Editing Posts

[chrislepingwell]

When someone edits their post, shouldn't this trigger a new email notification? I just got an email of a post from Hal, went to the site to reply, and saw that he'd already edited his original post, but so far there is no email notification, which is a shame becuse the updated answer is rather informative.

[Hal Levy]

Chris,

I raised this same question as it relates to moving posts from one message board to another- no e-mail is triggered then either. It would be nice if when an edited post or forum change is made for a post it trigger an e-mail to be sent.

In reality I probably shouldn't have edited my post and should have replied to it - to ensure it got mailed out.

Hal Levy
Daddyshome, LLC

[jminatel]

Thinking it over again, I probably agree too. At least when a message is moved to a different forum, I think we should consider sending a new email, otherwise subscribers in the forum it's mailed to won't see it.
Does anyone feel strongly about this the other way? That the current system of not generating a new email when a message is moved is the right way to go and shouldn't be tinkered with?

Jim Minatel
Senior Acquisitions Editor
Wiley Technology Publishing
WROX Press

[bluckcuck]

We are going to go ahead and make changes to cause an email notification when a topic is moved to a new forum (it will send to those with subscriptions on the destination forum). This is really how it should work.

Having the system resend a notification when a post is edited is also possible, but there are benefits and disadvantages.

Some of the benefits have already been noted by others.

One disadvantage is the possible confusion by the post apparently being re-sent out of order with the replies. Also, if you're like me you might make multiple edits to fix mistakes. All of these multiple edits would then be re-sent (allowing everyone to see how many mistakes you made ;) ).

It is not difficult to change this behavior in the system, but I think we should get some more opinions before we make the change.

Bruce Luckcuck
Director, Applications & Support Services
Wiley Publishing, Inc.

[chrislepingwell]

I can see that the multiple editing emails could become confusing. How about some sort of 'Re-post' button? That way, edited responses only get emailed out if the author feels that the changes are significant enough to warrant telling everyone all over again, and we can carry on subtly correcting typos and grammar without alerting all and sundry :)
Perhaps there also ought to be a editing time or post limit; it doesn't really make sense for people to be able to edit the first post of a subject after there have been 20 replies, or 12 months after it was written. Obviously FAQs and the like would have to be exempted from any limitations, but as these tend to be maintained by Admin level people, that shouldn't pose to much of a problem.