Meta: allowing more people to fork out OT threads

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It’s not uncommon for threads to go a bit OT, I don’t see it as a big problem because it turns out that discuss has an excellent tool to handle that. It’s not very discoverable, it’s the wrench icon at the top of a discussion and then ‘Select posts…’ in the menu and I have to say the user experience to select the appropriate messages to fork out is quite slick and painless.

It seems I have the right to do that (I’m not sure exactly why) and I do it now and then or when people explicitely request it. But couldn’t we allow a bit more people very active on the forum like for example @yawaramin to do that ? Or perhaps some people already have the right but don’t realize it (it’s not very discoverable) ?

This is Anil editing Daniel’s post to add this line to test my assertion below that all edits can be traced to a particular user.

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Thanks for the suggestion, Daniel! I’ve been peering around the Discourse permissions to figure this one out, and it’s tied to ‘trust levels’. Now, most trust levels are achieved by simply hanging around and posting, but the highest one (4) has to be manually bumped by an admin. The reason for that is that it gives permissions to edit other users’ posts, which in turn is the mechanism by which forking threads becomes allowed.

While this permission shouldn’t be given out too freely, it does seem entirely reasonable to give it out to frequent posters to help curate the site. Any edits on other posts are all visible in the post history (including who did it), so anyone misusing this feature can be caught out easily. I’ve bumped up @yawaramin to this trust level, and suggestions for anyone else who would like to help curate tags/threads are most welcome.

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Thanks for looking into this! So just for reference, we can see those who have that trust level on this page.

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Didn’t know that existed, but indeed it is the little pencil icon on the upper right of a post.
(Not to be confused with the little pencil icon on the bottom right of one’s own post that allows editing…)

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In fact (for me) it’s rather in the … on each post.

I thought everyone could do that, so I’d sometimes change the post of other people for example to correct urls, to urlify some references or correct the odd typo. But that was made on the (wrong) assumption that everyone could do that and thus that the people could do it on my own posts aswell. Now that I realize this is not the case I’ll refrain in the future (except, case arising, for correcting 404).

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