Hello, I recently added a question to the site and then after getting 3 answers realized I wanted to ask another question in the same context that was so similar that I'd prefer the two to stay together. (Kinda like "how does Foo affect Bar" and then thinking "How does Bar affect Foo")
I have seen a feature request for a notification to be sent to all answer-authors when the question is changed. This can add a lot of noise notifications though. For instance, on the Books About Unicorns question with 80 answers, if all you want to do is make a slight spelling correction on the question it would notify 80 people. These 80 people of course do not care.
So I suggest a new feature. The "Notify Answer-Authors" checkbox. When editing, you can check this box and it will give a notification to all answer-authors that the question has changed so that they can update their answers accordingly.
I suggest these rules though:
- Only the question-author can check it (or maybe a new 5k rep power?)
- If an question is owned by the community, then it is not available
- If the question has more than 15 answers total, or more than 5 answers with 2 or more votes then the box is not available(which implies that they should make a new question since there are "good" answers on this one already)
- Answers owned by the community do not get notified.
- Possibly provide an opt-out checkbox for answer-authors(either per-answer or in their profile). I can't see any real use for this though other than people like Jon Skeet who would get 10 of these notifications per hour.