This bug, correctly declared by @sam to be very minor back in 2014, has reared its head again and I think it’s become more important to to fix it. We have a use case on our site where our moderators need to frequently have to post on behalf of members, as explained in another topic, and I’d really like it to become an admin option to let moderators change authors:
Back to the bug. Not only does it allow the new owner to like their own post (I think - haven’t tried testing this just now actually), but it also sends notifications from the original owner even when done during ninja edit window. To replicate:
logged in as admin and with “send email notifications even when active on the site” pref enabled, start a new topic and mention yourself
use the admin wrench to change the owner to someone else
look for @ mention notification about this post - it’s from you!
wait to receive the email notification - it will be from you as well.
See screenshots illustrating 3 and 4, with me creating the topics and changing author to my colleague.
This seems to be the same bug (originally posted in a separate topic).
This is rather complicated to reproduce, so I’ll just describe what happened:
Create a post on the forum via the WP-discourse plugin. The owner of the forum post is system because the WP author does not have a Discourse username set (this is a setting in the wordpress plugin).
Change the ownership of the newly created forum post to userA
UserB replies to the post
Expected behaviour: userA is notified about userB’s reply
Actual behaviour: userA is not notified. More specifically, when I asked her, userA said that she was not aware of the reply, so I checked here notifications under /u/userA/notifications and there is no notification regarding the reply.
I have about 50 or so topics, all of which were originally created via the WP-discourse plugin with system user as their owner. I manually changed ownership for all of them to different users and I would like these users to be watching their respective posts (which they are not, because when ownership was changed, the notification status remained unchanged).
Perhaps someone could help me with a command line based workaround?
I agree with Tobias. The change ownership feature is great but when the new owner doesn’t really own the topic (as in: won’t be notified about replies or quotes) it is much less powerful than it could be.
I would like to use this for member recruitment: post a topic about a publication a potential member has somewhere else on the web, invite them to join and when they join, give them ownership of “their” topic. Unfortunately, it’s not possible with this bug.
I have no idea how difficult this is to fix technically, but its effects are certainly more than the minor wonkiness of likes discussed when this was first reported back in 2014.
Same happens if you edit and mention yourself in a post initially created by someone else. If the editor is not the same as the owner of the post, mentioned one gets a notification. It somehow makes more sense not to show any notification at all in this case then.
Email notifications seem to have changed by now - sender appears to be the owner of the post if I follow the steps as described.
Yes, it will be merged, but not right now. I left @maja some feedback on the PR.
Also, I’m unsure if or how the notification level of the previous owner should change. The PR always sets the notification level to “tracking”. I was thinking it would be better to leave it as-is, or changing it to the user’s default notification level for the category or group.
I also don’t think it’s worth changing the notification level of the previous owner. I don’t know about other people, but I mainly use this feature to create posts on behalf of others, and I am watching everything anyway.
