What is causing old posts to show up with recent changes?
Continuing on with this previous meta post, what is actually going on?
The previous post was initially about the policy of bumping old posts to the top of the active list. However, that brought up some questions about what exactly was actually happening. Unfortunately, those involved just ignored any additional requests for clarification. This meta post is therefore explicitly to find out what is actually happening.
This issue was brought up again by the latest bump of an old question, https://outdoors.codidact.com/questions/59255. Once again, we see recent activity, but no actual changes when examining the edit history:
As far as I can tell, the before and after text is the same.
The only positive-scoring answer to the previous question said that it should be OK to clean up old content, but that doesn't seem to be what is happening. So what is happening?
Here we are 3 weeks later with still no answer, and two more such posts just appeared today. Once again, the question list shows the last activity was by Charlie Brumbaugh, who is a moderator here. As such, he owes us an answer to the straight forward question of what is going on.
6 Jan 2021: Another one just happened: https://outdoors.codidact.com/posts/59371. The question list shows " last activity about 17 hours ago by Charlie Brumbaugh", but neither the question nor any of the answers show recent activity. All activity show pre-dates the creation of this site. That implies the question was copied from SE as it is now.
Charlie, what, if anything, did you do to this question to cause it to be bumped like this?
1 answer
For the question linked on 2021-01-06, the change was a deleted (spam) answer. Unfortunately, if you can't see deleted answers you can't tell that's what happened, so I understand how that was confusing. (We do want to improve how changes are reported on the question list, instead of everything just being "last activity", but we haven't gotten to it yet.)
On another community I just saw a recurrence of an existing bug: tag-only edits don't get reported correctly in the diff. This is a known bug. In the case I just saw, the first revision had one set of tags, the edit showed only the changes to tags (on both sides), but I could tell by looking at the two different versions. I wonder if that's what happened in the cases you saw.
I'll ask the team to look into this bug; when it first came up there were other large changes in flight, but that's not the case now so I hope we can fix it. (I have to hedge since I don't have the skills to fix it myself, so can't commit. I'll try.)
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