In the “Post Edits report” discussion, outofthebox suggests improving the report by defaulting to or offering an option to filter out self-edits, as edits made by others are more likely to indicate abuse of privileges. zogstrip proposes using the #plugin:data-explorer for this purpose, but outofthebox thinks it would be more intuitive to have this feature built into the Moderation tab. codinghorror agrees with outofthebox and suggests hiding self-edits by default. nbianca subsequently implements this change, removing self-edits from the Post Edits report via a GitHub pull request. Additionally, codinghorror shares a Data Explorer query that outofthebox uses to identify potentially problematic edits.
Hi,
Most of the time when I check the post edits report, I am interested to know when someone has edited someone else’s post. That seems like the most likely place for abuse of privileges. Is there a good way to check this subset of post edits? If not, I think it would be a small improvement to have this as the default or as an optional view.
Seems like a good query candidate for the #plugin:data-explorer.
Yea, that would work too. It seems a little bit more intuitive to me to have it built into the post edits report on the Moderation tab, as that keeps this potential area for abuse more visible and prominent, but either way would be nice.
I tend to agree this should be the default. Seeing a list of self edits is .. considerably less than useful @zogstrip
Yes, my bad. I didn’t realize we had a “Post Edits Report” (so many of them now 
).
@nbianca can you change the query of that report so we don’t show the edits made by the author of the post?
Also I think I see a 20 limit there, is that hard coded for a reason?
If it helps this is the query I used but I am not sure it gets everything
SELECT
p.id AS post_id,
u2.username,
topic_id
FROM posts p
JOIN users u
ON u.id = p.user_id
JOIN topics t
ON t.id = p.topic_id
JOIN users u2
ON u2.id = p.last_editor_id
WHERE (p.last_editor_id > 1 AND p.last_editor_id <> p.user_id)
AND p.self_edits > 0
AND p.deleted_at IS NULL
AND u2.trust_level > 2
AND u2.moderator = false
AND u2.admin = false
AND t.deleted_at IS NULL
AND t.archetype = 'regular'
ORDER BY p.updated_at DESC
LIMIT 500
Note that this rules out users who are staff as well as the system user, so basically the above query is just TL3 users editing around the site to tidy things up.
You could use this query as is @outofthebox in Data Explorer in the meantime…
I’m so encouraged by this update - thank you for improving this report!
@codinghorror, thank you for the Data Explorer query. That helped me quickly identify the edits with the greatest risk for abuse over the past few months. Thankfully, it was nice to see that all the ones I checked had been made to improve our community.
I have removed the self edits from the Post Edits report: