Continuing the discussion from Transparency - changes to the BBS:
Spinning this off into its own topic so it doesn’t get lost in the “Transparency” thread.
@zfirphdn astutely noticed that edit histories are now public and the knob to opt-in/opt-out of this is missing from user preferences.
What happened here?
Just for a bit of background up until today/a couple of days ago (not sure when this happened) we had a setting in preferences to allow for opting in or out of publicly viewable edit history and it was opt-out by default. I’ve rarely seen any members here change it to opt-in.
I’m not sure if this was a Discourse inbox feature, or an extension that BB was using (I recall @codinghorror mentioning it was a community PR).
Anyway something definitely changed here, I’m just not sure what it was but I’m glad to see it doesn’t appear to have been intentional.
Did the setting re-appear now that I disabled the global setting?
I still don’t see an option to toggle public edit history in my preferences, but I also can no longer click on another user’s “pencil” icon and see their edits so it at least appears to have the status quo from before (other than for the likely small amount of users that opted into this feature).
Anyway thanks for the quick action here. Part of the problem with what had happened was that anybody who had previously not consented to having their edit history public now had it public even for old posts and this could come at quite a surprise for those of us that care about this.
Roger that. A bunch of settings were flipped a few days back (minimum post length, some spam settings). I’m not sure what happened, but I think we’ve got most of them now. 
Can you check mine? This would be a good post to test.
I don’t see the option to change the setting, either, and mine was set to “Allow other users to see my editing history” before everyone’s was set that way.
To be clear: I want it to stay the way it was (showing the public edit history), but won’t be devastated if it doesn’t.
I clicked on the pencil icon and couldn’t see your edits.
The upgrade to [Version 1.8] (Discourse Version 1.8 - releases - Discourse Meta), maybe?
ETA: Thanks, @ficuswhisperer.
Could be, I’m not sure.
I don’t see an admin option that controls the visibility of a per-user edit history setting, btw, just the global on/off.
They weren’t until @orenwolf changed the setting to make it so, two days ago…
We removed the “opt out” user pref for “no edits are visible to anybody” because it was barely used, and had significant performance impact. There was never an “opt in” to this for the record, only opt out.
Note that you can always see your own edit history so don’t get confused on that point 
Well crap! that was unintentional, I’m sorry for causing all this confusion 
I’m happy just knowing that I wasn’t imagining things 
Thanks @codinghorror for the background on this, and thank to @orenwolf for making sure this is disabled.
Closing since mystery solved!
