the bump. Is that correct ? In fact, it’s [if there’s an edit, then bump] but [if that edit is a ninja edit, don’t bump]. “Ninja edit” meaning an edit during the “grace period” & under “max diff” (both configurable) where changes aren’t recorded to appear with an orange icon in the top right corner. Do I have all this right ?
One solution which solves everything I may have raised above, would be to have two different grace periods (with 2 separate parameters of each one): One for recording the edits (ninja edits) and one for bumping. In this case, you could keep a short period of time for ninja edits (5 minutes seems good to me) and have a longer “no bump” period (1 hour for example, maybe even 24 hours). If you want, you could tweak the “max diff” of the “no bump” period to use a lower value than the “ninja edit” period (you would have a “max diff” parameter for each period).
You could start the two periods at the same time, or consider the “no bump” period starting AFTER the “ninja edit” period.
To get back to this:
In fact, yes and no. We started to consider the tracking of edits and bumps together, because I assume that’s the way they are currently treated in the code you looked up. I was arguing to work only on the bumps. Allowing a longer period for ninja edits could lead to the problems I raised above.
An alternative to above, which I do like, would be to have an unlimited “no bump” ‘MIN DIFF’. Also, only “no bump”, not ninja edit. You could set this at 10 or 20 characters. The rationale would be: If an edit is of less characters than what is needed to create a new post, then it’s not worthy of having the topic bumped. This would prevent bumping for all the small corrections (even just changing or adding a word), but still make them visible with the orange icon. You could also consider not adding a specific “min diff” parameter, but using the value which already exists for the minimum length of new posts.
I’m going to go full crazy till the end : The ideal scenario as I see it, would be the parameters for 2 different grace periods as explained in the beginning, with a “bump grace period” (=“no bump”) which you could be set to 0 for unlimited, and a “bump grace period max diff” above which you do bump, even during the grace period. Set the latter to 0 to not use this new functionality and leave everything the same as it currently works.
We have a Want to buy / want to sell category and when people are cleaning up after themselves by editing old classifieds, they are accidentally bumping topics.
One of the reasons for such behaviour is that they may want to remove their contact info if visible, or avoid unnecessary contacting.
I can understand the rationale and preference both for, and against, so I don’t see any reason why this feature should not be configurable.
Yes my community has a similar situation. Sellers often edit their last post to update their selling information (adjustment of price and inventory etc.). Legitimate edits are fine and we allow people to see edit history. Some, however, edit their last post with bad faith for the sole purpose of bumping their thread so to get around our community’s “no bad bump rule”.
I will fiddle with the grace period configuration until there is an option to configure the bump rule for editing the last post.
Thanks a lot! Our community love the way Discourse enables them to self-regulate and they are often passionate about what the software can and cannot do.
Yeah, my main suggestion is to tighten up the editing intervals. If people can’t use editing responsibly, then the consequence is that their editing abilities get globally curtailed…
That plus warnings and possible suspensions for the folks who frequently engage in this behavior.
This is becoming a bit of a nuisance in our community, we are constantly having people posting “no bump” -posts to avoid bumping the topic when removing items from their WTB/WTS -lists.
I really think they have a right to edit those posts as it’s one of the busiest sections on the site and if they want to keep a single topic for their stuff that’s even better in my opinion, however we also prefer people not to post “sent a pm” -types of messages, and it might be that a topic of an item that gets sold will never see replies until it’s time to edit the content away.
any suggestions on how to circumvent current functionality or reasons not to have this as a configurable switch for category / global level?
When they create a WTB/WTS topic, be sure to add an extra post at the end. Then the edits will occur on a post that’s not the last post.
I would think you’d want bumping, if someone has stuff for sale and then edits the list to indicate half their items have sold… that’s a highly relevant bump.
I think the issue is that since people can be selling single items occasionally, bumping basically empty topics wouldn’t make much sense 