It’s important to be clear that many of the actions aren’t restricted to moderators. The action that triggered this post (editing a topic title) can be done by any sufficiently established community member, as can changing the category of a post (I’ve done this, moving posts from “Packaging” to “Python Help”, for example).
The sort of rules we’re talking about as “rules of how moderation is supposed to work” aren’t just moderation rules, they are community rules and as such, probably fall under the code of conduct (“be respectful of people’s views” => “don’t edit their post titles to say something they didn’t intend”, for example).
As the user who edited the thread title in question (I say user rather than moderator here, since any Trust Level 3+/“Regular”+ user can do so) from “Official Documentation” to “Tkinter documentation external links outdated?”, I want to apologize if that misrepresented your intent, or made you feel unwelcome to change it to something better.
As others inferred, given the original topic of “Official Documentation” for a thread in the Documentation category (which is specifically devoted to discussing Python’s official documentation) is entirely generic and doesn’t provide any hint to others of the actual thread topic, I gave it my best effort to give it an actual title after carefully reading the OP and the resulting discussion, with the understanding that the OP would be notified and refine it further as they wished. Was that not the case, sorry?
In general, I try to be conservative when editing titles, and generally would only do so for moderation reasons (personal attacks, incendiary remarks, etc); to fix formatting issues, clear typos, etc; or to give the thread an actual title for the benefit of others when the existing one is missing, generic or incomprehensible, with the expectation that the OP is welcome to refine it further. If the title had been at least a little specific, e.g. “Python Documentation Structure”, I wouldn’t have touched it.
In the future I can at least leave an explicit comment on the thread mentioning the change, the reason and welcoming the OP to make further edits as they see fit, e.g. “Hey, I edited the generic title to try to describe the topic of this thread to help other users find it; please feel free to modify it further if I misinterpreted something. Thanks!”.
FWIW, the user in question was a full TL2 “Member”, and the default global edit threshold is 2 months, of which there were several weeks remaining at the time I made the edit. So they should have been able to?
Yeah, at the very least, Discourse should show the most recent editor next to the edit count, like most other forums and such (that allow users other than the OP to edit posts to begin with)—its a huge hassle to constantly have to open the edit history just to check that, or otherwise have to try to guess, and it makes edits much less explicitly transparent.
+1 on this approach (in the limited cases where non-trivial changes are deemed acceptable); the previous was rather klunky, but this feels a lot clearer and more idiomatic.
Splitting the broader moderation issues into a separate post…
+100 to all of this, and I’ve also seen these issues come up multiple times before recently, both publicly and privately. As a moderator I think we should err for a lighter touch as long something isn’t a CoC violation, have a concise but clear set of public guidelines for privileged actions beyond just CoC enforcement and be more transparent to the affected user and the community when a moderation action is taken.
Additionally, I think we could do better at being more kind and empathetic with our language even when taking the same actions, as I’ve found that tends to be more effective at encouraging a positive response and building goodwill in the community than a harsher, legalistic tone
Definitely agreed there—it seems to me that discussions, even official PEP threads, are locked much too aggressively at least for my taste, due to a moderator’s opinion that the discussion is unproductive or has run its course (as opposed to e.g. avoid dupe threads or for CoC reasons). Addressing potential CoC violations are one thing, but otherwise users are free to choose whether to read, subscribe or respond to any given thread at any time, so while a thread split/merge can be useful if an existing discussion is veering well off the explicit topic, I’m not sure its the place for us mods to make the call to shut discussions down entirely.
This is particularly true if there’s a potential conflict of interest (e.g. a user raising a concern about us), or we’re not someone with subject matter responsibility for the category/thread in question, e.g. core devs for Ideas , PEP authors/sponsors/editors/delegates for PEPs , docs team/EB for Documentation , PyPA members for Packaging , Typing council for Typing , etc)
Some of them do, yeah, though the most directly way would be posting on Discourse Meta.
Definitely +100 as well for much better tools to make moderation more transparent and publicly accountable; while some actions do ways to provide an optional explanation (e.g. thread lock, albeit only after actually locking the thread, not part of the basic flow), others (like hiding/removing posts) don’t. I’d really like to be able to, e.g., automatically send users DMs/notifications informing them of the moderation action, the reason for it and making it easy to reach out if they’d like clarification or to appeal; or be able set a reason that would display publicly when a post was removed.
Right now, the only way to do so is to manually compose a DM, add @moderators and the user as a recipient, insert the relevant details along with the explanation, and send it off, which is way more work than just including at least a brief explanation as part of the moderation action flow that generates a message to the user and/or in the thread that includes the other details of the action automatically.
FWIW, as a moderator, I personally only currently consider it acceptable to edit a user’s post body directly for one narrowly scoped reason: fixing broken syntax/formatting, by far the most common being missing code fencing in Python Help making it difficult or impossible for others to read the post as the OP intends. In that case, I’ll typically let them know what I did and how they can avoid it next time in a reply to the discussion.
In the case of a user making, e.g., unnecessarily incendiary remarks directed at another user, depending on the circumstances I would either remove the post and send them a message about it, or if the post is otherwise acceptable and has meaningfully relevant content, I’d hide the post and send a request that they edit it to remove/rewrite the objectionable portions (which Discourse does have a built-in feature for).
Well, why not if it is possible. But how? I probably doesnt have the right flag to do so. There is no pencil icon near the title. So maybe I can add a post with a proposal for a better title, but I thing it mess up a thread and its not sure, that the person with the rights to do that will change it.
I have just rose the question, because I am accostumed to such practice from other discussion sites.
From my perspective this is not a big deal, if the original author is able to find their post. The big deal would tough on boarding like it is on Stack Exchange.
Hey, so just to clarify again, this was because the default two-month edit window for normal users has expired by now (whereas it hadn’t well over a month ago back when I submitted the edit). Did you not receive a notification back when it was edited, sorry? In any case, I’d be happy to help you change it to what you’d like, though if you want to re-open a broader discussion about the structure of the Python docs, I would suggest creating a new thread with your preferred (descriptive) title rather than necroing that old one focused on another topic, as you’ll likely get more feedback and responses that way. Thanks!