Should an edit to any wiki post bump the entire topic?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Yes I think this ↑ ↑ is an excellent starting point

[Tim_Jefferies]

I am struggling with this. Closing the wiki doesn’t work for me for the same reasons mentioned. It’s makes total sense to have the first post as the wiki, and the subsequent posts for discussion. Any edits to the first post should bump the topic to the top of the list. Users on the forum are checking latest and complaining why the edits aren’t being bumped.

The solutions mentioned here are exactly what I wanted to happen. Can this not be added?

Also see : Updating a wiki post, doesn't put it to the top of latest

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@Tim_Jefferies

Any edits to the first post should bump the topic to the top of the list. Users on the forum are checking latest and complaining why the edits aren’t being bumped.

If you need that, set the notification level for the topic to “watching” – watching a wiki topic will cause you to get notified every time the first post is edited.

[Tim_Jefferies]

Users are complaining because the /latest part of the website doesn’t do what it says it does. Bumping the topic on the edit of the first post specifically for wiki posts is the logical solution. I understand that people use wiki’s differently, but having an option to change this behaviour makes a lot of sense.

My users don’t want to ‘watch’ wikis, they want to use the /latest page in the way that makes logical sense.

Locking a post, deleting extraneous entries, making sure to edit the last post every time I edit a wiki on split wikis (that hit the 90,000) limit, setting it to watching. These are not logical solutions, they are workarounds. Doing it for 1 wiki - no problem. But the more wiki’s there are the more exponential that work becomes to manage. I’d literally need to come up with a time-consuming moderator management process just to ensure people can see updates, and they will still complain, because they won’t be in /latest.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Fair, but the more you run into limitations like this, the more it indicates maybe you should pick a different free open source software, one that better matches your needs?

Having a bunch of 90k+ character wikis is not the target use case for Discourse in general… and forcing a round peg into a square hole usually doesn’t end well.

https://media.giphy.com/media/G2MPcSmq0DZcs/giphy.gif(image larger than 4096KB)

[Tim_Jefferies]

This software fits my needs very well. The reason for this feature request is pretty clear. Its a logical request that would improve an already existing functionality, and solve all the workarounds in the process.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

I’m glad you like Discourse, cheers, but I don’t agree that “bump for any edit on any post in the topic” is ever a desirable behavior, versus the simple solutions outlined above…

[Tim_Jefferies]

They aren’t simple solutions for users, or moderators. See first post in the topic.

I don’t agree that “bump for any edit on any post in the topic” is ever a desirable behavior

For wiki posts, it is desirable. And expected from users.

Having a bunch of 90k+ character wikis

I have one wiki like this. Whether they are long wiki’s or short wikis, our users still are requesting /latest to include wiki updates.

[Stephen]

@Tim_Jefferies

For wiki posts, it is desirable. And expected from users.

For a wiki it’s desirable, Wiki Posts =! Wikis. There are lots of wiki features which Discourse doesn’t have, this is one of them.

Are there any other discussion products which do this? Sounds like you need to consider a product like MediaWiki.

[renato (Renato Atilio)]

I understand the reasoning for avoiding core updates on things you believe are not broken, but in my (unsolicited) opinion an edit to a wiki post not being bumped looks like a bug from the user perspective.

I’m also using this workaround of closing the topic and deleting all posts below OP (including the “topic closed” notice) but I have just a couple wiki posts, I imagine this doesn’t scale so well.

@codinghorror

but I don’t agree that “bump for any edit on any post in the topic” is ever a desirable behavior

I think it would be more like “bump for any edit on any wiki post in the topic” or even “bump for any edit on the first post in the topic if it’s a wiki”.

@Stephen

Are there any other discussion products which do this? Sounds like you need to consider a product like MediaWiki.

To be fair, I don’t know any other discussion products that have something like “wiki posts”.

Some requests here on feature are discarded as not desirable in core, which is fine, we’re just discussing the options and what goes on core is up to the core team. However, could this be solved in a plugin? Can I hook on post edit, check if it’s a wiki post and force a topic bump?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@renato

could this be solved in a plugin? Can I hook on post edit, check if it’s a wiki post and force a topic bump?

Most likely yes! Seems like a fine plugin idea as well.

[Stephen]

Best of all it keeps the confusing behavior out of core:

@Stephen

Discourse is primarily a tool for discussion and one oft overlooked part of that is remembering where someone last read to. It’s so useful because readers can always rely on the simple assumption that any newness is occuring at or after the thing you last read. Creating the potential scenario that a topic may resurface due to activity at either end totally defeats that.