"rebake old posts count" option is a bit confusing

[Alex_P]

There is rebake old posts count option in admin settings with this description:

Number of old posts to be rebaked every 15 minutes

At first I thought that Discourse always rebakes some old posts, but after looking at the baked_at field of old posts I noticed that it does not happen.

So I looked into the source code, and it seems like this option is used only for rebakes after some major updates/fixes in Discourse (and so far there was only one such case in 2017).

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/4739bdac0a9d23d175a4eb61ddf008f25c83cf9b/app/models/post.rb#L630
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/4739bdac0a9d23d175a4eb61ddf008f25c83cf9b/app/models/post.rb#L24

Maybe the description should be improved.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Hmm, maybe, what do you think @sam? Wouldn’t hurt to have a bit more info in this setting description?

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

Sure happy to update the description.

How does this sound @codinghorror

Maximum number of posts to be automatically rebaked after major changes to the Discourse rendering engine every 15 minutes.

Maximum number of old-version posts to be re-rendered to HTML every 15 minutes. Will only impact major rendering engine upgrades. (once every few years)

Hard to know what fidelity the description here needs?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Can we perhaps hide this setting altogether? It seems sooo rare that anyone would need to mess with it at all, and it’s so very specialized. A setting you only (maybe?) need to adjust every few years

@Alex_P

so far there was only one such case in 2017

I vote we pull this setting out and be done?

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

OK done per:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/12181

Setting is now default hidden. I agree the text there was very confusing, thanks for bringing it up Alex!