The discussion revolves around the need for a feature to view tag changes in Discourse, particularly for moderators. adrelanos highlights the importance of tracking tag modifications, especially when using Discourse as an issue tracker, to prevent accidental or malicious removal of tags like milestone or status_closed. While a plugin exists for ticketing (itsbhanusharma), adrelanos prefers a native solution to avoid dependency on external plugins that may become deprecated. maiki suggests removing problematic users but acknowledges the need for a way to detect and revert vandalism. rishabh proposes using the Data Explorer plugin for monitoring tag changes, though sam notes technical challenges due to the serialized format of the modifications column in post_revisions. Anat_Srulovitch also supports the idea, emphasizing the usefulness of tracking tag changes for specific topics.
Could you please add the ability (for moderators) to view tag changes?
Currently if any tag is changed anywhere there is no place to review these.
The closest similar thing is /admin/reports/post_edits but that does not show if any forum tags (/tags) where changed.
In case you wonder why this would be useful: I would like to use discourse as an issue tracker. It’s not ideal but sufficient for my use case. There’s been discussions on how to use discourse as a ticketing system and it seems possible in principle. Using it as a public issue tracker seems even simpler than a ticketing system. (Users require forum accounts to post. E-mail in is nice but not crucial.) In my case, only important thing to track is the status of the discussion and milestone (software version implementation goal). Using tags this is possible (tag status_closed) etc. But for example if a user or moderator by accident or trolling removes tag “milestone” then a “ticket” (actually forum discussion) could be lost from that view.
To learn about such topic tag change events, the ability to view tag changes would be super useful.
I saw this. I will consider it. Actually, I am in process of reading all subjects on discourse for issue tracking / ticket system.
For the use case as simple as mine, I was wondering if it would be doable / more sensible without an external plugin.
I hope my “view tag changes” request is useful enough outside of ticketing. Also please consider trolling / spamming where user edits its own post to add tag to add some badword.
Reason is, I’ve seen plugins here come and go. For now it looks well up to date but I saw other plugin discussions where I was too late for the party. The plugin was deprecated for two years already. Then I would hope to not be “stranded”. Migrating away from such as tickets plugin to another issue tracker in two or five years from now would be require a ton of time.
I came here looking for this myself. If we use Discourse as an issue tracker (using topics), it’ll be nice to have a list of all tag changes in the last ‘x’ days for a specific category/tag to see a periodic overview or snapshot of the current state.
Discourse Data Explorer should make this easy, and I’ll report here if I find/make an SQL query.
Sure but for a public, FLOSS project with open registration by the time the tag trolling has been done, the damage is already done. Therefore a way to view tag changes and easily revert vandalism would be useful.
