I have started getting a bunch of notifications about older topics I’ve been involved in on meta because @riking is graciously improving their titles, moving them to new categories, adding/removing tags etc. I really appreciate him doing this and do think it’s important for moderators to feel free to make improvements like this. It’s all part of the gardening involved in running great forums. But I don’t see why I should be notified. The same is true on my own discourse sites of course.
The feature that I’d like to request is a setting to enable/disable notifications when post is moved, renamed or tagged. This could be sitewide in admin, similar to the “Disables edit notifications by the system user when ‘download_remote_images_to_local’ is active” option, or on the user preferences for each user and on by default.
A related issue is that moving, renaming and adding tags indeed does bump up these old topics in topic listings, giving them prominence they don’t require.
Another approach would be to bring back the “minor edit” idea discussed last year, which allows you to tick a box to indicate that this change is so minor it doesn’t warrant notification. (and… the search for this reminds me I have talked about this before. )
Define “bunch of”? How many specifically? I just find it hard to believe that you are getting so many of these that it is a serious, we-must-change-the-software problem.
Not a we-must-change-the-software problem but I am having this problem at the moment and found this thread looking for a solution. I can give an example of when you can have a good bunch of these cases, many more than mentioned above:
I recently imported 8,000+ topics from another platform into a fresh Discourse instance. A number of moderators are working hard to get things organized which includes doing a lot of edits (partly due to the old platform not having a similar concept of topic titles). So when users log in to our brand new site, sometimes almost of half of what they see right away is very old topics with no recent posts (especially if a moderator has just done a clean-up session).
Now, our users know that we are currently getting started on a new platform so they are not freaked out, some have noted that revisiting old threads has been interesting etc. But still, I would much prefer to have people focus on new topics to get things going after the migration.
One development since 2015 is that we have the bulk edit option - when you use that to move, rename or tag, which you can use on just one topic, you do not bump or trigger notifications.
)