Welcome to Codidact Meta!
Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.
Can "last activity" provide more context on what it was that happened?
Currently (November 2020), the list of questions displays a "last activity" under each one of them. It refers, obviously, to when and who made the last action in the Q&A thread and links to the user that did that.
However, there are cases where the activity is not obvious or, to put it simply, it would be nicer to know exactly what changed immediately, without the need to browse all the Q&A pairs and see if somebody answered, an edit was performed in a post, etc.
What about providing some indicator on what was that last activity and a link to it?
So for example, instead of:
last activity about 6 hours ago by Monica Cellio
Let's say things like:
X edited [the question] about 6 hours ago
X posted [an answer] about 6 hours ago
The question was reopened about 6 hours ago
Where [something] is a link to the post itself.
1 answer
We've made some progress since this question was posted, but there is still work to do (especially in the case of deleted answers). Edits to questions and closures are more specific (I assume reopens are but can't find an example to confirm). New answers, edits to answers, and answer deletions still show the generic "last activity". This issue is on our roadmap but we haven't been able to work on it yet. I'm sorry it's taking this long.
I think the issues with answers -- both edits and deletions -- is that the code is checking the question (top-level post, really) state to generate the text on the category list, and the question itself doesn't record activity on answers. For deleted answers, I think if we recorded "answer deleted" (with a link for those who can see) in the question history, then we could use that information and people who can't see deleted posts would not be as confused. New answers could also reasonably be added to the question history; this would also help sort out the sequence when question edits and new answers interact with each other and we need to know which happened first. Answer edits are probably a little more complicated because that does require that the query check all the answers (in a performant way), but yes we want this.
0 comment threads
0 comment threads