Watching / Tracking / Notifications for post edits for Moderators

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?

11개의 좋아요

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.

1개의 좋아요

This only works for edits to the last post in a thread.

Any edits to posts above the last one I believe are un-trackable currently unless you are the author of the post that has been edited.

2개의 좋아요

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”

One workaround for wiki posts is to do the following:

  1. Make the OP a wiki post
  2. Link to another topic within the OP as the official ‘discussion’ topic for this post
  3. Close the topic
  4. Delete the “Moderator closed this topic” post.

Now the OP is the last post, and edits will make it bump to the top of the topic list.

Also, people entering the topic will always enter at the first post.

Discussion can happen in the separate topic if necessary.

6개의 좋아요

We have a plugin for this which we built for @Bill_S at Western Digital:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse-moderator-attention

Its designed for sites that need 1 moderator to read every single post or edit to a post.

12개의 좋아요

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.

9개의 좋아요

In the same vain - “moderating all content” - is there anything for profile content edits?

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.

Why not set your allowed edit interval to something much smaller like 7 days? That seems like a far simpler solution.

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.

12개의 좋아요

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.

4개의 좋아요

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.

5개의 좋아요

제가 제대로 이해하고 있는지 확인하고 싶습니다. 이 플러그인은 사용자가 닌자 편집 기간(ninja edit window) 외에 게시물을 수정할 때마다(최소한 tl0 및 tl1 사용자의 경우) 모더레이션 플래그를 발생시켜야 하는 건가요?

그렇다면, 새로운 검토 대기열(review queue)이 도입되면서 이 기능이 변경되었나요? 저는 최신 버전을 사용 중인데, tl0 사용자가 게시물을 생성한 후 나중에 내용을 완전히 변경해도(100자를 훨씬 초과하는 경우) 플래그가 뜨지 않고, 주제 제목 앞에도 별표(*)가 표시되지 않습니다.

이 플러그인을 처음 사용해 보므로 제 기대치가 타당한지 전혀 알 수 없습니다.

코드를 빠르게 살펴본 결과, 최대 별표(*) 하나만 추가할 뿐이며, 사용자가 네크로 편집을 해도 기존에 붙은 별표에 다시 별표를 붙이는 것은 아닙니다.

플러그인에서 네크로 편집을 처리하려면 다른 패턴이나 플러그인 변경이 필요할 것 같습니다.

4개의 좋아요

이 기능이 다른 사용자에게도 유용할까요? 적어도 tl0(그리고 tl1도 포함될 수 있음) 네크로 편집에 대한 플래그를 추가하면, 관리자가 스팸성 편집을 감지할 수 있도록 알림을 줄 수 있습니다.

기술적인 관점에서 구현 난이도가 얼마나 될지 저는 잘 모르겠습니다.

tl0/1의 모든 네크로 편집에 대해 플래그를 표시하면 매우 시끄러울 것이며, 대부분의 커뮤니티가 이러한 커스터마이징 기능을 사용할 가능성은 낮습니다.

보통 이런 문제를 겪는 커뮤니티에서는 tl1의 네크로 편집을 단순히 비활성화합니다 (tl0에서는 이미 비활성화되어 있는 것으로 알고 있습니다).

기술적으로는 모든 네크로 편집에 대해 플래그를 표시하는 플러그인을 만드는 것은 매우 간단합니다.

3개의 좋아요

화제에서 벗어나지 않으려 하지만, 제안을 하나 드리고 싶습니다.

이 플러그인을 꽤 오래 전에 로컬호스트에서 테스트해 봤습니다. 제가 바랐던 방식(토픽 내 위치와 무관하게 모든 편집에 대해 알림을 받는 것)과는 정확히 일치하지 않았습니다. 어떻게 수정해야 할지 살펴봤지만, 결국 작업을 중단했습니다.

이제는 좀 더 현실적인 접근 방식이 관리자를 위한 특수 조건부 읽음 상태/정렬 우선순위 부여일 수 있다고 생각합니다. 토픽 목록을 스캔하여 지표를 찾아야 하겠지만, 그만큼 소음이 적을 것입니다. 그리고 정렬 우선순위 부여가 없다면, 편집이 얼마나 오래전까지 거슬러 올라가느냐에 따라 확인하는 데 시간이 오래 걸릴 수 있습니다.