There doesn’t appear to be a way to get notified for post edits…
(both traditional post edits and Wiki post edits).
For post traditional post edits and Wiki post edits.
As a user
For users this topic seems to be tracking this:
As an admin / moderator…
Whilst moderation / approval prior to posts initially being displayed is not required, knowing something has changed so it can be reviewed is important.
It’s important to be able to know when every content change occurs for moderation purposes.
Some organisations require a “content review” for every piece of content on their site, even if occurs sometime later.
Is there any way of handling this currently?
Or list of posts recently “edited” outside of the initial ninja edit period…
… and perhaps receiving notifications for these?
The only way I know of to “catch” post edits is on Latest from the “… updated topics, click to show”
i.e. if there is no new or unread indicator, it’s an edit.
At SitePoint, we decided to compromise between having the convenience of member’s being able to edit their posts and the inconvenience of Moderators keeping track of post edits.
IMHO it is unrealistic to expect Moderators to “ride” Latest on the chance that a previously seen OK post has been edited into a Not OK post.
And I guess it is also unrealistic to expect Moderators to read every post. Though if for only for certain Categories, it could be a more acceptable approach.
Yes, and with our shortened post edit time limit this is usually good enough.
Community Flagging helps some.
But I think the fact that the post edit time limit is shorter than a typical visit cycle helps the most.
That is, if a Not OK edit happened, the chance of one of the many Moderators reading the post for their first time is almost certain.
We did try a post edit time limit more in line of what it was in vBulletin, but many wanted to be able to add “oh, I forgots”, fix typos, rephrase more clearly etc. so it was lengthened a bit.
Personally, I have no problem with a later “oh I forgot” post, and I make so many typos myself I hardly give them second thought when others make them. But folks are different after all.
In any case, I strongly feel the default setting is way too generous. i.e.
Admin → Settings [Posting]
post edit time limit 86400
The author can edit or delete their post for (n) minutes after posting. Set to 0 for forever.
That’s 60 days
If not already, maybe edited posts could be passed through Akismet?
Maybe the post_revisions table could be used for a Moderator page?
Such a page would likely be mostly typo fixes, bu it would be easier than relying on Moderators to read / reread posts looking for the “# edit pencil”
And it’s working great for my team. I have had issues in the past with users coming back later and editing posts to add unsavory content. The moderation flags help us catch those things many times before others even see them. I’m sure that it’s what you’re looking for.
Lately we often get posts that look fishy, but don’t contain spam (yet). Us moderators are just waiting for the edit to include the spam-link. Bookmarks help, but it can be tedious work.
And spammers are not dumb. They are waiting for someone to reply and then edit their first post so it won’t bump the topic.
Maybe an adaption of the function to change ownership of a post could be the solution here. If a moderator could make themselves co-owner of a post (without OP noticing) then they’d get edit-notifications.
I haven’t noticed many late edit link additions on the forum where I’m a moderator.
What we have noticed at times is changing post content after it has received replies that make a mess of the discussion and aggravates participants. eg.
“I need help with ABC”
“Try doing XYZ”
but after the edit, the topic reads as
“I need help with DEF”
“Try doing XYZ”
making the reply incorrect.
* it should be noted that this type of behavior has been limited to a handful of members and not a wide spread problem. moderator messages helped somewhat.
We have our edit time window low, hours not days.
I think some type of “if replies disable edits to previous posts” might work. But the problem of allowing cosmetic edits (eg. to -> too) while preventing substance edits can’t be solved by simple code.
TBH I don’t know what it’s set to, but I believe this is true for our forum too:
For now I’m using user topic timers, to check up on shady posts and I guess that’s a good enough solution. If I don’t catch a spam link right away, but a few hours later what harm can it really do?
Do you really have users coming back more than 1 day later to edit spam into their posts? That seems… unlikely. I’d need to see data on that.
In the meantime, we are adding a feature that prevents TL0 users from enjoying edit grace periods, as in every edit to their posts are tracked. This is because we have seen bamwar spammers abuse this, multiple times, across multiple sites.
Well it doesn’t happen often and it would be hard to find old deleted post where it did, but coincidentially it just happened again. A post from 4 days ago got edited to add a spam link:
Actually it was more than 4 days between writing and editing the post as it spent about 1 day in the approval queue. It was a bit shady from the beginning, so we didn’t know if we should approve it, but then we decided to “see how it plays out” since we didn’t have enough evidence to kick them right away.
Anyway I guess your suggestion of abandoning the grace period for TL0 users is probably a great solution.
Per @sam the solution that was implemented is mandatory tracking of all revisions in the grace period greater than {x} characters. There are two site settings for this, one for low trust users and one for high trust. Check your site settings.
Ho capito correttamente che questo plugin dovrebbe generare un segnale di moderazione ogni volta che un utente modifica il proprio post al di fuori della finestra di “ninja edit” (almeno per gli utenti tl0 e tl1)?
Se è così, è cambiato qualcosa con l’introduzione della nuova coda di revisione? Sono all’ultima versione e, se un utente tl0 crea un post e in seguito ne modifica completamente il contenuto (ben oltre i 100 caratteri), non viene generato alcun segnale e non appare nemmeno un asterisco davanti al titolo dell’argomento.
Non ho mai usato questo plugin prima, quindi non so se le mie aspettative siano corrette.
È qualcosa che potrebbe essere utile anche ad altri? Un flag per almeno le modifiche necro di livello tl0 (e forse tl1) avviserebbe i moderatori di possibili modifiche spam.
Non ho idea di quanto sarebbe difficile dal punto di vista tecnico?
Un flag per ogni modifica necro su tl0/1 sarebbe estremamente rumoroso; è improbabile che molte comunità utilizzino una tale personalizzazione.
Di solito, le comunità che affrontano questo problema disabilitano semplicemente le modifiche necro per tl1 (già disabilitate per tl0, per quanto ne so).
Tecnicamente, un plugin che segnala ogni modifica necro è molto semplice da realizzare.
Ho provato questo plugin sul mio localhost molto tempo fa. Non funzionava esattamente come speravo (notifica per ogni modifica, indipendentemente dalla posizione nel topic). Ho cercato di capire cosa sarebbe stato necessario per metterlo a punto, ma ho abbandonato il tentativo.
Ora penso che un approccio più realistico potrebbe essere avere uno stato di lettura condizionale speciale o un bump di ordinamento riservato ai Moderatori. Significherebbe dover scansionare le liste dei topic per cercare indicatori, ma non sarebbe così rumoroso. E senza un bump di ordinamento, la ricerca potrebbe richiedere del tempo a seconda di quanto indietro nel tempo siano state effettuate le modifiche.
