I really appreciate if you can add the feature such that editing can also trigger “require approval” or suspending accounts. There is one troll in our forum who found out that he can bypass the requirement by editing, and is trolling all the time with a new account each time. I don’t think blocking some words can stop him, because he can always know which words are blocked by testing, therefore he can just change a word and then post it. During his testing, admins know nothing. I want to have some hidden list of words to trigger “require approval” even if he is just editing, and whichever user used these words by editing should be suspended immediately.
9 Likes
This has cropped up in conversation a couple of times between me and @fzngagan recently, and we think it could be useful too. 
There is the option to lock a post from further editing, and an admin setting to do that automatically after a staff edit[1], but they don’t do quite the same thing. Having the option to send edits back for re-approval feels in keeping with the protection of having the content initially approved in the first place.
However, in your case, it sounds like you could make use of some of the other existing watched word features, like flagging and silencing, to achieve some of the things you suggest. Have you checked out those options?
-
staff edit locks post↩︎
1 Like
Yes, we have tried a lot of things. However, watched word features do not work on editing (except blocked word), so he was able to bypass those settings. Flagging (by other users) works, but usually there is a time delay, and the troll generally posts 10 replies before any user flags him.
1 Like
We have spammers who necro old posts with anodyne comments and then edit with spam links. We intentionally do not close old posts because it is generally contextually legit for our purpose. We use Require Approval words to try to block common spam.
I’d love if edits went back to the queue for users below a configurable trust level.
4 Likes
Because watched words aren’t applied to edits, and most spammers are at TL0, we’ve had to turn off post edits for TL0. This has been a frustration for a lot of legitimate new forum users who join us looking for help with a problem. So I end up wasting a lot of time explaining why they can’t edit.
1 Like
I’m looking for this feature too. At least one user has started abusing this regularly. So far nothing problematic has been posted, but now I’m not sure what might slip through.
+1 from me for applying the watched words filter to post edits. Spammers have figured this out and it’s causing harm on our forum.
Edit: In case anyone’s interested, I have set up a workflow in n8n to handle this. Whenever a post edit occurs, it fetches the list of watched words from Discourse and checks them against the new text. When it matches, it flags the post as spam, pushing it into the review queue (I couldn’t figure out which post_action_type_id I needed to flag a post as requiring approval, so 
). I’m happy to share this code - DM me if you want a copy.
2 Likes
We would also love this feature because we’re currently hit by a spam wave as mentioned in https://meta.discourse.org/t/blocking-recent-wave-of-spam and those bots do regular create posts with random content and then edit it to the actual content to bypass the “Require for Approval” list. We added a lot of the expressions we would like to have in this list to the “Block” list but this is risky in regards to over blocking.
3 Likes
We’re getting an huge amount of spam doing this simple technique of creating a post and editing it afterwards to bypass the “watched words” filter.
But even worse, it looks like “watched words” filters are not applied to the post title, so I’m not sure if that is a bug.
2 Likes