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Any heavily trafficked answer (and some well-maintained questions) will have accrued edits over time to respond to feedback, bugs, errors, edge cases, and occasionally changes to relevant specs. Almost always, these edit suggestions originate in comments, which is pleasant when critiquing a question or answer real-time but can be confusing when looking back at an edited answer.

Often I’ll read a comment suggesting an edit or pointing out an oversight which I cannot locate in its parent post at all, and eventually I’ll realize that it was simply referring to an earlier version of the post which has since been edited, often to address the exact thing pointed out in the now-irrelevant comment.

I wonder if this process could be made more organic. A post’s revision history and comments are chronologically and contextually related, and so I wonder if they could be better displayed together. Perhaps, when an edit is approved, a revision notification similar to a comment could be inserted into the comment stream.

Mockup of potential implementation on Stack Overflow answer 1489243 Above: a mockup of potential implementation on SO Answer 1489243

I foresee this benefitting comments in two major ways:

  1. By skimming the full feed chronologically, it will become clear when a comment might refer to content which has since been edited out.
  2. Because edit summaries would be displayed similarly to comments, users who have the ability to suggest edits might be encouraged to do so instead of simply leaving a comment pointing out an error.
    • And users who do not have revision abilities or who are not quite confident might see comments as a more collaborative way to run potential revisions by others and work toward quality edits.
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  • I see the proposed benefits and like them. I also see the problems Cai brought up and agree. It's a difficult problem. There's another feature request that proposes attaching a small indicator to each comment showing what the latest revision was at the time of the comment. It would help give context and would avoid the problems Cai brought up, but would also lose out on the benefits your proposal would have.
    – starball
    Commented Nov 4, 2022 at 2:27
  • There's another feature request in a similar vein that looks at things from the revision list POV (associating comments to revisions). The benefit it focuses on is mainly cleanup of addressed feedback comments.
    – starball
    Commented Nov 4, 2022 at 3:35

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At first glance I though this might be a good idea. It looks good. I agree with your points, it would be interesting too see and would give context to older comments.

But my main problem with the idea is: Comments are, by their very nature, not permanent. They are disposable (See How do comments work?). They can be, often are, and should be, deleted without warning. They are not a permanent "feed" attached to the post. In a lot of cases, those comments that it would help give context to should actually just be deleted after the revisions (which you can flag as obsolete).

Revisions on the other hand are permanent and an intrinsic part of the post they are attached to. This means you would have two conceptually very different things displayed in a single place, which I can see being confusing.

I can also see it taking up a lot of room. Posts can accrue a lot of edits, some in not a lot of time at all, so you could have a page full of edits to scroll through before getting to your comment.

I also don't always want to see the revision history, it may give context in some cases but it's often going to be long and inconsequential. And if I do want to see it, it's only a single click away.

I don't actually think it's a terrible idea, but there are a lot of problems with it.

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    Thanks so much for reading, @Cai. You’re amazing. I’m about an early teenager in SO reputation-years, so I still have plenty to learn regarding the best practices and ideal uses of SE features. The way you and the wiki describe comments is new to me, but makes sense. As for the other issues you point out, I did describe a per-user toggle that would enable/disable the feature globally, and/or I could also see a show revisions inline toggle on each comment list, similar to the current show # more comments.
    – Jacob Ford
    Commented Oct 3, 2016 at 21:06
  • @Jacob No problem at all. As I said, it's not a terrible idea but I do think comments and revisions are conceptually different enough for it not to work (easily, at least). I'm no authority though, so we'll see what others think :)
    – Cai
    Commented Oct 3, 2016 at 21:17

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