I noticed that on a site where I'm a moderator, there is a small icon below the up-/downvote buttons and favorite icons of every post, which looks like a small clock, and which actually links to the timeline of that post.
Here is a sample of such icon:
Some use cases where a timeline benefits my non-diamond moderation activities:
- Get a chronological sequence of:
- answers to a post.
- edits (revisions) of a post.
- a bounty that was started, or ended, as in this example.
- review votes (close, reopen, suggested edits, ...).
- comments.
- Events about a post for which I do not know any other way to discover them:
- posts that got tweeted, as in this example.
- posts that at some point became a hot network question, as in this example.
- close votes that are invalidated, as in this example.
- reopen votes that are invalidated as in this example.
- posts that were deleted and then undeleted again, as in this example.
- Notices that get added to, or removed from, a post, such as:
- posts that get locked / unlocked, as in this example.
- notices about Historical significance of a post, as in this example.
- Track the history of daily vote totals, as in this example.
- Lookup the exact hyperlink to a specific comment (e.g. to link to it, as in this example), as an alternative to clicking on the timestamp of the comment, and which results in a shorter URL, eg ending with
posts/340118/timeline#comment_1137398
.
So as a followup to my answer to "Add a link to the timeline of a post", and since a timeline is only protected by a "you name it, you got it" (1), I suggest to make that timeline icon visible to anybody (not just moderators).
Note: this question in NOT about changing any of the existing timeline privileges, only about improving the existing UI to make an available icon (to mods only for now) visible to anybody. And hence make using it more user friendly, instead of having to know it does exist, and typing in its URL to access it.
(1): click the edit link below a post and then change edit
to timeline
in the last part of the url.