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I edited an older question and then people complained about bumping such an old question to the front page for a minor edit.

If such an edit is not worth bumping the question, I think this should not stop you from editing, but is a misfeature of the site to bump it to the front page. Either there should be a threshold when a questions is bumped (and maybe an age limit) or an option for the editor to prevent bumping.

Then questions can be improved without annoying somebody.

While there is a point in getting more reviews of edits, this prevents at least implicitly by discouraging them through complaining users drive by edits, where I for example cannot really help with the question, but correct some minor issues like wrong tags or spelling errors. I think nothing should prevent someone from improving a question or answer, but of course not everybody needs to see the question again just because some punctuation was changed.

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  • The rationale is that questions are bumped to the homepage so people will see and can reveiw the changes.
    – CodeCaster
    Commented Nov 3, 2017 at 12:54
  • When this IS the rationale for minor edits, people should not complain about this. When this is a reason to complain, maybe the rationale is annoying for some people and may be reconsidered. I am neutral to the question, but would like to be able to improve questions without looking at their age. Maybe there should be a filter "I do not want to see edited questions on the front page" which can be enable by users?
    – allo
    Commented Nov 3, 2017 at 12:59
  • Well a link to the edit would really help shed some light on your question. If you changed a "th" to "the" in a wall of text full of typos, the complaints are on point. Indeed nobody should complain about an edit just because it bumps an old post; but the edit should be thorough as well.
    – CodeCaster
    Commented Nov 3, 2017 at 13:06
  • I think it was adding some tag. But even improving the spelling is a useful edit, while I can understand that people do not want to read the question again just because of such a minor edit. So I think this is a problem with the feature, as improving a question or answer should always be a good thing to do.
    – allo
    Commented Nov 3, 2017 at 13:17
  • Maybe it should be proportional to the edit and the age of the question how much the post is bumped. A corrected th then may just bump the question to the bottom of the front page or even only to page 2. The other option to just bump it for a fraction of the people does not help, because then these people are still annoyed and complain about the bump.
    – allo
    Commented Nov 3, 2017 at 13:19
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    Again, no, people should not complain about the bumping per se, but I don't believe they were.
    – CodeCaster
    Commented Nov 3, 2017 at 13:21
  • I current do not find the comment, it was on some of the other stackexchange sites. I think I did not react on the complaint, but I guess its worth a discussion, when there is a rationale about bumping but people are complaining about the bumping. Just avoiding to edit a question cannot be the best solution there.
    – allo
    Commented Nov 3, 2017 at 13:25

3 Answers 3

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The fact that an edit puts the question on the front page is important: if someone vandalizes a well-known question, then LOTS of people will know about it and will be able to roll it back.

As another reason, if someone turned their terrible question into an amazing one, then lots of people would see the post and could upvote. This could potentially lead to the lifting of a q-ban.

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All edits should bump posts to the frontpage, so they can be reviewed by others. Even edits that required manual intervention (edits by sub-2000 rep users), because we know how users review suggested edits, namely on autopilot.

So, people should not complain in comments that an edit was unnecessary just because it bumped the post. And in my experience that doesn't happen that often.

What does happen is that people complain if a useless edit to a useless post was approved, because that is useless for all parties involved. People also complain if an edit was approved but it only fixed one minor typo, while the edited post had a lot more issues which were not fixed by the edit.

If you do believe that you fixed every issue with a post while editing it, and people still complain just about the bumping (and not the problems with the edit itself), you should flag that comment as not constructive and move on.

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  • I just would like to see it like a wiki or anything else where you can participate: leave it a bit better than you found it, even when you can just help with a minor change. This is a problem, when the little improvement requires unproportional more reviews, etc.
    – allo
    Commented Nov 3, 2017 at 13:52
  • There is no problem. Every edit must be reviewed. Wikipedia also has an edit history page for all edits, even minor ones: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/….
    – CodeCaster
    Commented Nov 3, 2017 at 13:59
  • @CodeCaster I hope my new answer is more helpful than last one.
    – mega6382
    Commented Nov 3, 2017 at 14:05
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    @mega yeah it's clearer than the previous one. ;)
    – CodeCaster
    Commented Nov 3, 2017 at 14:07
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When an edit is made by a user with less than 2000 rep, it is required to be at least approved by either the OP or from the Suggested Edits review. But there is no such limitation on users with above 2000 rep. So, what if someone with 2K+ rep starts making terrible edits on old posts to get the Archaeologist badge or Copy Editor badge or whatever. If those posts are never shown on the main-page and no one notices them then they will just get away with it.

Also, it is about protecting the content look at this post You can't parse [X]HTML with regex. This post has a historical significance, and if you look at its Edit History, you will notice how many times edits and rollbacks and locks have been made on it. If any of those edits hadn't bumped it on the main, it might have gone unnoticed. I hope this clears things up. And sorry for the previous answer.

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